Since independence, Dublin has endured consecutive housing crises, from overcrowded tenements and appalling sanitation to unaffordable homes, stigmatised public housing, speculative development, displacement and homelessness. Generations of Dubliners have suffered the consequences of gentrification and repeated political failure. Perhaps nowhere have these failings been felt more than in Dublin 8.
Evidence-based policy should address these crises and improve residents' lives, but it has failed across multiple generations. Do we also have a crisis of evidence?
Funded by the European Research Council, over the past 4 years, the Data Stories project at Maynooth University has investigated the stories, politics and power embedded in housing and planning data, exposing how housing and planning data are generated, circulated, governed and used.
Fictions, Frictions & Evictions, curated by Brendan Fox, confronts the data and systems shaping Ireland’s housing emergency and the human consequences hidden behind their numbers.
Working with artists in residence, Augustine O’Donoghue, Mel Galley, Ella Harris & Hannah Mumby, Helen Shaw, Joan Somers Donnelly, and Sean Borodale, project collaborators Conor McCabe and Clara McSweeney, and invited artists and activists, Conor Burke, @the_liberties_sos - Abaigeal Meek & Jack Caffrey, the exhibition explores housing evidence through film, installation, image, speculative fiction, performance and activism. At its centre, a Public Access Library (PAL) brings this research into direct conversation with community-produced knowledge, wider literature, and the CATU Archive of Housing Justice.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of artist talks, conversations, performances and a walking tour by invited artists Con: temporary Quarters (Aoife Ward & Eve Woods).
Location: The Bank, 85 James Street, Dublin 8, D08 C2PR. Daily exhibition opening times: 11 am - 5.30 pm
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