Border Biennale 2025, curated by Rita Duffy and Joe Keenan, Townhall Arts Centre, Cavan

An exhibition by artists Miriam de Búrca, Pascal Ungerer, Sally O’Dowd, Rita Duffy,
and Maria Anastassiou.

“O’Dowd’s work probes performances and practices of mapping: diagrammatic tools or rituals that shape the ways in which territory is imagined, navigated, claimed or contested.

Her charcoal drawings experiment in collective approaches to communal cartography with local residents, exercises which reflect both on the island’s colonial
histories and cohabitation in the aftermath of the civil war. The UK and Republic of Ireland joining the EU in 1973 and its single market from 1993 helped soften the
border over subsequent decades, a fragile situation threatened by English and Welsh Brexit votes in 2016. By 2019 the UK Government opted for a trade frontier in the Irish Sea, which came into effect a century after Ireland’s partition in 2021.

With questions of land sovereignty under renewed stress, it is deeply revealing that O’Dowd and her collaborators opted to destroy the drawing they made – perhaps
refuting and refusing mapping as a manifestation of power. The video Burn, Burn, Burn (2025) documents a fire engulfing their fragile paper, reduced to ashen
mounds.”

Excerpt from the catalogue essay ‘Art Beyond Boundaries’, by Dr. Edwin Coomasaru, in Rita Duffy and Joe Keenan eds., The Border Biennial 2025 (Cavan: Townhall Arts Centre, 2025)

Images and exhibition design by Mark St John Ellis

Programme funded by the PEACEPLUS Programme and Cavan County Council Arts Office.