Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh: Performance & Q&A

Join us for an afternoon of events with artist Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh on Saturday, 10 January 2026, celebrating his current exhibition Vague Symptom Clinic. The programme will feature a live performance followed by an in-conversation with Isobel Harbison.

At 2.30pm, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh will present a 30-minute performance in the gallery, expanding on the themes of his solo exhibition. The work explores Ireland’s legacies of colonialism, partition, and state violence, and their relationship to intergenerational trauma and inherited chronic illness.

The performance will be followed by a discussion between Ciarán and Isobel Harbison in The Cube from 3.30pm.

Teas and coffees will be served from 3.00pm. All are welcome.

Isobel Harbison is an Irish art historian and writer based in London. She is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and writes widely on contemporary art, film and literature for publications including Art Review, Frieze, The Financial Times, London Review of Books and Tolka. She is the author of Performing Image (MIT Press, 2019), which examines performance and moving image in relation to media and politics. Her second book is forthcoming with MUP. She has delivered talks and lectures at institutions such as Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where she is currently a research associate developing a history of film and moving image in the north of Ireland from 1968 called ‘Recording History’.

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working with chronic illness. His mixed media practice explores the complexities that emerge between personal loss, the legacies of political violence and the affective registers of embodied experience. He is interested in combining the materialities of artisanal craft objects with industrial manufacturing processes to create a specific language of sculptural works. Collaborations (often through informal economies), include working with artisans in the Limousin; a day care centre in Derry; and an angling association in Donegal – exploring themes of labour, sickness and care. The collaborations create a kind of ‘primary public’ allowing the work to extend outwards through networks and ‘interest groups’, creating the conditions of meaning-making.

Image by Louis Haugh.