Following a call-out for programming ideas and interventions earlier in the year, Brightening Air recently launched its €1m programme of events. The nationwide event takes place along rivers, on doorsteps and in botanic gardens, at quay sides and on islands, in Gaeltacht communities, at handball alleys, swimming baths, through your browser and phone and at arts venues nationwide.
Dubliners can look forward to the following:
Mespil in the Dark (Pan Pan): a sensitive, surreal, voyeuristic investigation into the lives of eight artists who live in the same complex of flats in Dublin which will stream online from June 16-20.
A City and a Garden (Body & Soul, Sounds from a Safe Harbour): Using only your smartphone, discover stories and songs that lie hidden in the trees and bricks of our city spaces, interwoven with narratives and soundscapes guiding you along a Cork city street or the National Botanic Gardens. Some of Ireland’s most exciting writers and musicians have been commissioned to create four sonic experiences to make the familiar new and the everyday sublime.
The Corner of Scotsman’s Bay (Elizabeth Kilroy): A browser-based, interactive, online experience inviting you to contemplate a layering and compression of time, space and place as you explore a visual, art-based interpretation of the former Dun Laoghaire baths.
Woman In The Machine (VISUAL/Carlow Arts Festival): Woman In The Machine will unfold through film, exhibitions, sound works, light installations, digital native events, a 360 virtual exhibition space, performances, talks and community engagement projects created in response to Carlow’s landmark former Braun site, and inspired by the film about female pioneers in sound Sisters With Transistors by Lisa Rovner and women working at the intersections of art, science and digital media.
Light Ballet (Culture Works): A light installation floating down the River Shannon over eight days.
Wexford Blue Whale (Wexford Arts Centre/Helen McLean): Since 1857, pottery fragments from a shipwreck bound for Savannah, Georgia have washed ashore on beaches across Wexford. These fragments, or chainies, will be used to create a new, permanent mosaic artwork at Wexford Quay.
Brightening Air runs from June 11-20.
