Image: Lucie Khakhoutian
Launch 6pm Sat 4 May
Running 5-30 May
Artist Talk 12pm Sun 5 May
Curatorial Tour 1pm Sun 19 May
Rathfarnham Castle
Rathfarnham Road, Rathfarnham,
D14 F439, Dublin
Opening Hours
Mon-Sun 9:30am-5:30pm
Curated by Julia Gelezova.
Presented in association with the French Embassy in Ireland and Alliance Française Dublin.
Kindly supported by the Office of Public Works, the Italian Institute of Culture, Dublin.
The Invention of Memory takes the relationship between memory and identity as the departure point for this conversation, meandering across works of Irish and international lens-based artists, presented in the historic building of Rathfarnham Castle.
Recovering a memory is a complex process. Our memories are vulnerable, inconsistent, and easily manipulated, while still retaining the ability to feel authentic. We can say that the sheer act of remembering has oftentimes a bias purpose in itself, and it is this purpose that affects how we re-read such memories. As our identity is shaped by these memories, a recollected memory may help us understand our current ideas and perceptions, what we wish to achieve with this recollection and what we already know. Reflecting on these processes we can learn more about our present identity.
The Invention of Memory creates a discourse between the artists’ works, exploring different types of memories – national, personal, familial, landscape, gender – and inviting the viewer to consider the formation of identity through these. Benedetta Casagrande and partner Leonardo Falascone’s new project Maria di Magdala investigates creation of the myth of Saint Mary Magdalene, its implication in the sacred landscapes of South France, the fabrication of relics, and the overall journey of transformations undertaken by her identity in history. Franco-Armenian artist Lucie Khakhoutian reflects on her national, spiritual, and familial identity, questioning her current state of belonging, by exploring her family history and childhood memories. Clare Lyons is a young Irish photographer, currently developing a new body of work Back Into Your Mind, confronting her past. Creating sculptural images, she attempts to uncover repressed and suppressed memories, and what’s hiding underneath the creases, to better understand how that confusion and trauma has shaped her identity. Yvette Monahan presents Beyond the ninth wave, originally commissioned for TULCA in 2017, addressing trauma within the landscape, mirroring the layers of memory and pain buried deep in the Irish psyche. Yvette produced a body of work that creates a landscape informed by ideology, indoctrination, projection and prejudice as well as myth and memory.
Benedetta Casagrande is an Italian photographer, writer and curator. Her artistic practice is strongly related to her academic research, which investigates the relationship between photography, familial narratives and the shaping of histories, as well as the politics of vision.
Leonardo Falascone is an architect and multi-media artist. His research investigates time and geography, as well as the ambiguity between method and intuition in the creative process. His practice stretches across experimentations with drawing, design, sound and photography.
Lucie Khahoutian is a Franco-Armenian visual artist born in Erevan, Armenia. Her works approach a wide range of topics while being very focused on religion, spirituality, and mystical matters. Involving both her background and elements of her current life, she weaves a visual tapestry of her surroundings and aim at offering a complete and subtle visual universe in which occident and orient coexist smoothly. Going back and forth between collage and photography she plays with the idea of illustrating the magic or the ungraspable. She was recently a finalist of The New Vanguard Prize and Les Voies Off in Arles and the winner of the Emerging Talents Prize in Roma, Italy. In 2017 she was a winner of Krakow Photo Month and Finalist during Hyères Photo festival and the Cosmos Award in Arles. Her work is exhibited internationally through collective exhibitions and art fairs and is part of the collections of Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum and the Villa Noailles. She is a member of the collective Live Wild.
Clare Lyons is a photographer and visual artist based in Dublin. Her work is typically deeply private and explores themes of trauma, memory, and her personal struggle with mental illness. Clare is currently Assistant Editor at Junior Magazine which is an annual journal showcasing young Irish photographic talent, and is a member of Ormond Studios. Clare has recently returned from an arts residency Arts, Letters and Numbers in New York where she had a solo show Back Into Your Mind.
Yvette Monahan is an Irish photographic artist, creating visual narratives, which reveal stories hidden deep in living places. In 2017, Yvette was invited to create and exhibit Beyond the ninth wave, for TULCA Ireland by curator Matt Packer alongside other artists including Yoko Ono and Bob Quinn. Her previous work The thousand year old boy won the Gallery of Photography’s Solas Ireland Award and was further nominated for the Savills prize at the RHA BUE contemporary art fair and the Prix Pictet 2016, and exhibited internationally. Yvette self-published The time of dreaming the world awake as a monograph, with the work nominated for the 2015 Prix Pictet. Yvette holds a MFA in Photography from the University of Ulster, Belfast and an MA in Geography and Economics from Trinity College Dublin.