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Shades of Clay: Alice Rekab in Dublin, Liverpool, and Edinburgh
July 29, 2025
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
Mirrors feature frequently in Alice Rekab’s multimedia installation as a means of inviting their viewers to reflect on their own self-perceptions, and position in relation to the work and institution of display. Fragments in my Grandmother’s Dressing Room (2021), placed centrally in a new group exhibition at IMMA in Dublin, is a ‘shrine’ to the artist’s grandmother, Isatu, who was ‘evacuated’ from Sierra Leone during the civil wars in the 1990s, to the artist’s family home in Ireland. Beyond its display of domestic practices, it encourages deeper consideration of women’s particular experiences of conflicts, and perhaps their absence in political peace agreements - potential connections with the diasporas of Yugoslavia and Palestine in Ireland.
Rekab draws from their Irish, West African, and Arabic heritages to consider race, place, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Where the artist’s contemporaries like Marianne Keating look to historic political and media representations of Ireland’s transnational connections, they focus on their personal identity as a place of cultural complexity. Cultural references are made, but more subtly; a worn, brown edition of Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (1945) is slightly lifted from the plush pink carpet of their installation in Staying with the Trouble, whose own title references Donna Haraway’s formative - or ‘seminal’ - 2016 text on interspecies relations. (Encountering this gendered language is disappointing, even more so given Haraway’s particularly feminist practice, and Rekab’s identification as a non-binary artist.)
Running parallel in the building’s corridors is IMMA’s new collection display, Art as Agency, which also holds Rekab’s work at its core. The print Isatu an Ee cat (2021) was created by drawing digitally onto a composite image of family photographs and clay sculptures, which take the form of heirlooms and spiritual objects. The drawn lines act as ‘devotional mappings’ of their subject, emphasising Rekab’s respect for her grandmother and elevating her status.
This form of expression is scaled up in Let Me Show You Who I Am, a series of artworks created through workshops exploring Black and Irish legacies of community activism, with groups of individuals with personal or lived experience of migration. Co-presented with Liverpool Biennial and Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025, the works will be shown publicly on billboards across both cities. They make a particularly good home in Scotland, recalling the recent BUILDHOLLYWOOD commissions by Alberta Whittle and Jasleen Kaur, as well as earlier projects by Ingrid Pollard and Permindar Kaur in Glasgow, alongside other artists exploring learning through play in EAF 2025, like Leo Robinson.
In Liverpool, these boards take the name Bunchlann/Buncharraig, which translates from Irish Gaelic as ‘Origin Family/Bedrock’. This title borrows from Rekab’s installation of the same name at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2019-ongoing), again, scaling up their work on view at IMMA. Rekab often makes site-specific wallpapers, responding to the architecture of the institutions where they work. Clann Myiotlantach / Mythlantics, their exhibition produced by Sirius Art Centre in Cork in 2024, reengaged a series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by the New York-based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty (formerly Patrick Ireland), that were made on site but subsequently covered up, almost forgotten, for nearly twenty years.
In the exhibition’s opening conversation with Marie-Anne McQuay - curator of this edition of the Liverpool Biennial - Rekab connected the gallery’s location in Cork Harbour with the port history of Liverpool. This journey across the Celtic and Irish Seas - rather than the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise the focus of Rekab’s exhibition in Cork - has been made many times before. Liverpool's Irish community is one of the largest and most established in the UK, giving the city its nickname ‘the 33rd county of Ireland’. It is estimated that up to 75% of Liverpool's population has some Irish ancestry, a heritage deeply embedded in the city's history, cultures, and identity, and a part of works by other 2025 artists, including Elizabeth Price.
Rekab’s work strongly relates to BEDROCK, the theme of this Biennial, which is grounded in the city’s geological foundations and sandstone architecture. This simultaneous digging into the strata of the city, and the self, reveals both layers and layered experiences of migration - processes commenced in their 2021-2022 FAMILY LINES Project, spanning The Douglas Hyde in Dublin and Cypher BILLBOARD in London. The artist is also particularly drawn to clay for its symbolism and relation to creation. With Ali Cherri, who often employs mud and bronze in exploration of worldbuilding, Rekab also shares an interest in replicas, taking this beyond a critical acknowledgement of ‘fakes’ to themselves reconstruct ‘authentic’ West African sculptures.
Present across all exhibitions - one silent and unannounced, atop the dressing table at IMMA - are Rekab’s reconstructed nomoli. These figures, often made from soapstone or clay, have gradually been extracted from African soils and lands, detached from their use in spiritual practices. The buried sculptures were auspicious finds for local miners, but would always be replaced to make the land more fertile. (The ecology and ethics of archaeology will be unearthed again, in the art centre’s forthcoming exhibition with Barbara Knežević.)
Referring to the nomoli as technology, Rekab implicitly rejects the temporal othering of Black and indigenous practices, as well as the conventional expectation of the medium as necessarily hard and fixed. (In essays such as A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway advances the relationship between science, technology, and society, perceiving the former not as inherently oppressive, but as tools that can be used to challenge and transform existing power structures.) These processes of learning and unlearning often run in parallel; Rekab first worked with clay whilst working in a naíonra, an Irish medium preschool which follows the principles of language immersion and learning through play.
Rekab contrasts Ireland's more homogenous white society in the 1990s with multicultural cities in the UK, where they pursued further education. Isolation, more than direct racism, characterised her grandmother's experience on arrival, perhaps encouraging the artist’s intergenerational and community-based practice. In this context, Rekab’s location in the IMMA collection display seems all the more powerful, near Ellen Gallagher’s Magnificent Seven (1997) and Howardena Pindell’s Plankton Lace #1 (2020). These particular works are typically less represented in exhibitions of their artists’ respective practices; indeed, Pindell’s shimmering sculptural work swims close to Afrofuturism, a movement and aesthetic more often associated with Gallagher.
The many shades of clay in Rekab’s sculptures emphasise the artist’s mixed race and plural heritages. Fleshy pinks, pale reds, and greys are subtle allusions to the body; other artists working with ceramics like Bisila Noha make starker contrasts in colour and medium. Included within Rekab’s installation in Staying with the Trouble is nest of tables (Red); together in difference (2022), a sculptural work first commissioned by The Douglas Hyde. Similar works will soon tour with the aforementioned Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics - which borrows found wood from the basement of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where Rekab was formerly resident - maintaining connections across Ireland’s arts ecology.
With reference to that exhibition’s title, Rekab remarked how in the different communities of her childhood, she would encounter ‘different words for the same thing’. These interests in language and translation run throughout their practice (as well as IMMA’s wider programme, notably the recent L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School (2025)). Isatu an Ee cat (2021), for instance, is titled in Krio, an English-based creole that is the de facto national language of Sierra Leone.
More cat-like figures, alongside crocodiles and snakes, arise in clay in their exhibition in Liverpool. These animals are symbolic in Sierra Leone, whose name derives from the Portuguese phrase for Lion Mountains. Though they were the first Europeans to arrive, map, and trade in the region in the late 15th century, Portugal did not establish a formal colony. Indeed, ‘Freetown’, the colonial capital of British West Africa, would not be established by so-called abolitionists until the late 18th century.
Lions are considered regionally extinct in Sierra Leone - the Barbary lion long hunted out, for use in Roman gladiatorial games - but their presence lingers in the country’s name, national iconography, and geology, through fossils. Rekab maintains a strong relationship with the National Museum there, perhaps one channel through which their research may develop and deepen.
Staying with the Trouble is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 21 September 2025.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is on view at IMMA in Dublin until 6 February 2028.
Alice Rekab: Bunchlann/Buncharraig is on view at Liverpool Biennial until 14 September 2025.
Alice Rekab: Let Me Show You Who I Am is on view at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics, produced by Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, travels across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art between 2024-2026.
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