Personally, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s first solo exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin is a surprise. I expected the artist’s computer generated slow-moving photomontages, that wallow and shift in a liquid modernity. I admit here that I was never seduced by Ní Bhriain’s filmic works, works that made the artist’s reputation. I always found them formally directed and subjugated by a didactic redescription of colonialism located within the museum and empire. They seemed almost too oriented towards a politics of representation than the possibility of an imaginary and reflective materiality and lability. They ruminated on their own construction, technically and conceptually.

This, I feel, is not the case with Ní Bhriain’s current exhibition Interval Two (Dream Pool). No backlit screen in sight; everything is heavy with its own dull materiality and ontology. Thud! The tapestries buckle and warp at the edges. The fear that the gallery spotlights are too bright, is a fleeting fear that light might give away the ghost of their dark method. A method I don’t care to know, just experience.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval V, 2023, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex, edition of 3 + 2AP, 294.5 x 454 cm

The tapestries are reminiscent of Eoin Mc Hugh’s reconstructed Persian and Turkish carpets presented in the same gallery in 2014. They have the same material presence and scale that rises up before you and collapses in on itself. They are operatic arias in baroque tones, and, dare I say it, they invoke the West’s imperial construction of the orient and Eugene Delacroix’s painted flirtations with Morocco.

Yet it is post-war surrealism, from Man Ray’s and John Stezaker’s surrealist photography to Picasso’s Guernica that comes to mind. Perhaps it is the times we live in, that these images are invoked. A time when territories are being contested, and culture becomes a frosted lens or mirror through which we both distract and reterritorialise our conceptual and emotional relationship to war at a distance.

Ní Bhriain’s eidolic mise-en-scene is one that dreams without need for over-breakfast translation or interpretation. It speaks the zeitgeist, while paradoxically using the language of civilisation (“archival”) to distance itself from the present, a present that is unavoidably present and distant all at once.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, [detail] Untitled (seal) 2023, found photograph, acrylic, stained walnut frame with museum glass, unique, framed, 56 x 47 x 4 cm, Image: author

In Sigmund Freud’s terminology, “Civilisation” will forevermore be followed by “its Discontents”. Yet it is my word “followed”, interpolated within this badly paraphrased cultural formulation, where we find civilisation trailing in the rear-view mirror of culture.

Culture, in another psychoanalyst’s terminology (James Hillman’s) is something very different to civilisation. Contra civilisation, which is the coping, adapting and ossification of the institutional bedrock of society, culture is more spontaneous and unruly.

Culture is always collecting beneath our feet, forming a bricolage of subjective events that are continually trying to break through the institutional concrete with lively efflorescence. Culture is alive and abject yet temporary; culture, in another Freudian term, is uncanny. It is the spectre of civilisation, a corporeal ghost that disappears as soon as it appears, to leave ongoing civilisation in its wake: dead. Simply put: civilisation is an object; culture is a subject.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval VI, 2023, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex, edition of 3 + 2AP, 294.5 x 408 cm

The press release advertises Ní Bhriain’s “Jacquard tapestries” as forming “the centre of this exhibition”. It continues: “fragments of archival portraits merge with images of underground caves and architectural ruins… resulting in scenes of threshold and collapse, inhabited by thylacines, birds of prey and other unlikely creatures, threading an imagined line between contemporary threats of extinction and ancient narratives of the underworld.”

Let’s sit with that description for a moment, one that dutifully taxonomizes the contents of the tapestries, photographs and sculptures in anthropological detail. This description is civilization not culture. This list of “thylacines [extinct dogs], birds of prey and other unlikely creatures” demonstrates the significance of such cultural signifiers in the legitimisation of the artwork as a political and social product, not just a bourgeois or economic one.

This tension between the seduction of the work as an object versus its latent political meaning is what artists like Ní Bhriain struggle to neutralise in their inchoate democracies of form and content. Such binaries are limiting and unnecessarily polemical. Thing is, we are always unconsciously taking things in – politics and form – unbeknownst to consciousness. Especially the artist, whose parasitic gaze is always unblinking. The neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms has made claims of a brain phenomenon, whereby a person looking at a page of text, but not consciously reading, is unconsciously already reading, and that such unconscious reading is enough to influence memory and behaviour later.

Neutrality is at stake for art when the artist stakes a territory of either/or of politics and form. Art, at its best, is already political. Art is not this or that. Art is! Explicit sign-posting towards the political is what Jacques Lacan calls being caught in the “symbolic”, the order through which we determine cultural codes and signifiers, and live by them. This is civilisation! I’ll say it again. This is civilisation!

Artists are the present, even though they are dedicated to the exhumation of the past. They are both too distant and too close to the objects of their obsessions, so there is a constant oscillation between object and subject, hence the formal and political tension in Ní Bhriain’s work. There is always detournement at play, the subversion and spoliation of pre-existing cultural elements that are redistributed as the sensible in the present.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Untitled (cage) 2023, diptych, pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, wool, brass frame with museum glass, edition of 3, 15.3 x 22.6 x 2.5 cm

Ní Bhriain explicitly plays with such binaries of now and then, presence and absence, hide and seek in small pairings of photographic prints that, behind a veil of formalised damage and reversals (turning the back of previous photographic works towards the viewer) we are proffered a challenge to both see and imagine.

The question is, does the blind spot in these sibling pairings reveal more in their ignorance? The colour and grain of the photograph that turns its back on us is read in relation to the photograph on show. Further, the photograph on show feels like it is almost looking back at me, as both objects are anthropomorphised through the bind of being looked at and not looking. The art object’s job is to look at us so we can become objects under its subjective gaze. Once again, culture is a subject; civilisation is an object.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Untitled (mountain) 2023, diptych, pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, wool, brass frame with museum glass, edition of 3, 20.5 x 20.5 x 2.5 cm

What registers in the mind’s eye when confronted with the back of a photograph? I personally don’t have an itch to see what is hidden behind. I know the gallery workers have seen what is behind, and they continue on typing away on their iMACs with the secret knowledge, none the wiser or powerful. And yet there is still a desire to take hold of the object and turn to reveal the disappointment, the negative of what you couldn't have imagined.

The competition myth between fourth-century painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius shows us that the thing that veils the object or image of desire is desire itself. That desire is formulated through its suppression or repression. Being human is to be enticed by what may lay behind the obstacle or object-cause of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls the objet petit a. We desire objects that are absent with all our imaginary heft and might.

So I am left with one other desire, one that cannot be reversed. Ní Bhriain was shortlisted to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale by two consecutive panels (2022/2024). I thought the artist would get the nod for 2024, due more to her reputational economy than some subjective love for her work, which didn’t exist at the time. But that has all changed. This current exhibition not only implicitly points to a politics via the semipermeable membrane of its formalist tones and textures, permitting the world to flow in and out without forcing an issue, but it also has a material presence. The archive may be mentioned, but the archive is not what is present. What is present will be deemed civilisation in the future, but for now we can experience it as culture.—James Merrigan