Things To Do: Visit limbo, dwell on furniture, appreciate a translator, ponder the port

Our Picks

Our recommendations – no sponsored content, or adverts, just stuff we like.

The Dolldrums

Fresh from making her feature-length debut in Donncha Gilmore’s film Girls & Boys only a few weeks ago, actress Liath Hannon is back once again.

She is over at the Smock Alley Theatre this week for a brief run of her new play The Dolldrums, which is produced by the Jaxbanded arts collective, and is written by Hannon herself.

Described as a modern parable “about the truths we deny and the perceptions we embrace”, The Dolldrums follows Lily Burke, a character who “will do anything to be a real girl. Even if it kills her.”

Lily has been murdered by her subconscious self, Lilith, and is trapped in Dolldrums, a purgatorial zone, where she must reflect on a life shaped by sex, lies and self-sacrifice.

There are still tickets available for the shows this evening and tomorrow (Thursday and Friday, 6 and 7 November). You can purchase those here.

Then, on Saturday night, Jaxbanded and Smock Alley will be hosting a special fundraiser for the trans short film Hostile Architecture, which is directed by Liadán Roche, with whom Hannon collaborated with for Roche’s previous film Terratoma.

This post-show club-night will follow the final (sold-out) performance of The Dolldrums, and will feature audio-visual installations, a few speeches and music.

Tickets for the fundraiser are available here.

And finally, if you haven't had a chance to see Girls & Boys, the Irish Film Institute has another screening planned for 21 November, which you can book here.

Lumen

This evening TØN Gallery in Temple Bar will be launching Lumen, a new exhibition of works by furniture designer Gildas O’Laoire and artist Mark Redden. Lumen will combine contemporary art and craft, such as painting, sculpture, design and furniture which expresses “the solace of living with art and the luminous effect art has on life”.

Between now and 2 January, TØN will be turned into a living room by O’Laoire and Redden, whose creative paths have crossed a few times over the years, most notably when they both built two currach boats at East Wall Water Sports Centre in 2014, which were launched by Michael D. Higgins.

Lumen is being opened by TØN as part of Dublin Gallery Weekend, which begins today and continues until Sunday, 9 November. This four-day celebration of art and creativity will see exhibitions from hundreds of contemporary artists, guided gallery trails, public art tours, talks, workshops and art books fairs being held across the city.

To see what else is coming up, visit the Dublin Gallery Weekend website here.

BETA Festival

BETA, the art and technology festival, is back with its third edition beginning this Friday.

Launched back in 2023, BETA showcases Ireland’s research and artistic communities by using exhibitions, conferences and workshops to engage with how emerging technologies impact society.

The festival, which will continue until 23 November, is based primarily around the Digital Hub. And starting tomorrow, its Digital Depot will be hosting a two-day conference that examines subjects like responsible usage of artificial intelligence in the cultural sector, hydroacoustics, and how viral content can contaminate information ecosystems.

On Saturday, as part of this conference, author Joanna Walsh will be launching her new book Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters. Joining Walsh to discuss her philosophical history of the internet is Rachel O’Dwyer, the author of Tokens, which charts the rise of cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens and platform capitalism.

Meanwhile, from tomorrow, on the opposite side of the city, the Substation in Dublin Port will be hosting a new group exhibition, Undercurrent: As Below, So Above for the duration of the festival. Bridging together the work of artists Kat Austen, Lauren Moffatt and Siobhán McDonald, the show will look at and reflect on ports as “interdisciplinary liminal spaces for reimagining our entanglements with water, technology, and ecology”.

Undercurrent: As Below, So Above will be open to the public until 23 November from Wednesday to Sunday between 2 and 6pm.

For more information on BETA’s line-up, and to book a seat at its conferences, visit the festival website here.

The Translator’s Alchemy/Ailceimic an Aistritheora

IMRAM, the Irish literature festival, is also returning this week, with a programme of multi-media literary projects, musical shows, gala poetry readings and a special hip-hop as Gaeilge night scheduled over the course of the month.

To kick things off on Saturday, the festival has organised, in association with the Dublin Book Festival, a special round-table discussion on literary translation. The Translator’s Alchemy examines the art of translation as an alchemical act, designed to evoke the same emotional response and cultural resonances in the target languages as in the original text.

Led by Michael Cronin, this talk will feature: Antain Mac Lochlainn, the translator into Irish of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Máirín Nic Con Iomaire, the director of translation programmes in the School of Celtic Studies at Maynooth University; and Mícheál Ó hAodha, poet, lecturer, historian and literary translator.

Ailceimic an Aistritheora will be held at The Chapel in the Irish Museum of Modern Art at 2.30pm on Saturday, 8 November.

Admission is free, and tickets can be reserved here.

Sweety Barrett

The Irish Film Institute is pulling up a real forgotten gem for this month’s From The Vaults feature. On Tuesday evening, they will be screening Stephen Bradley’s 1998 film Sweety Barrett.

Likened to the Billy Bob Thornton-led 1996 drama Sling Blade, Sweety Barrett stars Brendan Gleeson as the titular Sweety Barrett, a man with an intellectual disability, who has arrived in Dockery, a seedy fictitious port town, to find work after he recently lost his job in a travelling circus.

As Barrett settles into life, befriending a local woman, played by Lynda Steadman, he becomes embroiled in a smuggling operation that unleashes a spiral of dangerous and unexpected events.

Sweety Barrett was Bradley’s directorial debut, before he later went on to make Fran: The Man, which came out earlier this year, as well as 2005’s zombie comedy Boy Eats Girl, featuring singer Samantha Mumba in the lead role.

Shot in Balbriggan, Bradley’s debut is also noteworthy for its stellar cast, which includes Liam Cunningham, Andrew Scott, Brendan O’Carroll and a young Cillian Murphy in his debut feature-length role, five years before he and Gleeson would pair up again for 28 Days Later.

The screening is at 6.20pm on Tuesday, 11 November, and will be introduced by Bradley.

Tickets are available here.

Advert

Click here for more info!

Noticeboard

Listings of events submitted by readers – you can submit yours for next week's newsletter, via this form.

"Who do THEY think you are?" Quiz Night

Think you know what the Internet knows about you? It’s time to find out.

On Monday, the ADAPT Centre will be hosting a table quiz at Lucky’s on Meath Street where your knowledge of the hidden world of online tracking is put to the test.

The quiz starts at 7pm on 10 November, and you can reserve a spot here.

Recreating Courbet's The Origin of the World

On Sunday, 16 November, Gallery X on Hume Street will be hosting a guided class for artists to recreate Gustave Courbet’s influential and scandalous 1866 painting The Origin of the World.

The class, which is open to artists of all levels of experience, will be led by artists and teacher Lady Blue Dream, with some lessons on technique and colour palette, as well as a few stories about the painting itself.

Drinks will be served, and all works will be exhibited in Gallery X’s end of year exhibition from 15 to 19 December.

For more information, contact Lady Blue Dream at thenakedkink@gmail.com.

Wife after Death by Eric Chappell

This evening, Wife After Death, a new play by Eric Chappel, will be opening up at Donabate Parish Hall.

Running until Saturday 8 November, the play is set on the day of the funeral of comedian, TV personality and national treasure Dave Thursby as a mystery female guest arrives and upsets the proceedings with a devastating announcement.

Wife After Death will be on in the Donabate Parish Hall at 8pm from 6-8 November.

Tickets are available here.

Seeing Ourselves

On 20 November, Seeing Ourselves, a new exhibition by artist Doru Ivan, is opening at Reds Gallery on Dawson Street.

Seeing Ourselves showcases a selection of Ivan’s oil paintings, which explore the complexities of human identity and emotion, and bridges the visible and invisible to capture fleeting sensations, memories and unspoken moments.

The show will continue until Wednesday, 26 November.