This Must Be The Place is a new series of public lectures that takes its title from the 1983 Talking Heads song, a song that was unusual in their catalogue as a love song to place and home. The talks series broadly looks at how contemporary artists have used site and location as frameworks for research, installation and theme. Talks are live and in person and held in the RHA Friends Room on Thursday evenings. The series will feature artist talks by Ciara Roche, Fiona Whelan, Dominique Crowley, Alan James Burns and Michelle Malone and will continue in 2023.
This is the second of a series of talks, hosted in person in the RHA Friends room on Thursday evenings at 5.30 pm during October and November.
Artist bio:
Fiona Whelan is a Dublin based artist, writer and lecturer at NCAD. Her arts practice is committed to exploring and responding to systemic power relations and inequalities through long-term cross-sectoral collaborations with diverse individuals, groups and organisations. These processes typically manifest as text-based, visual, performative and dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are exposed and interrogated. Current projects include What Does He Need? with Brokentalkers, Rialto Youth Project and a Dublin city network of organisations, co-producing the What Does He Need? exhibition and audio piece (IMMA, 2022), public poster project (Dublin city, 2021; The LAB, 2020) and Stevie (2020). And Multi-Story – Creative Engagement for Housing Change, a collaboration with Housing Action Now and artist Feidlim Cannon. Multi-Story Act 1: The Apology was presented online in Seanad Éireann and Butler Gallery in 2022. Fiona’s writing focuses on the complex relationality, labour and ethical challenges of collaborative arts practice, and is featured in multiple journals and publications. Books include Freedom? (co-written with Kevin Ryan as ‘Two Fuse’, Cork University Press, 2018) and a critical memoir TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation (2014).
Image credit: Fiona Whelan, What Does He Need?, Brokentalkers & Rialto Youth Project in partnership with The LAB Gallery, Dublin city, 2021, Photo by Louis Haugh.