Historically, ‘the commons’ was used to describe an area of land that was neither public nor private. It described a common resource for anybody to use under certain rules, usually developed by a vested community. ¹ Much of what was the historical commons is private property today, a process which began in the Eighteenth Century with The Enclosure Movement. Contemporary society has seen newer enclosures of the commons that encompass intellectual property, language, seeds and genetic material. In response there has been a resurgence of commoning led by commoners calling for a more livable set of economic, social and political conditions. These commoners are experimenting with methods of organising social production differently, in ways that forefront mutual care, equality and social justice.
In programming Instituting Commoning: A Platform for Un/Learning in NCAD Gallery, we define our use of the term ‘commoning’ in this contemporary rediscovery of the meaning of ‘the commons’ and its governance.²
Instituting Commoning: A Platform for Un/Learningbrings together a network of artistic and academic practices through the exchange of viewpoints, the sharing of resources and the creation of new social bonds. The framework for exhibition and programme has been conceived through an attempt to materially platform or occupy the institutional Gallery space as a ‘commons’ – made manifest through demarcated floor markings and built raised platform using elements of Studio Bark’s U-Build construction system. The platform is an inclusionary space that frames artworks by Dr Richard A. Carter, Michele Horrigan, and Dr Ameera Kawash and will also be used to stage event-based interactions, process-based work, workshops, symposia, recent NCAD MA/MFA Art & Social Action graduate work, housing activists and community group meetings, pedagogical un/learning workshops, and specific ‘commoning’ research threads from NCAD Staff members: Michelle Browne, Anne Kelly, Gareth Kennedy, Dr Emma Mahony, Dr Tom O’Dea, Seoidín O’Sullivan, and Dr Fiona Whelan who have recently participated in an EU Staff Exchange research action entitled Spatial Practices in Art & Architecture for Empathetic Exchange (SpaceX-RISE).Instituting Commoning: A Platform for Un/Learning is curated by Anne Kelly in collaboration with Dr Emma Mahony, Michelle Browne, Gareth Kennedy, Dr Tom O’Dea, Seoidín O’Sullivan, and Dr Fiona Whelan.
1. Foyer Conversations: Cinema of Commoning, podcast, episode 1: A Conversation with Stavros Stavrides, 2 August, 2024.
2. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) Paperback – 14 Mar. 1991 by Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge Uni Press.
PROGRAMME
Exhibition Launch Thursday 29 January 2026, 6PM – 8PM.
Exhibition Opening Times: 30 January – Friday 27 February 2026, 11AM – 6PM.
PUBLIC EVENTS
The NCAD School for Un/learning, Un/learning Workshops: Wednesday, 11 February 2026, 5-7PM, NCAD Gallery, Foyer, Street.
NCAD MA/MFA Art & Social Action students, working with Dr Emma Mahony, have devised four unlearning exercises specifically for NCAD. They will deliver these exercises with the participation of staff and students who are invited to enrol in the NCAD School for Unlearning. Upon completion of the exercises participants will graduate. Unlearning is both a discourse and a practice that involves the critical appraisal of accepted “truths”, power relations and practices, as well as an appraisal of the role the individual plays within this matrix. Unlearning calls on those who practice it to challenge not just what they know and believe to be untrue and unjust, but also deeply rooted habits and attitudes that are unjust. Habits, however, are not just practiced by individuals, but are also performed by institutions where they comprise the often invisible and unquestioned organisational actions and structures that reproduce systemic inequalities. The purpose of The NCAD School for Unlearning is to apply unlearning to NCAD to unpack, unsettle and undo any unjust habits and attitudes. Workshops are additionally facilitated with Anne Kelly.
Multi-Story Symposia: Saturday, 21 February 2026, 10AM-2PM, NCAD Gallery.
Aengus Hennessy & artist Evelyn Broderick present the Multi-Story project in a half day symposium centred on housing in Ireland, with speaker contributions from Housing Action Now (HAN), Community Action Tenants Union Ireland (CATU) and the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI).
The Multi-Story project originated from a Create commission with artists Fiona Whelan and Feidlim Cannon alongside Housing Action Now (HAN) that set out to engage housing activists in a unique online collaborative arts process, which explores their direct experience of the housing crisis through visual and performative story-telling. Link
Housing Action Now is a collective of community workers, researchers, activists and artists concerned with the growing housing crisis in Ireland. HAN works with representatives from renters unions, those working with asylum seekers, refugees, disabled people, Traveller organisations, housing and homelessness and those in the student accommodation housing sectors. Initially developed as a series of online workshops with HAN members and hosted by the artists, this workshop process has explored each activist’s own individual sense of home through multiple creative tasks which have evolved into text-based and theatrical elements. The project explores the potential of digital media to enhance socially engaged collaborative art-making, connecting diverse groups of housing activists in Ireland at this time.
Instituting The Commons Inquiry Date: TBC, Tuesday 24 February 2026, 5-7PM.
A hybrid event with in-person and online participation hosted by NCAD Gallery moderated by Dr Emma Mahony with speakers from Laboratory for the Urban Commons, AthensLink, Askeaton Fine Arts, Limerick LInk, NCAD Gallery, Dublin Link, and Coventry Biennial Link.
Responding to a cultural context increasingly inflected by neoliberal and authoritarian values systems, the Future Art Institution takes the form of a group conservation that debates what the critical art institution of the future might look like. It asks its contributors, all of whom are curators of small-scale art institutions /biennales in Europe, to imagine a future model for the art institution that is centered on the principles of collectivity, sustainability, care and commoning. In advance of the conversation, the participants are circulated a list of questions to which they are asked to respond. Their answers are shared with the moderator before the debate and are used to shape the conversation. The outcome of the conversation is a collective proposal for what this institution of the future could be.
Positing questions centred on: What are its core values? What is its infrastructure? How is it sustainable? What is the curatorial structure? What is the management structure and how does it enact collectivity? What is the funding structure?
Un/learning Symposium Date: Wednesay, 25 February 2026, 10AM-5PM
Speakers: Dr Richard A. Carter, Michele Horrigan, Dr Ameera Kawash
Researchers: Michelle Browne, Anne Kelly, Gareth Kennedy, Dr Emma Mahony, Dr Tom O’Dea, Seoidín O’Sullivan.
(9.30am)
10-11AM Unlearning Workshop Part 1 – Introduction to Unlearning. NCAD Gallery & Foyer.
Dr Emma Mahony & Dr Tom O’Dea
11AM-12PM Elevenses for the “Hungry Months”. Gareth Kennedy & FIELD Students. NCAD FIELD Link
12-1PM Unlearning Workshop Part 2 – Developing & Testing Exercises. NCAD Gallery & Foyer.
Dr Emma Mahony & Dr Tom O’Dea
1-2PM LUNCH Goodies
2-3PM Exhibiting Artists Talks w/ Q&A Dr Richard A. Carter, Michele Horrigan, Dr Ameera Kawash. NCAD Gallery.
Anne Kelly
3-4PM ‘Playful Possibilities’. NCAD Gallery & Foyer
Seoidín O’Sullivan & Dr Dominic Thorpe
4-5PM ‘The Artist Collective Game’. NCAD Gallery & Foyer.
Dr Tom O’Dea & Michelle Browne
* Elevenses for the “Hungry Months” hosted by artist Gareth Kennedy, and Students from NCAD FIELD programme. Since 2020, Gareth has been charged with running the Studio+ NCAD FIELD module in a derelict brownfield site beside the College which is in the process of being reappraised as a Novel Ecology. FIELD students served the participants pancakes cooked on a reclaimed manhole cover over a campfire and also offered tours of the site.
* Playful Possibilities session draws on an elective designed by artists Seoidín O’Sullivan and Dr Dominic Thorpe for NCAD’s Fine Art students. Developed in response to student anxiety, self-consciousness, and the lingering effects of isolation after Covid, this session offers an embodied, playful approach to learning in shared studio spaces. Through movement, improvisation, and playful exercises, participants are encouraged to let go of perfectionism, take creative risks, and reconnect with the body as a source of knowledge and confidence. Play is used as a serious pedagogical tool—supporting experimentation, reframing failure, and fostering connection, resilience, and creative flow.
* The “Artist Collective Game” is a game wherein a group develops and shares the tactics and tools required to build a successful artist collective. Throughout the game players build on their own experiences of collaboration along with their artistic practices, skills and references to gather the resources needed for their collective.
Practitioner Information
Dr. Richard A Carter is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter’s research addresses a broad range of questions concerning how digital systems influence how we sense and make sense of the world, defining different possibilities of action and expression. A key aspect of Carter’s research concerns telling alternative stories about the nature of our digital environment, inviting us to rethink its possibilities beyond those we are usually presented with. Critically informed speculation, experimentation, indeterminacy, and possibility form a cornerstone of Carter’s research activities, which are conducted across a wide range of technologies, formats, and modes—including drones and satellites, machine vision and artificial intelligence, generative algorithms, and virtual worlds.
Michele Horrigan is an Irish artist and independent curator. Since 2006, she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick, Ireland. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals. She is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Her artworks made over the last two decades have investigated narratives of place, dwelling and environment, with an ever-increasing focus on ecological issues. Resulting videos and installations have been presented at Rubin Foundation, New York; Tilburg University; Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Schloss Britz, Berlin; Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin amongst others.
Ameera Kawash is a Palestinian-Iraqi-American artist whose work explores relations between cultural archiving, generative AI systems, and algorithmic bias. She examines the tensions between preservation and generation, asking how pattern-based knowledge systems such as embroidery and machine learning encode, transmit, and resist erasure across material and digital forms. Ameera holds a practice-based PhD from the Royal College of Art. She is co-founder of Ark Knowledge Networks, developing AI systems for low-resource languages and at-risk archives, and Future Botanic, creating cultural interfaces for sustainable infrastructures. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized through awards including the S+T+ARTS Prize Africa Award and the Terra Carta Design Lab.
The exhibited works are created through Tatreez Garden, a generative AI system trained on Palestinian embroidery patterns combined with indigenous plant forms. Reinterpreting tatreez as a computational craft, the project invites audiences to participate in a living archive that evolves across time and media: from digital generation to video installation to hand-embroidered textiles created in collaboration with Lali Pali, an initiative working with Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon. Rather than claiming to preserve or translate traditional practices, it explores what new forms of cultural transmission become possible when these patterns are encoded algorithmically, producing alternate materialities that resist both cultural and technological erasure. The majlis or ‘sitting space’ functions as a commons, a shared space for gathering, observing, and sharing knowledge, as has been historically true throughout the Levant and Arab world.
Studio Bark Design Studio, U-Build – Studio Bark Link.are science-driven, unable to ignore the facts of the climate emergency and to continue with business as usual. Are forward thinking in their work, vocal in communicating what they believe in, and courageous in their ambitions for our collective future. They engage with industry and beyond to drive sustainable technologies and conversations forward. Are generous with their knowledge and ideas for how industry can improve, sharing their programmes and making their research open source.
Are motivated by compassion towards people, the planet and each other. They envision a world where everyone’s social needs and welfare are met. They are passionate about protecting and restoring the planet for future generations. They are dedicated to cultivating a studio grounded in kindness, respect, transparency and fairness, and recognise the need to address the diversity deficit within our industry and wider society. They treat their clients with care and will sit alongside you through the unique journey of your project, providing our knowledge, experience, and a listening ear.
They take responsibility for their work, are thorough in their research, and committed to project success. They are sincere in their approach to their client’s needs, and attentive to the nuanced requirements of individual project. They are methodical and careful in their business practices, ensuring day-to-day consistency alongside long-term resilience. They place learning in high regard, promoting upskilling within their team to consistently raise their knowledge and abilities, viewing each project as an opportunity to expand their expertise.
