Natasha Bourke is a Cork City–based artist. Bourke makes performances, films, installations, and drawings informed by her extensive background in movement, physical theatre, and new circus. The works address pathos, institutional frameworks, perception, and identity politics.

Bourke’s films, in particular, depict absurdist and haunting images of the self and society. The artist often performs in them through her alter ego, Coneface, which she has been constructing since 2014. To become Coneface, she covers her face with a semi-transparent cone to morph into an embodied camera lens – the personification of a mechanical gaze – which affects how she navigates and records the surrounding environment. She also uses observational techniques like the split screen to capture dance-like forms.

Bourke shot Concrete Keys mainly in the former site of FÁS, a defunct Irish state agency devoted to training and employment, occupying an iconic, Brutalist-style office block on Sullivan’s Quay in Cork City. The building served as a tax office from the 1980s to 2008 and later had various uses, including artists’ studios. It was torn down in 2018 to make way for a project by the property development company BAM Ireland.

In Concrete Keys, the building becomes a backdrop for dreamlike atmospheres populated by beings – ‘Business Clown’, ‘Selves’, and ‘A Deviant Twin’, among others – performing surreal actions. The building adopts various institutional characteristics – prison, hospital, workplace – and the beings represent ‘imaginations’ of Bourke’s mind.

The film exposes the laborious and imitative qualities of various tasks, duties, and routines through comic effect. But it also speaks to the oppressive power structures of multiple institutions in Ireland and beyond, from religion to patriarchy.

Concrete Keys produces a satirical response to the bureaucratic measures that punctuate everyday life, whether in a professional context or the private, domestic realm. Its structure responds to the capitalistic, repetitious division of time into work and leisure, with the institution operating between two archetypes, the factory or the office and the home. More broadly, the film reflects on social and personal rituals, institutionalism and institutionalisation, and the tension between freedom and self-preservation within the pervasive corporate mentality of late capitalism.

Natasha Bourke and Aideen Quirke, Programme and Operations Manager at SIRIUS, discuss Bourke’s approach to filmmaking, her engagement with the former FÁS site in Cork city’s centre while artist studios occupied it, her use of humour and irony, and her critical understanding of our world.

This exhibition is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, Director.