Clann Miotlantach / Mythatlantics – Alice Rekab

Alice Rekab is an Irish Sierra Leonean artist based in Dublin. Rekab uses their identity as a starting point to examine the intersection of personal and shared historical and cultural narratives. They trace fragments of their mixed-race experience through body and mind, geographies and politics. They address themes of familial and artistic connections, migration, and sense of place and belonging. 

Rekab makes sculptures, expanded paintings, digital collages, and films that are composite interactions with subject matter, technologies, imageries, and storytelling. They call upon “poor” techniques and materials—craft, vernacular iconography, reclaimed utilitarian articles, and symbolism—for their references and manifestations. 

Rekab researches and operates through the framework of the family unit. They revisit and reimagine archival items—photographs, objects—found in their own holdings, and combine them with memories and oral accounts, all derived from their encounters with Irish and West African traditions, knowledges, spirituality, and materiality. 

Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics showcases materials such as clay, colored mirrors, and salvaged wood and utensils, blended with representations of Rekab’s family members, African nomoli figurines, snakes, crocodiles, sky, land, water, and pieces of furniture, among others. These elements consider the Atlantic Ocean as a diasporic terrain, fluid and turbulent, that forged Black and Irish stories of mythological recovery, and more ambivalently of transition, transformation, repression, and resistance across history. 

Rekab is uniquely capable of challenging historically prevailing notions of Irishness as associated with whiteness, possessing the capacity to critique the “white innocence” that shapes a collective unconscious which still largely fails to recognize the racial issues permeating social relations. In addition, the artist contributes to a wider recognition of the complexity of identity in Ireland today, using their biography as a signifier of that and platforming it as a useful metaphor through which to think about, and enact, sustainable ways of living with difference in the country.

A Siruis National Touring Exhibition.