Audience Reaction to Exhibitions at GIAF Festival Gallery

Audience reaction to Ana Maria Pacheco's Dark Night of the Soul and Ailbhe Ni Bhrian's Inscriptions at the GIAF Festival Gallery as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2017.

Ana Maria Pacheco is a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was born in Brazil in 1943 and has lived in England since 1973. The first non–European associate artist of the National Gallery, London, Pacheco’s nineteen figure installation Dark Night of the Soul was inspired by her time in residence there.

Ana Maria Pacheco looks fearlessly into the dark heart of humanity and seeks out the light. This powerful solo exhibition by the Brazilian–born artist, presented as part of GIAF 17, features major works that have rightly brought her international critical and popular acclaim.

Pacheco encourages the viewer to get close to her figures and exploits the respective scale of each to challenge the audience’s physical and moral equilibrium. Her work deals with issues of control and the exercise of power, drawing upon the tensions between the old world of Europe and the new world of her Brazilian birth and looks unflinchingly upon the perilous world we encounter.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is a Cork–based artist who works with film and photography.

The photographic series Inscriptions combines imagery from a number of different sources, referencing museum artefacts, expansive landscapes and studio debris.

The work, also presented as part of GIAF 17, takes its starting point from a text by Samuel Quiccheberg entitled Inscriptions of the Immense Theatre. This is the earliest published text on museology and outlines the methods for the collection and categorisation of objects, images and artefacts from across the world.