Beautiful Apocalypse, a solo exhibition from Galway artist Miriam de Búrca is being hosted by Galway Arts Centre for this year’s Arts Festival. In it, Miriam uses a range of media to examine and critique the ongoing legacies of colonialism and patriarchy.

Through drawings, wall paintings, collage and the ancient technique of verre églomisé (a complex and decorative painted mirror process), she toys with the vocabulary of colonial aesthetics, using mimicry and irony to critique the superiority of ‘high art’.

Beautiful Apocalypse includes a new film installation, Suspended Scream. For that, Miriam has collaborated with French-Syrian artist Taïm Haimet (a graduate of ATU and winner of the RDS Visual Arts Awards 2023), to respond to an old tape that the Galwaywoman shot in 2005 in Palestine, and to interrogate conflicting issues around inheritance, privilege and negation.

By looking through a Western lens, Miriam points to the role art has played in legitimising colonial projects – and also, the power it has to dismantle and decolonise these structures.

“We are honoured to be presenting this beautiful solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Miriam de Búrca, her first solo exhibition in her home city,” says curator and Arts Centre director, Megs Morley.

“Miriam’s work is an exquisite, expanded drawing and painting practice that draws our attention to the material and aesthetic legacies of colonisation,” she adds.

“The intensive scrutiny and detailed study that she explores in her subject matter asks us, the viewers, to do the same – to look, to scrutinise, and criticise – not as passive observers but as active witnesses in the unfolding legacies of colonialism, past and present.”

Miriam de Búrca, who comes from Henry Street in the city, just down the road from the Arts Centre, studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and the Ulster University, Belfast where she received an Award of Excellence in 2010 for her practice-based PhD.

Her drawings and film and video works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and her art is in the collection of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Arts Council of Ireland; the British Museum; Mead Gallery at University of Warwick, Coventry; the University of Galway; Glucksman Gallery at University College Cork, as well as in private collections.

Beautiful Apocalypse will run from Monday, July 15, until Saturday, August 24, at Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street.

For full details of the visual arts programme at this year’s Galway International Arts Festival, go to giaf.ie.

Pictured: Miriam de Búrca explores how art helped support colonialism and can also help dismantle it.