Dublin gallery to take up short-term residence at Dublin Port Company’s Pumphouse

Great to the Port’s Pumphouse put to some good use

The Temple Bar Gallery + Studios will embark on a four-month residency at the Dublin Port Company [DPC] Pumphouse. The gallery will be showing two solo exhibitions from Yuri Pattison and Liliane Puthod running simultaneously called ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’.

In Dublin Port, the Victorian-era Pumphouse is set beside a now-infilled graving dock (dry dock) which acts like a terrace, the building formerly housed the steam engine which powered the gates of Graving Dock 1.

Organisers have said that the unique heritage of Dublin Port lends itself perfectly to the artists’ considerations of geographic, economic and transport networks. “Both artists use symbolism of rivers and seas, capturing how the flow of time speaks to the idea of life as a circle and the transitory nature of things, making the Pumphouse the ideal venue for TBG+S to curate two off-site installations,” the statement reads.

Yuri Pattison’s dream sequence is a site-specific installation which includes a computer-generated video, sculpture and a soundtrack arrange on a ‘Disklavier’ piano (self-playing). Data collected from local monitoring sites at Dublin Port manipulates and alters the aesthetic, auditory and structural elements of the work.

Liliane Puthod’s new exhibition Beep Beep is a large-scale immersive installation which integrates personal family narratives with the social history of the Renault 4, a popular 60s car. For this exhibition, Puthod has reanimated her late father’s 1962 R4 from its dusty shed in her hometown of Reignier, France, and documented the journey of this ‘time machine’ to Ireland.

Of the partnership Lar Joye, Port Heritage Director at DPC, has said, “the Pumphouse forms part of our deep commitment to port-city integration and exhibitions like these are part of Dublin Port Company’s ongoing effort to making the port more accessible to the general public. This includes partnering with leading arts organisations such as TBG+S and ensuring that the artists they work with have an appropriate venue to display their work for the public to enjoy.”

This exhibition is part of Dublin Port’s early stage plans to expand the use of the Pumphouse into an exhibition, events and performance space, as part of their port-city integration plans up to 2040. Over the years the Pumphouse has played host to theatre and music projects, ‘Hidden Pianos’ (2018) developed by Artistic Director Máire Carroll with the aim of sharing classical and contemporary music in site-specific locations, ‘The Pumphouse Presents’ (2020), a Winter Festival of Plays commissioned by Dublin Port Company featuring work from Axis Ballymun, ANU productions and Fishamble: The New Play Company, and ‘The Book of Names’ (2021), a hugely ambitious co-production by ANU Productions and Landmark, that plots a singular path through one of the most secretive, contentious, and turbulent times in Irish history.

Last Summer plans to transform the pumphouse into an ephemeral space for events and performances by the DIY rave collective Temporary Pleasure, were indefinitely postponed due to “new terms and conditions which are impossible to satisfy given the insurance market in Ireland”.

‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ includes an accompanying public event programme including weekly Saturday tours; Summer School, a series of free family and adult workshops from 25th to 28th July; and special events for National Heritage Week, Culture Night, Open House Dublin, and Dublin Festival of History.

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