David Farrell - Solastalgia

PhotoIreland presents the premiere of a new body of work by David Farrell at the International Centre for the Image. Irish artist David Farrell is perhaps better known for his contemporary documentary works, such as Innocent Landscapes and The Swallowing Tree.

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These long-term projects explore the searches of the Southern Irish landscape for those known as the Disappeared from the conflict in Northern Ireland. In recent years, he has more fully embraced a diaristic methodology in making photographs that has always been latent in his practice. His life and work enfold a hybrid of the German terms lebenskünstler and gesamtkunstwerk, all the while embracing the Beckettian questioning of existence. In exploring multiple genres of photographic and installation practice, Solastalgia presents a meditation on the artist’s personal and poetic relationship with photography and quotidian existence.

There is also an overhang from the flooding in Emilia Romagna in 2023 that destroyed significant aspects of his archive and home, as explored in the inner room within the space. Occasionally, the series is punctuated by intimate moments from Farrell’s domestic life, reflecting on topics of love, loss, endurance, and the singular presence and influence of his wife Gogo. His approach is also shaped by daily walks with his dog, Click, who serves not just as a loyal companion but as a grounding presence. The exhibition reveals an inner monologue where the photographs, in conversation with each other, extend the notion of narrative beyond the single image. Though seemingly a departure from the work we are familiar with, the images remain as we have known them: quiet and haunting, confronting memories with a tough beauty.