Island Talk 12
22nd May 2024
Talk 1 - Alan Phelan
Alan Phelan works in photography, sculpture, film, museum interventions, public art and collaborations with other artists, writers and curators. Born Dublin, 1968, Phelan received BA, Dublin City University, 1989 and MFA, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, 1994.
With his revival of the Joly screen colour process since 2019, he has sought to create a visual history for the process it never had as it was abandoned from use in the 1900s. Using mostly queer reference points and touching on over 500 years of image making, he continues to work on this large body of images. The unique additive colour process uses red, green and blue lines to filter light and make colour images. The three colours now form the basis for other works in print, painting, and video which riff on RGB in a variety of ways.
His work has recently been concerned with queer counterfactual temporalities, where histories are revised, recovered and reassembled into artworks and scenarios. Another example of this would be the 2016 film Our Kind on Roger Casement, placing him alive but in exile somewhere in rural Norway 25 years after his execution. This was a way to explore betrayal, loss and nationalism by shifting timelines and facts into a fictional scenario bringing together unlike characters.
Talk 2 - Barbara Diener
Born in Germany, Barbara Diener is a lens-based artist currently living and working in Cork City, Ireland. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the California College of the Arts and Masters of Fine Art in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and Diener’s photographs are part of numerous private and institutional collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Daylight Books published Diener's first monograph of her body of work Phantom Power in 2018 and her project The Rocket's Red Glare was published by Fw:Books in 2023.
Barbara Diener will present some insights into her practice, speak about her influences, and her three projects Sehnsucht, Phantom Power, and The Rocket’s Red Glare. She will also talk about her new position as Photographic Collections Librarian at UCC Library and share some new work in progress.
Talk 3 - Daragh Soden
Daragh will speak about 3 bodies of work; Young Dubliners, Looking for Love and Ladies & Gentlemen.
Positioning a generation of adolescents grappling with shifting socio-economic conditions at its centre, the Young Dubliners series is a bitter-sweet ode to the town where I grew up.
Including traditional photographs, screenshots from dating apps and a short Super8 film, Looking for Love, examines how we search, perform and relate in the pursuit of love in the modern age.
Ladies & Gentlemen is a series of large format photographs, raising questions around gender roles, photographer-subject relationships and the performativity of identity.
