One of our favourite creative spaces is kicking off its late early 2025 program with Skin / Deep, a superb exhibition that brings together a group of young photographers to challenge artistic perspectives on the body in contemporary Irish photography and lens-based media. The featured artists take an expanded view of the social, psychological, and material realities of embodiment – of being a ‘body’ in the world.
Through their individual practices, they call into question many fundamental assumptions about how gender, sexuality, and selfhood are manifested in and through the body. As an exhibition, Skin / Deep argues for a reconsideration of those bodily experiences that have long been regarded as marginal, and for the means to address them.
Exhibition curator Darren Campion says that “Skin / Deep is an exhibition about the different ways people experience and understand their bodies, which is determined largely by the society we live in. The artists in the exhibition use their own lived experiences to call into question many of the social assumptions we have around bodies, to show there is no real norm, no ideal, just different ways of being.”
16mm film transferred to digital, 2023
One of the artists – Pradeep Mahadeshwar – says that “Living in contemporary Ireland that claims to offer a ‘safe space’ for LGBTQIA+ individuals, and for those who were not born in Ireland and do not have the ‘Irishness’ body aesthetics, it is often a struggle for displaced queer voices like mine to be heard.
The set sexual stereotypes of attractiveness and desirability which are based on skin colour, have forced me to navigate the ‘safe space’ in isolation and have altered my art practice profoundly. The willingness of Skin / Deep: Perspectives on the Body to highlight diverse bodies in Ireland aligns with my desire to challenge the notions of what is considered a ‘normal Irish citizen,’ ‘an Irish Queer,’ and ‘an Irish Artist.’ This emphasis highlights the layered complexities of belonging and visibility and my ongoing art project, ‘New Irish Queerness.'”
Using their own experiences, the artists in this exhibition present ways of thinking about the intersections of identity, the body and the self that have only recently begun to be acknowledged in Irish society. They show how different bodily experiences – queer, trans, sick, maternal, migrant – can increasingly claim space in a culture that at one time would have rendered them largely silent and invisible.
The exhibition also functions as a survey of contemporary photographic practices, with the featured artists embracing approaches that push the boundaries of their medium. For better or worse, photography and digital technology have profoundly altered the way we encounter both our own bodies and those of other people, from social media and advertising to dating profiles and hook-up apps.
Yet, for the artists in this exhibition, photography and related media also serve to re-centre lived experiences of the body, reflecting on essential, increasingly urgent, questions about what it means to be human.
Featured artists:
Shia Conlon, Jane Cummins, Phelim Hoey, Pradeep Mahadeshwar, Pauline Rowan, Vera Ryklova, Pádraig Spillane, Brian Teeling, and Nazli Yildirim.
Skin / Deep: Perspectives On The Body runs at Photo Museum Ireland until February 9th 2025
Curated by Darren Campion
Photo Museum Ireland, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, D02 X406
