Fissure

Galway Arts Centre is delighted to present a group exhibition featuring the work of eight Master of Arts in Creative Practice students from the School of Design and Creative Arts (SDCA), Atlantic Technological University (ATU), Galway, curated by Soña Smedkova. 

Featuring artists: Dina Abusehmoud, Mohamed Alkurdi, Carine Berger, Rocío Romero Grau, Kate Hodmon, Laurence Hynes, Cheryl Kelly Murphy & Evan Murray.

The title of this exhibition draws on the notion of gaps, marks, pauses, boundaries, and margins. Its purpose is to establish a common thread between each individual work and create a cohesive and immersive experience. Fissure questions the interconnectedness between humans and nature and invites the audience to reach a point where both worlds connect. The Galway Arts Centre, with its rendered limestone walls, becomes a perfect backdrop transforming space that aims to grasp times of unease and solitude across an array of materials from found objects to items of comfort and loss. As the audience traverses through the artistic landscape imbued with memories of the Persse Family, they are drawn into a space dedicated to the storytelling of the well-known Lady Gregory. Her legacy is conveyed in the exhibition in a modern retelling using screens and storyboards of animation and game design environments. We are collectively asked to consider our perceptive awareness which one might feel is lost in recent years as a cause of the digital revolt. 

This group of eight postgraduate students crossed the borders of their homelands in France, Catalonia, Palestine and Ireland, bringing their unique backgrounds, cultures and contrasting practices together in Fissure, to collectively produce an allegory of prospects and to populate a void. Through a diverse range of media from photography, sculpture, documentary, animation, graphic novels Manga to mixed media and interactive installations, the artists create a new trajectory of perception. The definition of a split, a division – a noticeable crack within the landscape – creates a philosophical margin where the ecology of this octagon of work is dissolved. The exhibition transforms what Fissure is, creating a contemporary pocket filled with juxtaposing creative matter, shaped by emerging visual artists, filmmakers and animation and game designers.  

Special thanks to the School of Design and Creative Arts, ATU and Galway Arts Centre. 

Curator’s Biog

Soña Smedkova is a Czech multidisciplinary artist based in Galway, Ireland. Smedkova gained First-class Honours in Master of Arts in Creative Practice at the School of Design and Creative Arts, ATU, Galway. In the fourth year of her undergrad studies, she was an integral member of the student-led curating team for an exhibition for GMIT contemporary art graduates Not a Degree Show, Printworks, funded by Galway City Arts Council. She was awarded an Agility Award by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021. In early 2022 she became a member of the Board of Directors at 126 Artist–Run Gallery and the same year she was a curator of an exhibition A Remix of Change at 126 Gallery as part of the Galway International Arts Festival. Smedkova’s work was recently exhibited in a group show DÉAD in Transmediale, Berlin under the Creative Pathways Programme, funded by Irish Embassy Berlin and Goethe Institute Ireland. The show is now travelling to Dublin and will be launched as part of the Culture Night at Goethe Institute Ireland. 

Exhibition Events

Friday 8th September 

6 pm – Opening reception at Galway Arts Centre | 47 Dominick Street with guest speaker Ruth Mulhern, Galway City Council Arts Officer.

6:00, 7:00 pm and 8:00pm – Performance by Rocio Romero Grau

Friday 22nd September –  Exhibition open until midnight with a Culture Night Special event to be announced.

Digital Catalogue can be viewed as a flipbook  here  or as a downloadable PDF MA_2023