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, queer and trans rights, and 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 “The Wild Geeze,” 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.

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