Love, Rage & Solidarity

Love, Rage & Solidarity is a solo exhibition by Treasa O’Brien, featuring a selection of works spanning her practice as an artist and filmmaker that focus on cultures and communities of resistance. Using documentary and narrative forms, essay film, sci-fi, and DIY tactics, O’Brien investigates the potential of video and filmmaking as both an artist and an activist. The works explore (de)colonialism, social politics, climate change and migration, with an intersectional, queer, and feminist approach. Many of the works explore their own making as part of the work and challenge ideas of authorship and collaboration.

As well as video installation and film, the exhibition features a wide range of materials, objects, photography, and text works that form part of a wider body of ideas and research, connecting O’Brien’s creative practice with her practice of activism. While many of the films have been screened at festivals, cinemas, and social centres internationally, they have never before been viewed together in a gallery installation setting.

New works created in 2024/2025 include “Ná Géill Is Tú Beo,” an immersive installation with a soundscape by electronic keener and musician RÓIS, featuring Breda Larkin, Laura Lavelle, Growler, and many of Ireland’s taboo-breaking performance artists; and “Understory,” a surreal exploration of a post-human world shot in Connemara, premiering with a live score in collaboration with Amelian Donegan and Philip Fogarty as part of the opening event on 23rd May at 6 p.m.

The exhibition also features O’Brien’s invitation to the public to participate in events and discussions in the gallery’s “Room of Encounters”—a social space for conversation—as well as to bring offerings to her “May Altar Plus”: a shrine to feminine and non-binary folk icons, featuring offerings of nature’s bounty to Mary, Brigid, The Morrigan, Anu, and Sheela na Gig.

EVENT SERIES
A series of free events will take place throughout the duration of the exhibition

Friday 23 May 6pm Opening reception with live performance at 7pm
47 Dominick Street

Saturday 24 May 7pm ‘Eat Your Children’ Screening
Galway Arts Centre | Nuns Island Theatre

Tuesday 27 May 7pm ‘Town of Strangers’ Screening
Galway Arts Centre | Nuns Island Theatre

Thursday 29 May 6pm Súgán Rope-making workshop and accompanying exhibition tour with Róisín Doherty and Treasa O’Brien
47 Dominick Street

Thursday 05 June 6pm ‘Cinema Intent’ Screening and Artist’s Talk with Kate McSharry in conversation with Treasa O’Brien
47 Dominick Street

90 mins of short films made with asylum seekers, pro-choice activists, and grassroots organisers
Followed by discussion

Thursday 12 June 6-8pm ‘Body // Body’ Workshop with Kate McSharry and Treasa O’Brien
47 Dominick Street

Figure drawing in response to Love, Rage & Solidarity
Participants will take turns posing in groups for one another activating tableaus of protest and solidarity using drums and placards. Drawings of group consensual platonic touch ‘cuddle puddle’ will be facilitated in the ‘Ná Géill Is Tú Beo/ Never Give Up While You Are Alive’ room.
Materials provided or bring your own

Friday 13 & 20 June 10:15-11.15am Silent Disco: ‘If I Can’t Dance…’, led by Michelle
47 Dominick Street

The maxim ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of the Revolution’ is attributed to anarchist activist and philosopher Emma Goldman. Silent Disco is a grassroots horizontal DIY collective who organise pop up dances usually in outdoor locations around Galway.

On these two Friday mornings, participants are invited to dance to protest and political tunes, to which we can wiggle our bodies, and mosh our hair. The set will feature choons by Palestinian, Irish and international independent bands and singers. Headsets will be provided. As well as what we are fighting against, this collective dance offers us a chance to reflect – with our bodies as well as our minds, on what we are fighting for.

Gilles Deleuze said: “Power demands sad bodies. Power needs sadness because it can dominate it. Joy, in consequence, is resistance, because joy doesn’t give up. Joy as a life force leads us in places where sadness never can”.

And George Clinton of Funkadelic says: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

Protest and political music playlist
Silent dance, collective expression

Friday 13 June 11:30am-12:30pm Co-opoly and other board games, led by Treasa O’Brien
47 Dominick Street

Co-opoly is a game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everyone loses.

All players are on the same team and work together to start a cooperative business or organisation and compete against the Point Bank.

Learn and Practice skills needed to run a co-operative. Make tough choices and put your teamwork to the test.

Co-opoly is for 3-6 players age 10 and up and it takes 60min to play. Created by the TESA collective. Thanks to Fiona Woods for the loan of the game. The first 6 people to arrive can play co-opoly. Chess and backgammon also available. The game is left in the ‘Room for Encounters’ and can be played any time by a group of people, during the opening hours of the Arts Centre.

Sunday 15 & 22 June 2-4pm Songs of Resistance, led by Donal McConnon
47 Dominick Street

Community singing from the Activist’s Songbook

Thursday 19 June 6pm ‘Spirit of Shuhada Street’ Screening and Songs
47 Dominick Street

Documentary with imagined utopian scenes and discussion of Shuhada Street closure aka Apartheid Street in the old city of Al Khalil / Hebron in West bank, Palestine. Features interviews with activist Issa Amro (currently under arrest), artist Hanadi Shabaneh, settlers and ex-residents of the street. Made in collaboration with Youth Against Settlements.

Q&A with director Treasa O’Brien and activist and ex-Hebron resident Rana Abushkhaidem

Followed by Singing session

TREASA O’BRIEN (she/her) is a mother, visual artist, filmmaker and writer.  

She is inspired by grassroots movements, social politics, psychology and philosophy as well as art, literature and cinema. Thematically, her work explores cultural and personal memory, ecology, decolonialism, class struggle, migration, identity, and place. She often employs humour, reflexivity and surreality in her work, and blurs the lines between social relational artist, auteur artist and activist. Her film works explore fiction, documentary, and artist’s moving image, and she is most interested when those distinctions collapse. 

Her work employs various media including sculpture, drawing, photography, participative work, sound, video and film.  She has made several short films and three feature-length films including Town of Strangers, funded by The Arts Council, and executive produced by Oscar-nominee Joshua Oppenheimer.  Town of Strangers was released in UK cinemas in 2023 and received 4**** reviews in The Guardian and the Irish Times, and was named one of the best films of 2023 by The Guardian. She is currently working on a film about The Wild Geeze, a taboo breaking queer-feminist cabaret duo, focused on themes of body positivity, sexuality, eco-feminism, grief and mental health.  

Her films and art projects have been shown internationally in festivals, galleries, and social centres, and bought for broadcast. She has worked on productions for Channel 4, BBC4, and the United Nations. She has a degree in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art & Design, a Masters in Fiction Directing and a Ph.D. in Filmmaking by Practice. She has taught film and art at UCL, Goldsmiths, University of Westminster, NUIG, LSAD, UG and ATU Galway. Much of her formal education was undone when she was a participant of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School.  

Treasa’s work has been supported by Screen Ireland, The Arts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council and The Goethe Institute, and by so many friends, family and strangers along the way. She lives with her little one in Galway near the woods and the sea and community.  

www.treasaobrien.org

This exhibition has been supported by: The Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Art Project award 2024,  Interface Inagh Artist’s Residency Award 2024  The Galway City Council Platform 31 Artists Award 2022,  Screen Ireland