Léann Herlihy, i’d rather be a fag than be your bird (2022)
i’d rather be a fag than be your bird (2022) by Léann Herlihy is a live reading with an array of 35mm slides which uses image description and direct quotes that document the shifting, expanding and rupturing ways that trans, non-binary and gender non-confirming people reclaim social perceptions whilst navigating the public sphere. Disrupting the discrepancies in essentialist theories of gender, i’d rather be a fag than be your bird socially critiques the dichotomised structure of Otherness in a heteronormative society. Transgressing beyond ‘Other’ as another tick-box option to choose from, this body of work calls for the abolishment of colonial and capitalist coercive mechanisms of segregation.

i’d rather be a fag than be your bird was commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[. The first iteration of this work was performed whilst lounging on a pile of plush velvet pew cushions in St Eanswythe’s Church, Folkestone in April 2022 for ]performance s p a c e[ day of performance: TIDINGS. The work has since travelled to events such as TRANSFAG: a Celebration and a Manifesto at Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest in London.

i’d rather be a fag than be your bird was acquired by the Irish Arts Council and added to their Collection in 2022.

Sam Keogh, The Unicorn Surrenders To A Maiden Cartoon (2024)
The Unicorn Surrenders To A Maiden Cartoon is an installation of collage, sculpture and performance by Sam Keogh which critically engages depictions of pre-modern Europe in both tapestries and mass media genre fantasy. The work draws on The Unicorn Surrenders To A Maiden, a badly damaged 16th Century Flemish tapestry that survives today in two fragments and hangs in the Met Cloisters as part of a famous series of tapestries known as The Hunt of the Unicorn. At the time of the French Revolution, the original tapestries were owned by members of the French Nobility. Such artifacts were often expropriated or destroyed in acts of iconoclasm against the Ancient Régime, which is likely why only fragments of the tapestry remain. The surviving remnants are pockmarked by areas of damage and repair, forming a material index of revolutionary events, each one a fraying, tearing, and patching up of Europe’s historical narrative.

In The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden Cartoon, the fantastic scenes depicted in the tapestry is re-made as a ‘cartoon’, or 1:1 scale working drawing made for the production of a tapestry. Here, the rarefied hortus conclusus of the Unicorn is invaded by monstrous entities. Their forms are Frankensteined together with limbs, heads, faces and personal effects from an array of sources. Some hands hold scissors or craft knives, suggesting that they have collaged themselves together before cutting and pasting themselves into the world of the tapestries, exploiting its sutured wounds as entry points. Limbs are multiplied and entangled, and faces are made up from folded, torn, and recomposed layers of background and foreground. It’s difficult to tell where distinct bodies begin and end or whether they are destroying or building the world they inhabit.

On the night of the 26 July, Keogh activates this work with a live performance which brings its characters into dialogue. A maiden sits in a walled garden awaiting the arrival of a unicorn when she is confronted by Meg Mucklebones, the liminal swamp-being from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’ (1985). As Keogh unfolds the work’s physical elements, the work’s characters metamorphose whilst arguing about knots; the myth of Europa; and the history of the EU flag.

This work was originally shown in Atletika gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania – a site which paradoxically sits at both the border and the centre of Europe. The Unicorn Surrenders To A Maiden Cartoon was made with the support of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association David Dale Gallery, Creative Scotland, The Arts Council of Ireland, and Culture Ireland.

Bea McMahon, Background (2025)
Back for a second iteration, Background is a performance by artist Bea McMahon, choreographer Artémise Ploegaerts, and writer Díc Walsh.

The performance focuses on things as they separate from their background and turn into coherent, distinguishable and countable subjects that can then take part in the plot. It is like the gap between when you don’t know something and then after a little while you do know it. It was originally conceived in relation to McMahon’s work in the exhibition GOD in the Complex, Dublin 2024.

This restaging has an additional plot twist, situating the performance as the backdrop to one episode of a new TV show titled Cricket. Conceived as a series and created in the genre of cringe tragedy, Cricket is devised to be performed and shot by the artist and her crew of collaborating writers, actors, camera operators and producers. Their chimeric appearances on and off-stage will colour and distort the original performance, while adding to the layers of background material.

Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Dublin City Council, Kunstverein Aughrim and the Arts Council.

Venus Patel, Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse (2023 – 2025)
Venus Patel is an artist living in Dublin, born in Los Angeles, with Indian and Latin American heritage. She makes films informed by her lived experience of being bothered due to the way she expresses her identity, namely as a transfemme person of colour. Her works reference narratives of the body and performativity; self-representation and the creation of a public persona; gender-based violence; and traditions of protest associated with queer rights. They blur the boundaries between the real and the fantastical, and employ irony, absurdity and abjection to critique society’s dominant value systems.

For Terrapolis, Patel takes on the role of compère, performing live as Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse, the protagonist in her film installation Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse (2023), a work that is currently featured within the exhibition Staying with the Trouble. This work mocks the documentary form to examine social and sexual conformity. The film follows the character named Daisy (played by Patel), who emigrates from Texas to Ireland after being rejected by her family. Once arrived, Daisy encounters a goddess on a mountaintop who implores her to free the world from the evils of heteronormativity before the impending apocalypse. Dressed in a cowboy hat and a white dress and carrying a pink megaphone, Daisy preaches across various locations in Dublin, spreading the goddess’s message and accumulating a group of followers. Through parody, the film comments on the cult of the leader prevalent in organised faiths, particularly Christianity.

Eoghan Ryan, Circle A (2024)
If your constantly stuck in the same drama that never ends, it’s not even tragedy. It’s not a good piece of art, it’s just a bad situation!

Anarchy can be affirmed as a response to order. As such, the performance Circle A by Eoghan Ryan puts full emphasis on the temporality of the word ‘response’. In other words, trying your hardest to undo a system. Three performers wearing tap shoes, work within the constraints of the Circle A symbol sprayed to the floor. They are influenced by a live drummer and a deconstructed sound score composed of evocative stems that come together and fall apart. The performers develop upon a tight set of actions. These are accompanied by lesser and greater degrees of agency, so how these actions interrelate in a system for a live audience becomes somewhat unpredictable. That’s why they need to experiment, for 45 minutes, eliminating codification from all but one emergent, anticipatory level.

Concept: Eoghan Ryan
With Amina Szecsödy, Tomislav Feller and Boris Charrion
Drummer: Sarah Grimes
Originally commissioned by Live Works at Centrale Fies. Supported by Mondriaan Fonds Project Grant.

Léann Herlihy (they/them) is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin.

Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploys alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Rigorously and creatively critiquing the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society, Léann actively transgresses beyond ‘Other’ as another tick-box option to choose from and moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.

Léann Herlihy is a lecturer in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. They are the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award [2022], Visual Arts Bursary [2021, 2023, 2024] & Project Award [2024]. Select solo exhibitions include the middle of nowhere, Project Arts Centre, Dublin [2022]; Beyond Survival School Bus, Dublin Fringe Festival [2022]. Select group shows include pass the baton, Galway Arts Centre [2025]; Dreamtime Ireland, VISUAL Carlow [2025]; Precarious Joys, Toronto Biennial of Art [2024]; The Salvage Agency, TULCA [2024]; The Gleaners Society, 40th EVA International [2023]; Reflex Blue, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios [2023]. They are a Member Studio Artist at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios [2024-27].

Sam Keogh works across drawing, sculpture, collage, writing and video – strands that combine as sprawling installations which often host performances. In his performances, Keogh interacts with the work’s physical elements whilst speaking as one or more characters who try and often fail to present a theory, an anecdote or an historical event. In this fractured struggle with language, drawing and sculpture are variously used as mnemonic device, prop or avatar. Here, the work’s physical, gestural and linguistic materials combine to create associative cartographies of the present.

Sam Keogh received an MFA from Goldsmiths, London in 2014 and completed the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam in 2017. His work has notably been exhibited at the Lagos Biennial (2024); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); the 15th Lyon Biennial (2019); Eva International, Limerick (2018); Glasgow International (2018); and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015). The works from The Unicorn Tapestry Cartoons presented here have been shown at Atelika Gallery, Vilnius (2024); ADA, Rome (2024); Museum Rijkswijk, The Netherlands (2024); St.Chads, London (2024); Well Projects, Margate (2024); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2023); and Primary, Nottingham (2023).

Bea McMahon uses many different media including sculpture, performance, song, dance, moving image and installation, often working in collaboration with others. Trained in mathematics and mathematical physics, she navigates through conceptions of reality and their corresponding appearances in the outside world. Recent collaborations include Cricket, a TV series shot in various locations including Treignac Projet and Kunstverein Aughrim (ongoing); Another Shot at Love, a romantic comedy commissioned for the 40th EVA biennale in Limerick, 2023; live performance with lip-synching pop group Dina from Egypt in I’ll be your Mirror, Hugh Lane Gallery, 2023 and pop-video-smash-hits magazine launch at Framerframed, Amsterdam 2024.

Recent exhibitions include God, a two-person exhibition with Conor McFeely, The Complex, Dublin; Animal Farm, Paper Biennale, Museum Rijkswijk, The Hague, 2024; Sequins, with Maaike Schoorel at Shimmer, Rotterdam, 2023; Floppy Forest at Treignac Projet, 2021; and group shows Ad Ampio Respira, Artopia Gallery, Milan 2022 and Under Bat Hill at W139, Amsterdam 2021.

Artémise Ploegaerts is a choreographer and performance artist, blending movement, theatre, and video. Her work has been featured at Dansmakers Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum, and KLAP Marseille.

Díc Walsh creates experimental, author-driven theater. A former architect, his work includes Drainage Scheme (Abbey Theatre, Dublin) and Oneday (Iontas Theatre).

Venus Patel is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist working in visual arts, film, and performance. Born in Los Angeles, she graduated from TU Dublin in 2022 with a BA Honours in Fine Arts. Her practice utilises a unique blend of humour, absurdity, and abjection to create multi-faceted work that speaks on subject matter such as hate crimes, religious guilt, and Queer POC bodily suppression. Solo exhibitions include: “Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse” (Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, 2024) and “Monsters of the Apocalypse” (Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2023). Selected group exhibitions include: “In the Press” (Hypha Studios, London, 2025), “Power of Us” (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 2024), and “The Queeratorial” (Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 2023). She is a recipient of the RDS Taylor Art Award (2022), Arts Council Bursary Award (2024), and Romilly Walton Masters Award (2023). Her film work has been screened in festivals across Europe and the US.

Eoghan Ryan works across moving image, installation, performance, puppetry and collage. Selected shows, performances and screenings have taken place at IMMA (IE), Rencontres Internationales (FR/DE) Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT), The Complex (IE) Haus for Media Art Oldenburg(DE), Live Works, Centrale Fies (IT), BFI London Film Festival and ICA London (UK), BusanBiennale 2022 (KR) International Film Festival, Rotterdam (NL), Visio (IT) Kunstverein Freiburg (DE) South London Gallery (UK) and Serralves Museum (PR) amongst others. Ryan completed his MFA at Goldsmiths in 2013, attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2019–2021), participated in the Visio program for moving image (2021) and received the Grant of the Stiftung Niedersachsen for Media Art 2024. He is currently developing a guest commision for EVA 2025.