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A TOTAL TRANSFORMATION IS NEEDED

Location: The Old Fire Station, located at 190A Rathmines Road Lower, Dublin 6, D06 R9F9.

Exhibition Dates: 5th – 18th October 2024.

Open: Wed-Sat | 1 – 6pm

Featured Artists: Clodagh Assata Boyce, Isaac Harris, Jordan/Martin Hell

Curated by Beulah Ezeugo

A TOTAL TRANSFORMATION IS NEEDED is a group show and a holler into the ether.

In this exhibition, featuring work mediated through prose, speech, and song, three artists working across the Black Atlantic—Clodagh Boyce (Ireland/USA), Jordan/Martin Hell (UK/USA), and Isaac Harris (UK/USA)—meet in Dublin to engage in a dialogue. The exhibition highlights the practices of Black artists who write, emphasising the power of language to construct and deconstruct the intangible frameworks that shape our lives.

Join us for a launch event at MART Gallery, Old Fire Station Rathmines on October 5th at 1:00 PM. The event will include a special reading by Isaac Harris from their forthcoming novel, Le Triomphe de Reine Nègre, starting at 1:30 PM.

Artist Statements: 

Clodagh Assata Boyce is a Trini-Irish curator and artist working between Belfast and Dublin. They employ gathering as artistic practice to explore nationhood and migration.

Isaac Harris is a writer and artist from Virginia whose practice interrogates cultural and historical narratives through fiction. Their work explores themes of memory, the absurdity of Black identity, and the fluidity of power, focusing on narratives set in and around Virginia and the greater Black diaspora in the Atlantic world. Isaac is the author of Blaxploitation Burner Tape (Waterwings Press, 2023) and Ghetty Gospel (Ethel Zine, 2021, US; Peanut Press, 2021, Scotland). Recent work has appeared in Deleuzine (2023) and in Francis Jones and Josie Perry’s The Thieves, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2024). Isaac holds a degree in Linguistics and History from the University of Edinburgh and currently resides in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

Jordan/Martin Hell is a Black trans(2s) artist, writer, & scholar. They are the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2021) & AUTOLINGO DIDACTICA (Monitor Press, 2023) Their writing has been internationally published in interdisciplinary press, projects, & initiatives by Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (DE), Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishing (UK), Monitor Books (UK), Real Review (UK), Soft Opening (UK), Mousse Magazine (DE), 032c (DE), Rosie’s Disobedient Press (UK), Sticky Fingers Publishing (UK), The Bittersweet Review (UK), Pratt Institute’s The Felt (US), & others. He studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art (US).  Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the School of English & Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis project BLACK DEVIATIONS, ARCHIVAL SPECULATIVITIES: BLACK FEMINIST PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH IN MID-LATE 20TH CENTURY LITERATURE & PERFORMANCE is an interdisciplinary global archive of speculative research & practice across experimental painting, queer/trans womanist theology, film, meditation/monasticism/queer spiritual separatism, porn, translation, transcription, music, archive, hybrid text & novellas, sculpture, fashion, & performance. Their work has been shown internationally at Soft Opening (UK), Tokyo Arts & Space (JP), Sadie Coles (UK), Emanuel Layr, (EU),  Wexner Center for the Arts (US), Goethe Institut Irland (EU), Performance Space NY (US), Sophiensæle (DE), Callie’s (DE), La MaMa Theater & Galleria (US), Ars Nova (US) & more. 

Beulah Ezeugo is an artist & curator who works with others against the rapid tightening and regularisation of borders. Her practice engages with postcolonial geographies & memory and expands outwards through exhibition-making, programming, & publication. As an independent curator, she is interested in supporting collaborative & research-led artists’ practices. Beulah is currently a research associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry, and one-half of the collective Éireann & I Archive, a migrant memory project.