On Ideals in Source

In Source 87 I review ‘Ideals’ from the PhotoIreland Festival 2016.

“Ideals was the centrepiece of PhotoIreland’s 2016 Festival, and was shown in the City Assembly House, now home of the Irish Georgian Society. The old exhibition room, in which Ideals was staged, was one of the first purpose-built art galleries in Europe, arising out of the professionalisation of fine art in the late eighteenth century and is a space imbued with the mixture of enligthenment idealism and bourgeoisification which that eighteenth-century origin implies. In this sense, then, the crumbling walls of the Assembly House were the perfect setting for an exhibition subtly questioning the ‘Ideals’ which circulate in a commemorative year in Ireland that looks back to the Easter Rising of 1916, an event which itself drew on a lineage of civil dissent found in that cumulative moment of eighteenth-century radicalism, the French Revolution….”.

Agustini Triquell’s The Dam was amongst the highlights of the show, a series of images of holiday resorts built in the 1940s and 1950s by the Peronist regime in Argentina.

2012

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