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.