Alice Rekab is an Irish Sierra Leonean artist based in Dublin. Rekab uses their identity as a starting point to examine the intersection of personal and shared historical and cultural narratives. They trace fragments of their mixed-race experience through body and mind, geographies and politics.

Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics explores themes of familial and artistic connections, diaspora, and sense of place and belonging. It features commissioned, newly made works engaging with the location of SIRIUS in Cork Harbour along with a comprehensive selection of past works.

Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, director. Following the presentation at SIRIUS, the exhibition will travel across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art, in collaboration with producer Rayne Booth.

Accessibility Note
Our building has accessibility limitations. There are three steps to the front door and a temporary wheelchair ramp is available upon request. Our toilets are accessed via stairs and are not open to visitors. Public toilets are beside the Titanic Experience, by The Promenade.

Alice Rekab researches and operates through the framework of the family unit. Rekab revisits and reimagines archival items – photographs, objects – found in their own holdings, and combines them with memories and oral accounts, all derived from their encounters with Irish and West African traditions, knowledges, spirituality, and materiality. 

Rekab makes sculptures, expanded paintings, digital collages, and films that are composite interactions with subject matter, technologies, imageries, and storytelling. They call upon ‘poor’ techniques and materials – craft, vernacular iconography, reclaimed utilitarian articles, and symbolism – for their references and manifestations. 

Clann Miotlantach / Mythatlantics showcases materials such as clay, coloured mirrors, and salvaged wood and utensils, blended with representations of Rekab’s family members, African nomoli figurines, snakes, crocodiles, sky, land, water, and pieces of furniture, among others. These elements consider the Atlantic Ocean as a diasporic terrain, fluid and turbulent, that forged Black and Irish stories of mythological recovery, and more ambivalently of transition, transformation, repression, and resistance across history.

The use of clay is a distinctive feature of Rekab’s output. This medium conveys an ancestral, primeval quality. The sculptures’ manipulation (the vestiges of the artist’s hands are often detectable), their colours (pale red and light grey, suggesting skin tones), and their animal-like shapes (specifically the snake, a biblical symbol associated with the replacement of paganism by Christianity in Ireland, and the crocodile, an allusion to the ‘wildness’ associated to Africa in the West) turn them into artefacts that speak to the telluric and experiential.

Rekab is uniquely capable of challenging historically prevailing notions of Irishness as associated with whiteness, possessing the capacity to critique the ‘white innocence’ that shapes a collective unconscious which still largely fails to recognize the racial issues permeating social relations. In addition, Rekab contributes to a wider recognition of the complexity of identity in Ireland today, using their biography as a signifier of that and platforming it as a useful metaphor through which to think about, and enact, sustainable ways of living with difference in the country.

Alice Rekab lives and works in Dublin. They will participate in the 2025 edition of the Liverpool Biennial. Recent solo shows include Mehrfamilienhaus, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2023) and Family Lines, The Douglas Hyde, Dublin (2022). Recent commissions include Truth, Flags, Identity, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2020). Their first monograph was published by Distanz in 2023 to accompany the exhibition at Museum Villa Stuck. Their work is in the collections of the Arts Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, among others.

To accompany the exhibition, SIRIUS presents a public programme this February and early March, comprising various events that address the themes and ideas of Rekab’s practice. These events include screenings, performances and workshops by artists and curators based both locally and internationally.

WORKSHOP
Beulah Ezeugo and Joselle Ntumba (Éireann and I): Heritage
Through Storytelling and Symbols 

Éireann and I is a community archive that chronicles stories around heritage, activism, and art relating to Black life in Ireland. It was initiated and is led by Beulah Ezeugo and Joselle Ntumba. They are presenting the workshop Heritage Through Storytelling and Symbols. The session explores how identities evolve through social and cultural transformations.

Éireann and I invite participants to bring to SIRIUS an item from their personal archive, a memento or family photograph, to draw from throughout the session. Using these materials, they engage in various activities, including flag-making and recording oral histories, through which they design symbols that represent their own imagined place of origin.

SIRIUS
Saturday, 15 February
11am – 4pm
Free; booking via Eventbrite is required (https://www.eventbrite.ie/o/sirius-arts-centre-31770035337)
Refreshments are included

PERFORMANCE
Cliff Masheti, Fionnuala O’Connell, Raphael Olympio, Outsider Yp (Mark Mavambu)

Cliff Masheti, Fionnuala O’Connell, Raphael Olympio, and Outsider Yp (Mark Mavambu) are Cork City and County-based artists. They explore, individually and collectively, themes of identity associated with their diasporic experience. They are presenting an evening of spoken word. Their performances embrace the agency provided by their self-reflection and assert counter-narratives to dominant portrayals of Irish life.

SIRIUS
Saturday, 15 February
5pm – 7pm
Free; no booking required

PERFORMANCES
Alice Rekab + Eamon Ivri (aka Lighght), Dylan Kerr, Julie Landers, Cían Ó Donnchadha, polyp, Jasmine Wood

Alice Rekab is presenting a day of performances by guest artists Eamon Ivri (aka Lighght), Dylan Kerr, Julie Landers, Cían Ó Donnchadha, polyp, and Jasmine Wood. They respond to Rekab’s positioning of the Atlantic Ocean as a terrain of mythological recovery that encapsulates stories common to Irish and Black people, including change, repression, and resistance across history.

SIRIUS
Saturday, 22 February
11am – 7pm
Free; no booking required

SCREENING
Larry Achiapong and David Blandy

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy are artists based in England. Their collaborative practice shares their interest in popular culture and the post-colonial condition. They examine communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate the self as a fiction, devising alter-egos to point at their divided selves. The Finding Fanon Trilogy is a film series inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation. In the works, the artists negotiate Fanon’s ideas to examine themes of belonging and displacement through the perspective of race.

Larry Achiampong comments: “One of the things that fascinated me about reading Fanon’s writing when I was at art school was how these visions of doom, chaos, even pandemic are presented in front of the reader. Even 50 years after the book was published, the writings are ever present; the evil that is racism is very much alive and continues to fester through societies across the planet.”

David Blandy comments further: “Our films are visual poetry, using image, soundtrack and voice to create a complex interplay of meanings. … The elements provide a symbolic framework for our thoughts around Fanon, alluding to histories and ideas through the image and sound. Water acts as medium, a space of transition between the real and the virtual, but also refers to the Middle Passage and migration in general.”

SIRIUS
Saturday, 1 March
3pm – 5pm
Free; no booking required