Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics

Alice Rekab is an Irish Sierra Leonean artist based in Dublin. Rekab takes their identity as a starting point to examine the intersection of personal and shared historical and cultural narratives. They trace fragments of their mixed-race experience through body and mind, geographies and politics.

Rekab researches and operates through the framework of the family unit. The artists comments: “I am the white passing child of a mixed marriage born into a very white space. Dublin in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a monoculture and I was the only one I knew with a Black dad and grandmother. I learned our story by heart – who we were and where we came from. I carried a photograph. I taught people how to say our surname, Rekab… Because of my light skin tone, people questioned if I was my father’s child. I told different parts of my family story to different people. This auto-redaction was an editorial-process-as-defence-mechanism; it made me up as a new person every time.”

Rekab revisits and reimagine archival items – photographs, objects – found in their own holdings and during their trips to Sierra Leone, and combines them with memories, oral accounts, field notes, and readings, all derived from their encounters with Irish and West African traditions, knowledges, spirituality, and materiality. These undertakings were initially facilitated by their connection with their Sierra Leonean father and grandmother, and furthered through study and contact with other artists of African heritage.

Rekab makes sculptures, expanded paintings, digital collages, films, and performances that are composite interactions with subject matter, technologies, imageries, and storytelling. They call upon ‘poor’ techniques and materials – craft, vernacular iconography, reclaimed utilitarian articles, and symbolism – for their references and manifestations. The use of clay is a distinctive feature of Rekab’s output. This medium conveys an ancestral, primeval quality. The sculptures’ manipulation (the vestiges of the artist’s hands are often detectable), their colours (pale red and light grey, suggesting skin tones), and their animal-like shapes (specifically the snake, a biblical symbol associated with the replacement of paganism by Christianity in Ireland, and the crocodile, an allusion to the ‘wildness’ associated to Africa in the West) turn them into artefacts that speak to the telluric and experiential.

Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics explores themes of familial and artistic connections, diaspora, and sense of place and belonging. It features commissioned, newly made works along with a comprehensive selection of works made in the past five years. It showcases materials such as clay, coloured mirrors, books, and salvaged wood and utensils, blended with representations of Rekab’s family members, West African nomoli figurines, West African and European architecture, animals, sky, land, water, and pieces of furniture, among others.

The exhibition considers the Atlantic Ocean as a diasporic terrain, fluid and turbulent, that forged Black and Irish stories of mythological recovery, and more ambivalently of transition, transformation, repression, and resistance across history. The featured works generate a symbolic lens by which to imagine a clann miotlantach, or ‘mythatlantic family’.

Rekab is uniquely capable of challenging historically prevailing notions of Irishness as associated with whiteness, possessing the capacity to critique the ‘white innocence’ that shapes a collective unconscious which still largely fails to recognise the racial issues permeating social relations. In addition, the artist contributes to a wider recognition of the complexity of identity in Ireland today, using their biography as a signifier of that and platforming it as a useful metaphor through which to think about, and enact, sustainable ways of living with difference in the country.

Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics is an exhibition produced by Sirius Arts Centre and realised in part with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland through a Project Award. The exhibition is curated by Miguel Amado, director, Sirius Arts Centre.

Following the presentation at Sirius Arts Centre, the exhibition is travelling across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art, in collaboration with producer Rayne Booth, with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland through the Touring of Work Scheme.

Biography
Alice Rekab lives and works in Dublin. In 2025, they are participating in the 2025 edition of the Liverpool Biennial and are featured in the group show Staying with the Trouble at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Their recent solo shows include Mehrfamilienhaus, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2023) and Family Lines, The Douglas Hyde, Dublin (2022). Their recent commissions include Truth, Flags, Identity, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2020). Their first monograph was published by Distanz in 2023 to accompany the exhibition at Museum Villa Stuck. Their work is in the collections of the Arts Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, among others. They are a member of Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin.

Alice Rekab, Scene / Seen III (Through the Window), 2024. Installation view, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. Co. Cork. Photograph: John Beasely. Courtesy of the artist and Sirius Arts Centre