“The Galway team is fantastic. It’s an ace team,” said Australian artist Patricia Piccinini.
She’s not talking about the one that beat Donegal to reach the All-Ireland football final, but the Galway International Arts Festival team which brought into being the large-scale exhibition of her startling, life-sized hybrid-creature sculptures.
Piccinini is standing at the edge of a jungle off Galway’s William Street. “We’re here probably for the last time in the Festival Gallery, which will be great loss,” said festival chief executive John Crumlish, standing beside her.
It’s the opening of Galway International Arts Festival’s visual arts strand and the “jungle” is a diorama created for Piccinini’s creatures in the temporary pop-up gallery behind the city’s GPO, where thousands are expected to visit over the next two weeks of the festival.
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Queues formed to see her last exhibition in Galway. Piccinini said she and Peter Hennessy, her life and creative partner, and their children had dreamed of returning to Galway since her first festival show in 2015.
As Crumlish and festival director Paul Fahy “become increasingly grey and as we fade into the semi-darkness” of the jungle gallery, he made “a plea one more time for a visual arts place in the town”. An Post’s redevelopment plans, which include a permanent civic arts space, have been years in an interminably slow-cooker and there is still no sign of action.
Fahy first called for a visual art space when he took over as director in 2006. “Transforming space is something this festival has done for many, many years since its inception in 1978, out of necessity,” he said.
But here they are in 2024 still operating in temporary, re-purposed buildings. “And while it’s brilliant and thrilling, it’s a shame,” he added.
Arts Council director Maureen Kennelly said Piccinini’s We Travel Together explores “the complex relationship between the artificial world of humanity and the natural world that we all occupy”.
The creatures populating the wilderness gallery appear as “other”, but are also strangely familiar and underline “our responsibilities to the world and the creatures with whom we share it”.
Environmental concerns also dominate exhibitions by Bernadette Kiely and Yvonne McGuinness, around the corner in another pop-up gallery, Printworks.
The Galway International Arts Festival opened on Monday night, with a party led by Eimear Noone, LA-based film and video-game conductor and composer originally from Co Galway.
On Wednesday, she’s conducting hits of The Police with their drummer Stewart Copeland (who has just arrived in town) and an orchestra, part of a line-up at the festival’s Big Top tent that includes Kneecap, Leftfield and Annie Mac.
The opening night performance was of Reunion, a new Mark O’Rowe play with a cast including Robert Sheehan, Cathy Belton, Ian Lloyd Anderson, Catherine Walker, Venetia Bowe and Stephen Brennan. A festival co-production with Landmark, it is one of seven world premieres or commissions this year.
Others include The Map of Argentina, a play by Marina Carr, directed by Andrew Flynn, that tunnels into the complicated contours of family dynamics; two immersive theatre installations by Enda Walsh; and Unspeakable Conversations by Christian O’Reilly, which explores the right to life of disabled babies and stars disabled actors Liz Carr and Mat Fraser.
Another converted space, the University of Galway gym, hosts Duck Pond, Swan Lake re-imagined as a circus spectacular from the Australian company Circa, who wowed the city with The Pulse last year.
Following 2023′s record-breaking attendance of 400,000-plus, this year’s festival focuses on increasing accessibility, with 30 per cent of events free (including street performances next weekend), plus ISL-interpreted and captioned performances, and audio description and a touch tour of the Festival Gallery.
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