10 avenues into art and housing
Ireland is currently experiencing a chronic shortage of housing and accommodation which impacts the creation of art in a multitude of ways. Artists’ responses to this existential issue can take many forms, some of which are documented in NIVAL’s collections. The following items examine this situation in relation to the nation’s capital.
10. WAKE zine, Arthology Collective: Eileen O’Sullivan, Monika Crowley & Melissa O’Donnell
This limited edition zine is the documentation and celebration of the WAKE performance at 27 Royal Canal Bank, Dublin. Set against the backdrop of Dublin’s escalating housing crisis, WAKE combined lamentation and celebration to prompt deeper discourse around policies and their implementation, impacting artists and cultural production. Arthology is a collaborative art practice founded by Eileen O’Sullivan, Monika Crowley and Melissa O’Donnell while studying on the MFA Fine Art at NCAD Dublin in 2024-25.
9. Hotel Ballymun, Seamus Nolan
Hotel Ballymun was an art project commissioned by Breaking Ground, the per cent for art commission programme for Ballymun Regeneration Limited, and was curated by Aisling Prior. Under the guidance of artist Seamus Nolan, the fifteenth floor of Clarke Tower, one of the last remaining tower blocks in Ballymun, was transformed into a short stay hotel from 23 March to 27 April 2007 before it was demolished later that summer. During these four weeks, the rooms were booked out every night and a conference room held a variety of meetings, talks and events.
8. Con:temporary Quarters, Aoife Ward & Eve Woods
Ward and Woods have collaborated on several projects with satirical slants which aim to bring attention to the use and availability of spaces in Dublin. Con:temporary Quarters’ first project was a sold-out walking tour for Culture Night 2022: ‘A Cultural Tour of Hotels in the Liberties’. Con: temporary Quarters: The Exhibition was held in on the site of the former Tivoli Theatre on Francis Street, Dublin 8, in September 2023. The exhibition highlighted the misuse of the space, the loss of cultural space and the failure of the planning system to meet its promises.
7. New Kiosk 12077, Con:temporary Quarters
New Kiosk 12077 is an envelope-style interactive artist book with a metallic chrome reverse. This book comes primed for communication and connection with its own tin can phone attachment and call cards. Published by Substandard by Design, a subsidiary of Con:temporary Quarters by Aoife Ward and Eve Woods, this project explores alternative housing options, one solution being to live inside a decommissioned Eircom phone box. This artist book was acquired by NIVAL at the Dublin Art Book Fair 2024.
6. The Land for the People, Eimear Walshe
This workbook by Eimear Walshe highlights the relevance of nineteenth-century land conflict in the present day. The pamphlet presents a series of challenges to members Irish society through accessible exercises on themes including inheritance, displacement, community organising, and revenge. The project is a continuation of a theme in Walshe’s work which prompts re-imagining land ownership and land use in Ireland.
5. Suburban Fantastic, Chris Finnegan
Suburban Fantastic takes the reader on a journey through a remembered suburb – a playground of shifting spaces and geometries is presented here in book form. The material nature of this artist book reflects a sense of discovery and expectation. A longed-for state of child-like apprehension, where an exciting unknown waits around every corner.
4. Beyond Pebbledash and the Puzzle of Dublin, Paul Kearns and Motti Ruimy
Beyond Pebbledash was published in the autumn of 2014 in conjunction with a temporary installation of a public sculpture in Clarke Square, National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin. The installation, also titled Beyond Pebbledash, involved the erection of a ‘typical’ Dublin pebble-dash house (scale 1:1) to include a reconstructed pebble-dash façade and steel skeletal frame. At the heart of this concept, the authors pose the question: What do we really see? What are the hidden urban messages behind an Irish rural landscape littered with so called ‘ghost estates’? How do we interpret or make sense of the blended fusion of suburban sprawl?
3. TRESPASS, Aoife Desmond & Seoidín O’Sullivan
TRESPASS is a collaborative art project which combines two artists’ divergent practices. Together they investigate and intervene in disused urban space in Dublin. TRESPASS investigates the different issues around land use and ownership through documentation and performative actions. This project was initiated in Dublin in 2005 where the two artists are based and was exhibited in The LAB gallery in 2009.
2. Property Reading Group at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Niamh Darling
In response to the pervasive issues relating to property, the Douglas Hyde Gallery has hosted a reading group on the theme of ‘property’, initiated and facilitated by Niamh Darling, Provost’s Fellow in Curating. The reading group interrogates the concept of ‘property’ and its implications on housing, land, public and art spaces, considering artwork and practices that resist the confines of this ideology. The regular group meetings provide the opportunity to think together about these issues. NIVAL is grateful to Niamh Darling for sharing the full reading list with us for researchers’ access.
1. NAMACO—Mega Dreoilín, Han Hog and Donal Fullam
The 16-bit video game Mega Dreoilín is a radical reimagining of edutainment designed for the demographic of ‘Generation Rent’. Positioning itself as a revolutionary instructional manual, Mega Dreoilín allows players to learn about the bureaucratic land dominance imposed on Ireland by successive waves of colonisers, landlords and global multinationals, as well as the strategies required for collective resistance against these sinister powers.
