This year's DEAF Festival's opening night has the honour of presenting the debut Irish performance of the wonderful Soap & Skin, aka eighteen year old Anja Plaschg. Having grown up on a pork farm in the small village of Gnas in rural Austria, Anja's spellbinding live performances have been stunning Audiences and filling concert halls across Europe. She performs alone, with a grand piano and electronics, her breathtaking vocal's displaying a depth of talent rarely seen in such a young artist.

 

"If These Walls Could Talk" looks to the literal and conceptual presence of the walls and structures that define the urban environment and focuses on how space is re-used, recycled and re-invented to span over lifetimes. For over twenty years, Cairo-born artist Khaled Hafez has explored the continuous reproduction of dichotomies both within and between the popular culture of his native Egypt and that of two of its chief western influences: the United States and France. This exhibition includes the DEAF Film programme selection of video works from Hafez, alongside a video installation from Ahmed El-Shaer (known for his work with the Cairo-based group ‘Medrar: For Contemporary Art’)

 

 

Landscapes and portraits from the boglands of the mid-West. Originally from Northern Ireland, photographic artist Simon Burch worked in London for 8 years before moving to Dublin in 1996 to establish a studio. Since then, he has staged exhibitions of his personal work as an invited artist in RHA, along with other solo and group shows. The recipient of numerous international awards (EPICA inclusion on two occasions and AOP Silver for his portraiture), Burch was recently commissioned by the Regional Cultural Centre in Donegal to produce a new body of work as part of their imaging Donegal‚ Residency.

 

Seven Folds in Time by Jaki Irvine, a major new multi-screen video installation commissioned by and made specifically for Temple Bar Gallery. Jaki Irvine’s work in film and video, whether in single-screen format or in more complex multi-screen installations, weaves together enticing, though ultimately elusive narratives in which image and musical score variously overlap, coalesce and diverge. These languid explorations of human interaction with the natural world, the built environment, and with other humans are suffused with a melancholic lyricism, sometimes leavened by a dreamlike humour. Subjectivities split and fragment as the boundaries that separate self from other become fluid or permeable.