Burdening the Image: Summer School for adults

Friday 29 August

9.45am Welcome registration tea/coffee with Sara Muthi & Cleo Fagan, Hugh Lane Gallery Education Curator

10-11am Tour of the exhibition Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: The Dream Pool Intervals with Sara Muthi

11.15am – 12pm: Introduction with Sara Muthi

12-1pm: Lunch

1-2pm: Luke van Gelderen

Screening of Hardcore Fencing (2023) and group discussion.

Hardcore Fencing (2023) is a video collage, functioning as a digital self-portrait, constructed from the artist’s internet browsing history. Drawing on content from platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, it examines how identity and masculinity are shaped within online spaces. The work reflects on how extreme displays of emotion are commodified as authenticity, revealing a culture where vulnerability becomes performance.

2-3pm: Workshop: group digital collaging

Participants are invited to bring two short video clips (1–2 minutes each) from any source (such as YouTube, TikTok, archive sites, personal recordings, or screen recordings). Ideally, select clips that contrast strongly in tone or feeling; one might be personal, the other from the wider internet. During the session, Luke and the participants will swap the audio between these clips, exploring how meaning shifts when sound and image are re-contextualised. Together, these found materials will be treated as cinema, developing shared criteria for discussion, analysing their ‘surface-level’ qualities, and considering what they reveal about identity, authorship, and our evolving ways of reading images.

Saturday 30 August

10 -11am: The International Centre for the Image

Presentation by PhotoIreland, Ángel Luis González Fernández, Director, and Julia Gelezova, General Manager

This presentation unpacks the infrastructural work of Julia and Ángel as they investigate how images are created, distributed, and consumed, exploring important conversations through the work of artists through the work of PhotoIreland.

PhotoIreland grows the reputation of Irish artists globally through a 360 degree support system and platform for contemporary photography, activated through a diversity of projects, which will be presented. In 2025, PhotoIreland launched the International Centre for the Image in Dublin.

11am-12pm: Ursula Burke

Talk: Embroidery Frieze (The Politicians) (2017) and beyond

Burke’s talk explores the politics of representation, image appropriation, and the use of allegory in her textile work, particularly Embroidery Frieze (The Politicians) (2017). She will highlight art historical influences such as Norwegian tapestry artist Hannah Ryggen, whose anti-fascist work — created during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II — is embedded with powerful iconography of resistance and defiance.

12-1pm: Lunch

1-3pm: Workshop: political embroidery

Ursula Burke will lead an embroidery workshop where participants will be invited to make an embroidery, responding to a range of images, ideas and influences connecting art and the socio-political sphere. They will be provided with a small hoop, fabric and embroidery thread and guided through basic embroidery stitches in order to make a piece of work that reappropriates embroidery as part of a Fine Art practice.

Sunday 31 August

11am-1pm: Chloe Brenan

Lecture-performance & workshop: A Stick in a Dark Room (2024)

A Stick in a Dark Room begins with Niels Bohr’s 1929 thought experiment of navigating a dark space using only a stick as a guide. From this point of departure, the work explores dissonances between two contrasting artworks: a dustbowl ballad by Woody Guthrie and a short story by Virginia Woolf. Each centres on a character sleeping in an orchard – yet under markedly different social,  environmental, and economic conditions.

The lecture-performance becomes a stage for exploring themes of rural labour, storytelling, and the ways in which artworks shape our understanding of reality – both revealing and obscuring worlds.

Following the performance, a practical workshop invites participants to create their own responses to artworks in the Hugh Lane gallery space. Using images, reflections, and written fragments, the workshop explores how meaning is not simply found, but shaped, diffracted, through shifting perspectives, mediums, and disciplines.

Participants are asked to bring a camera or camera phone for use during the workshop.   

Lecture-Performance: 15 minutes
Talk: 30 minutes
Prompts: 10 minutes
Exercise: 30 – 40 minutes
Share / review: 20 – 30 minutes

1-2pm: Lunch.

2-3pm: Colm Keady Tabbal

Lecture: Untitled

Colm Keady-Tabbal will deliver a lecture. (“The disaster takes care of everything”)

3-4pm: Participants discussion with Sara / concluding remarks on learnings/ feedback/ ideas.

…

Sara Muthi is a curator and writer. She is the Curatorial Fellow at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Curator of Visual Art at Brown Mountain Diamond, an artist-run art residency space in deep rural Ireland. As of 2025, Sara is a member of AICA | International Association of Art Critics. Her research investigates the intersections of Evangelicalism and Western visual culture.

Luke van Gelderen is a visual artist working across video, installation, image making, new media and performance. His practice examines the authorship of the ‘self’ within networked technologies, and how these environments drive compulsive self-obsession and consumption. Utilising appropriated imagery, he examines the intersection between memory, loss, violence, pornography and technology.

Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011. His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He regularly contributes to publications such as The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge.

Julia Gelezova is a cultural producer and curator, specialising in contemporary lens-based practices. She is General Manager for PhotoIreland, producing events throughout the year like the annual PhotoIreland Festival, while collaborating on ambitious projects like Creative Europe Photography Platforms—Parallel and Futures. Julia is co-editor of OVER Journal.

Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Her work incorporates porcelain sculpture, soft sculpture, embroidery, and drawing, to investigate identity politics of historical and colonial eras ranging from tradition to modernity.

Chloe Brenan is an artist working across moving image, photography, sound, publication and text. Her practice explores the porosity of the body and its indivisibility from its environment. Her work often explores language and its failings and involves close and careful examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life and processes on the edge of perception that call into question boundaries between bodies, environments, intimate spaces and wider structures of power.

Colm Keady-Tabbal is an Irish Lebanese artist based in New York and Dublin. They received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. They are currently a resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.