Still, We Gather

Galway Arts Centre is delighted to announce our final exhibition of the year, Still, We Gather, opening 12 December 2025 and running until 8 February 2026.

Still, We Gather brings together artists working across a wide range of mediums to celebrate the social and political potential of coming together, recognising gathering as a practice of care, joy, protest and collective imagination. 

Developed through an open call, the exhibition brings together a constellation of contemporary Irish artists whose practices emerge from layered geographies and diverse lived experiences and whose works explore how forms of connection and resistance are sustained and reimagined across borders, cultures and times. 

Solidarity as both method and theme threads through the exhibition, with many works developed through collaborations, collectives, and socially engaged projects that foreground processes of shared authorship, dialogue, and co-creation. Drawing from indigenous knowledge systems, memory work, collaborative research, and participatory methodologies, artworks across the exhibition inquire into how culture, land, and language are carried forward or lost, how communities sustain connection in a moment marked by deepening political tensions, and how gentle acts of collective care can counter fragmentation. 

Reflections on the erosion of ecologies and languages, the fragility of social infrastructures, such as housing and care, and the deepening uncertainty facing younger generations frame Ireland’s present within international histories of struggle and resistance.

Still, We Gather invites a deeper engagement with the political, social, and environmental forces that shape this moment, highlighting the ways artists continue to pose alternatives to persistent cycles of extraction, displacement and forgetting by creating space for how we might imagine and build different futures together.

Exhibition Artists
Dervla Baker, Marilyn Lennon & Andy Ingamells
Niamh Barry
Ceara Conway
Róisín Doherty
Stephen Doyle & FeliSpeaks
Dún Emer Eastside Collective with Áine Phillips
Emma Finn
Kevin Gaynor
Austin Ivers
Vanessa Jordan
Ciara Lee
Christine Mackey
Manal Mahamid
Samir Mahmood
Claire McLaughlin
Johnny McMahon
Fiyin Oluokun
Áine O’Hara
Lily O’Shea
Venus Patel
Katherine Sankey
Lee Welch

With screenings, discussions, performances and workshops by :
Susan Thomson
Leah Hilliard
PATHOS Collective
Brain Crusher & Kin Games Art collective
Fite Fuaite Performance Collective with guest artists
David Sherry 

Image: Calling the Bird Ancestors (2025), Dervla Baker, Marilyn Lennon & Andy Ingamells