This screening of Amanda Dunsmore’s Senator David Norris coincides with Bloomsday (16 June) in the centenary year of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Recently acquired for the collection, Senator David Norris (2012) is a video portrait of the prominent Irish LGBTQ+ activist and renowned Joycean scholar. David Norris (b.1944), a founder of the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform who has served in Seanad Éireann since 1987, has suggested that to enter into the world of Ulysses we should: ‘Listen to it, read it as far as you can with your ears.’

Filmed in the attic of the James Joyce Centre (North Great George’s Street, Dublin), Dunsmore’s portrait of this usually animated raconteur is silent. Norris sits composed, surrounded by books and the remnants of Joyce related materials.

Senator David Norris was created as part of the Galway County Council Public Art Residency Programme with Galway’s older LGBT community.

Amanda Dunsmore (b.1968) examines place, people, and moments of political significance through her work. Employing archival processes and aesthetic tactics drawn from established conventions of portrait painting, she explores representations of societal transformation through contextual portraiture and social historic projects. Dunsmore’s filmed portraits feature social actors who have transformed society, often filming them in locations of social-historic significance.