Galway Arts Festival:From images of war to islands of myth and a fairy tree tale, there's plenty to whet the appetite in Galway, writes Aidan Dunne
It might seem like faint praise to recommend an exhibition by saying that you'll probably wish you'd never seen it, but this is the case with Women War Photographers at the Aula Maxima, NUI Galway. A powerful, thoughtful show, it also makes for undeniably grim viewing, and includes a number of genuinely disturbing pictures. The title doesn't quite do it justice, though. A lot of the time we see reportage photographs as single images, visual anchors that encapsulate a story or make a narrative point. All five photographers in this exhibition are more than capable of doing that, as their work attests, but part of the show's strength is the contextualisation that emerges as we see substantial bodies of work by each.
Consequently, as we tour several of the main zones of conflict in the contemporary world, we get a depressing sense of just how deeply rooted the problems are and how extensive is the suffering of ordinary people.
Time and again we are prompted to realise that terrible and cataclysmic events are also part of everyday reality, and the comfortable and familiar can be turned on its head in the most casual, offhand way. The show breaks down the comfortable distance that usually insulates us from that knowledge.
True, there is something exotic about Ami Vitale's documentation of life in Kashmir. Several of her images, including those of mountain villagers assembled in mourning, for example, are so startling, and describe such an unfamiliar world, that they have an hallucinatory air of unreality about them. But in the work in general, conflict and suffering are personalised, not exoticised.
Wherever the setting, the enemy is depersonalised and treated as so much rubbish. In Alexandra Boulat's sad, melancholy photographs, bodies lie abandoned in the street in the former Yugoslavia. People are sprawled beside the wreckage of a bus in Heidi Levine's stark record of the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Israel.
Kate Brooks also documents the terrible aftermath of violence in Iraq. One of the most troubling images, though, is Paula Bronstein's photograph of a badly burnt young woman in Afghanistan.
The accompanying text says that she is the mother of a three-year-old daughter, and that she set herself alight. Obviously this is by no means the whole story, and one is left wondering just what the whole story could be. It is voyeuristic to be looking at her in agony, just as it is voyeuristic to be looking at most of what we see in the exhibition. Yet, even though one is unlikely to leave the show with any hope that things might change, it does demonstrate the need for change, and is worth seeing on that basis alone.
Sean Lynch, whose exhibition is beautifully installed at the Galway Arts Centre, is a storyteller of sorts, an unreliable narrator in search of unreliable narratives. He reconsiders the official versions of aspects of cultural history, or he unearths forgotten strands of cultural history, and shapes this material into open-ended, provocative accounts that do not pretend to absolute authority. Rather, he urges us to be wary about any notion of a fixed, authoritative view. If that sounds dryly academic, his work isn't. He has a droll sense of humour and he is enthusiastically alert to the wonder of things.
Several previously exhibited projects are included, together with new work of particular relevance to Galway and the west of Ireland. Among the former, Latoon is a video recounting folklorist Eddie Lenihan's campaign to reroute a planned new road around a whitethorn tree in Co Clare. It is a remarkable story. It is noticeable here and elsewhere that Lynch likes to end on a note of uncertainty, as if he would be disappointed if there were a definitive conclusion to anything.
Take his search for the missing bicycle on the summit of Carrauntoohil, a monument to Flann O'Brien. No one knows who put it there, or who did away with it. But is was there, and it is gone. Suitably mist-shrouded views of the peak include a glimpse into the gully where it presumably lies. Another series of photographs traces the environmental sculptures created by Richard Long on his Irish walks. After all that, why not go for the big one and track down Hy Brazil, the fabled island? This he sets out to do. Well, sort of. He quotes TJ Westropp's sighting of the island in 1872. A drawing Westropp made at the time is lost. Instead, we see a series of projected photographs taken by Lynch of the Atlantic Ocean looking southwest from the Aran Islands. The photographs are gorgeous to look at. As one fades into another in the sequence, Lynch suggests the ambiguity of the view. You can readily imagine seeing an island out there. But behind the sublime imagery we can see the apparatus generating it.
A number of preserved fish, arranged in two vitrines, form an unlikely audience for the ocean slide show. They include what look like diminutive sharks, deepening the suspicion that the set-up parodies Damien Hirst. In fact the fish, part of a collection in NUI Galway and reputed to have been caught and preserved by Charles Lynch, aren't making any categorical claims, but he does like leaving us with the spectacle of real fish looking at, or for, a mythical island.
A partial history of anger in Galway marshals a few examples of extreme vandalism directed towards public sculpture in Galway. The centrepiece is the beheading of the life-sized statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire. Although the head was recovered, the integrity of the work, which had been carved from a single limestone block, was destroyed. Just like real life.
Kaori Yuzawa's carefully staged photographic tableaux at Ard Bia Gallery are magic-realist pictures. She is inspired, by Japanese myths, but rather than merely depicting them she uses them as starting points for her own meditations on life. She succeeds brilliantly in engendering a fictional space. Looking at the images, you'd quite like to read the stories that might easily accompany them, not because the images lack anything but because they open up all sorts of possibilities. Her delicate touch is evident in a small installation that also forms part of the show.
Carmel M Cleary's photographs discern similar forms in Arizona's canyons and in the dramatic Icelandic landscape. While they are outstanding, and it is nice to have them on view in University College Hospital, it is also a difficult venue, and they would benefit greatly from a conventional gallery space.
Dermot Seymour's involving, gritty, hyper-realist paintings are on view at the Norman Villa Gallery in Bordersnort, and Jane Queally's Liminal Paintings, featuring thoughtful abstracts with lots of subtle colour, are at the NUI Galway Gallery.
Among group shows the Kenny Gallery's A Northern Light and Artspace 21 are particularly ambitious. The Kenny show is huge, exploiting most of the labyrinthine building now that the many thousands of books that used to line the walls have been moved elsewhere. It's a good show to browse your way through and includes some of Betty Brown's playfully anarchic animal sculptures and substantial bodies of work by Catherine McWilliams, Jack Pakenham and Gerry Gleason, among others. Small groups of paintings by Arthur Armstrong and George Campbell are well worth seeing as well.
At the festival box office and other venues, Single Shot is a collection of film and video pieces by a number of artists, all shot in a single take. There are some terrific pieces, and not just in terms of the visual trickery you might expect from the premise.
Aideen Barry, who is Galway's foremost performance artist, is much in evidence, on film in Avalanche Opera, the meaning of which becomes clear when you see it, and live from July 26-28 at the Radisson SAS Hotel. Galway's experimental space G126 has work by no less than nine artists currently working in Glasgow, including graphic artist David Shrigley, who shows an animation.
