Fiona Whelan is a Dublin based artist and writer. Her collaborative art practice, in partnership with Rialto Youth Project, explores and responds to systemic inequality through durational intergenerational projects examining complex power relations at a personal, community and societal level. Staged in community sites and contemporary art venues, public manifestations are typically polyvocal and dialogical in nature, intending to expose, challenge and reconfigure systemic power relations while coproducing another form of relational power through collaboration.
Previous work in collaboration with Rialto Youth Project includes: The Day in Question (IMMA, 2009), Policing Dialogues (The LAB, 2010) and Natural History of Hope (with Brokentalkers, Project Arts Centre, 2016). Publications include: TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation (2014) and Freedom? (Two Fuse, Cork University Press, 2018).
March – June 2019
Fiona Whelan is on an invited residency providing studio space supporting a new inter-generational project What Does He Need? (Fiona Whelan, Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project). In a time when a spotlight is being shone on many patriarchal structures and misogynistic cultures nationally and internationally, this project is an urgent critical enquiry into the formation of boys’ and men’s identities, considering how forms of masculinity are cultivated and subsequently experienced in a boy’s life.