Luan Gallery is delighted to present Apocalypse Anxieties, a multi-disciplinary group show featuring work by artists Aideen Barry, Kerry Guinan, Léann Herlihy, Tom O’Dea, Orla Punch, Christopher Steenson, and Frank Sweeney and is guest curated by Kerry Guinan.
The official opening will take place at Luan Gallery on Saturday, April 27, at 2pm with guest speaker Ian Kenneally. All are welcome to attend. The exhibition will continue until Thursday, June 27.
Apocalypse Anxieties — an exhibition at the end of the world — responds conceptually, aesthetically, and affectively to an underground “nuclear bunker” installed under Custume Barracks during the Cold War. Protected by reinforced concrete and equipped with accommodation facilities, a command centre, and an RTÉ broadcasting studio, the officially named ‘Integrated National Control Centre’ was provisionally set up to serve as the emergency operational base for the Irish Government in the case of a nuclear attack by the USSR.
Located directly across the road from the Luan Gallery, the site was in part selected for its proximity to the most powerful radio transmitter in the country, through which the government hoped to maintain communication with a nation in peril above ground.
In this exhibition, guest-curated by artist Kerry Guinan, the unused bunker symbolises the apocalyptic prospects that have shadowed the modern era and its unfettered productive ambitions. Presented in the form of an imaginary doom museum, the artworks in Apocalypse Anxieties subversively inhabit historical, present-day, and speculative artefacts, including survivalist kits, post-Earth architectural models, geological material, and Cold-War-era radios and telephones, to raise critical questions about how catastrophes are prepared for, communicated, and survived — and by whom.
Linking the existential threat of nuclear war to that of the climate crisis today, the exhibition holds space for the open expression of base survival fears at the levels of the individual, the species, and the Earth, while defending kinship and intimacy between these entities at the end of the world.
Apocalypse Anxieties will continue until Thursday, June 27. Luan Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 5pm and from 12pm to 5pm on Sundays. Admission to Luan Gallery is free, and guided tours are free to all but require advance booking.
This exhibition is supported by the Arts Council.
More information on the exhibition and upcoming events can be found at http://www.athloneartsandtourism.ie/luan-gallery/ and on Luan Gallery’s social channels.
