Worldly images at Crawford

A new exhibition exploring the stories of immigrants who traverse the no-man’s land between hope and home will open on Leeside next month.

Showcasing photography and film making from five international artists, ‘In Transit’ illustrates the physical and psychological challenges faced by people fleeing unsafe or economically depressed homelands.

The exhibition, which will open in Crawford Art Gallery in March, is curated by Peggy Sue Amison, Artistic Director for East Wing, a platform for photography founded in Doha, Qatar. Ms Amison is the former Artistic Director of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, a position she held from 2001 to 2014.

The artists whose work will feature in the exhibition are George Awde (US/Lebanon), Daniel Castro Garcia (UK), Gohar Dashti (Iran), Tanya Habjouqa (Jordan), and Stefanie Zofia Schulz (Germany).

The photography and video works in this exhibition are created in Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Italy, and Iran, and are testimonies to day-to-day survival alongside the struggle to find a sense of normalcy, stability, and a place to call home.

The well-travelled exhibition was initially exhibited at Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark in 2016 and has since toured extensively in the United States, showing in a number of venues in California and Massachusetts.

‘In Transit’ opens in the Crawford Art Gallery on Emmet Place on 6 March and will run until 4 May.

Meanwhile, Crawford Art Gallery has also announced its participation in the 2020 Artists’ Film International programme (AFI).

The AFI programme brings together recent moving image works by artists from 22 global partners, which are then presented by each of the 22 institutions over the course of the year.

This will be the first year that Crawford Art Gallery takes part in the AFI programme, and to mark its inaugural outing, Irish artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain has been invited to present her 2018 film ‘Inscriptions (One Here Now)’.

The film was originally commissioned by former Director of Sirius Arts Centre, Miranda Driscoll as part of ‘One Here Now: The Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland Project’, supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

The AFI programme opened in Crawford Art Gallery this month and will run until 23 January 2021.