Alice Rekab + Éireann and I
We Make Our Own Table
8 October– 27 November 2022 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB
‘We Make Our Own Table’ is a new BILLBOARD x FAMILY LINES poster commission by artist Alice Rekab, developed in collaboration with community archive Éireann and I. Over the last two years they have worked together with members of the Black Irish community in the UK and Ireland to explore experiences of race, place and belonging through a series of consultations, workshops and a public exhibition. The artwork Alice has made for Cypher BILLBOARD is a meditation on the importance of this time spent together and the objects and conversations that were shared.
'We Make Our Own Table' is a celebration of Pan-African food culture. It is a digital collage made up of images taken by the artist at ' Race Place And Belonging : Food And Heritage' a workshop led by Éireann and I Archive at Douglas Hyde Gallery in September 2022 which invited people of African Descent to join together in a workshop that explored food and memory and culminated in a potluck dinner.
This work is part of an ongoing project relating to memory and devotion within Alice's practice and all documentation of the work will take its place in the Éireann and I Archive after the exhibition is complete.
This programme is part of FAMILY LINES; a multi-platform project by artist Alice Rekab in collaboration with community archive Éireann and I, commissioned by The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Each stage of the project considers the importance of both platforming voices of colour and making specific spaces for self-representation and gathering, and each stage informs the next stage of the project. The FAMILY LINES project was commissioned by The Douglas Hyde and is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon through a Project Award. This Cypher BILLBOARD programme has been made possible with support from The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Culture Ireland, and Stephen & Ljuba Morris.
BILLBOARD x FAMILY LINES: The Changeover
Saturday 8 October 2022, 6.30-8.30pm | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, London, N22 8YB
Join us to celebrate the BILLBOARD x FAMILY LINES programme with a live posting of Alice Rekab + Éireann and I’s ‘We Make Our Own Table’ to launch the second half of our poster exchange, following Henrique Paris’ commission ‘Registo II’. Come early to see both works up on the site and meet the artists over a drink.
Footnote to Migration
Sunday 9 October 2022, 3.30-5.30pm | MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y1DH
A creative writing workshop bringing together reading material from MayDay Rooms, a radical archive based in Britain, and Éireann and I, a Black community archive based in Ireland. In this session, led by Éireann and I, we invite you to trace lines of connection between items that highlight the perceptions and experiences of Black migrants on both isles.
Alice Rekab’s practice is concerned with expressions and iterations of complex cultural and personal narratives. Alice Rekab takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point from which to explore experiences of race, place and belonging. Over the last ten years Rekab’s practice has centred around collaboration and interdisciplinary work from which they produce film, performance, image and sculpture, creating new intersectional narratives and objects for exhibition. | alicerekab.com/
Éireann and I is a community archive consisting of found and donated stories chronicling the lives of Black migrants in Ireland. It is part of a growing movement of grassroots efforts from marginalized communities to collect and make accessible our own experiences outside of traditional archival institutions. We collaboratively curate spaces where we can make collective decisions about what is valuable for preservation, shape collective memory of our experiences, and control how our past and present stories are constructed. | eireannandiarchive.com/
