Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Dublin

From the series The Forbidden Sun © Robert Ellis

Culture Ireland and The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon present Isabel Nolan’s commission for the Irish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia running until Sunday 22 November 2026.

Read More Working across photography, sculpture, performance, film, and textile, Tamara Kalo’s practice engages image-making as an alchemical gesture of ritual and remembrance. Currently based in London, Kalo exhibits her work for the first time in Ireland for The Artist’s Eye, presenting the only body that can hold our world’s grief (2025), commissioned by Beirut Art Centre. Kalo’s installation examines collective grief as a durational condition, embedded in both the landscape and the body. At the centre of the installation is a lumen photograph, fragmented across twenty sheets of silver gelatin paper which have been stitched together by the artist. Capturing a view of the Mediterranean Sea, the photograph was made with a camera obscura that Kalo set up in a vacant building overlooking the corniche in the coastal city of Saida, Lebanon. Exposed to the changing light over three days, the image formation followed the timeline of a traditional mourning period, tracking the transition from loss to release. In her installation, Kalo explores time, light sensitivity, and the sea, as formal allegories for grief, registering loss as a boundless, ongoing condition that moves beyond a singular moment, body, or place. About the Artist Tamara Kalo is a Lebanese-French artist based in London, working across alternative photographic processes, sculpture, performance, film, and textile. Kalo is currently completing an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has a BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Beirut Art Centre, Beirut, Lebanon; Athr Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; The N.E.S.T., Al Ula, Saudi Arabia; Rotlicht Festival, Vienna, Austria; PhotoEspana at Casa Arabe, Madrid, Spain; Gallery Isabelle, Dubai, UAE; and Baro Galeria and O Contemporary, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Credits the only body that can hold our world’s grief (2025) was commissioned by Beirut Art Centre, Beirut, Lebanon.

Jaouda’s multi-layered textile works traverse the languages of painting, sculpture and installation to produce ‘landscapes of memory’. The forms, colours and motifs within her intricately textured surfaces gesture towards different encounters across time and space, drawing on the artist’s childhood in Libya and experiences of living between Cairo and London. Organic and geometric forms reveal themselves within her layered topographies, evoking images both real and imagined: spectral presences and absences within the shadows of memory. Each work is intimately hand-crafted through a slow, meditative process. Jaouda begins by treating and dying her fabrics with earthy, saturated pigments, a process through which the physicality of her materials is altered and colours come to life. Then comes a process of décollage, or cutting out, which Jaouda describes as ‘a radical and poetic strategy that is as much destructive as it is constructive; where the act of undoing and unbuilding becomes an addition rather than negation to the work.’ Rebuilding layer upon layer, the fragments are reassembled into sculptural tapestries. For Jaouda, this process of material construction and deconstruction mirrors the rooting and uprooting of the self within her migratory existence. As she elaborates: ‘cultural identity is formed through a constant process of becoming.’ Jaouda’s large-scale installation at The Douglas Hyde takes inspiration from the ‘Khayamiya’, an intricately patterned textile that is created through the ancient craft of appliqué and applied to the interior of tents. Functioning as both ornament and shelter, the ‘Khayamiya’ tent often serves as a temporary ‘third space’, erected within Cairo’s dense urban areas for moments of gathering, such as funerals, Ramadan rituals and Eid celebrations. For Jaouda, the intimate tent- like environment she creates within The Douglas Hyde’s monumental gallery is also a memorial space, where viewers are invited to come together, sit and reflect. Drawing on memories of botanical landscapes, sewn onto the tent are deconstructed shapes of indigenous plants and trees that have once been uprooted. Within this sheltered retreat, Jaouda constructs a space to mourn an absent landscape.

This exhibition explores the art of photography and its ability to capture reality in all its complexity.