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Shows ✳︎ Talks ✳︎ Naps ✳︎ Events ✳︎
AIB Portrait Prize 2025 at RCC Donegal
April - June 2026
The Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny is delighted to announce that we will host the AIB Portrait Prize 2025 and the AIB Young Portrait Prize 2025 from 4 April – 20 June 2026. This major touring exhibition from the National Gallery of Ireland will bring some of the finest examples of contemporary portraiture to Donegal.
The AIB Portrait Prize is one of the most significant competitions for visual artists in Ireland today, celebrating excellence and innovation in portraiture across a range of media. The 2025 shortlist features 26 artists, chosen by a distinguished panel of judges: artist Gareth Reid; Professor Emily Mark-FitzGerald (UCD); and Dr Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery.
2026
Affective Forms at Luan Gallery
February — April 2026
curated by Aoife Banks
Affective Forms at Luan Gallery, Athlone
Luan Gallery is delighted to present Affective Forms, a group exhibition featuring work by Tara Carroll, Sian Costello, Phelim Hoey, Áine O’Hara, Day Magee, and Rajinder Singh.
Affective Forms is a multidisciplinary group exhibition that explores evolving representations of the human body in contemporary Irish art through painting, photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Foregrounding the lived experiences of bodies often marginalised in mainstream visual culture, Affective Forms brings together works that rethink the human body not as an isolated or idealised figure, but as a relational, sensing, and meaning-making site, while examining the emotional and spatial connections between body and environment.
Working through photography, sculpture and text, Áine O’Hara’s work is informed by queer and crip* theory, disability justice scholarship, and lived experience as a multiply disabled, chronically sick queer person. Produced during extended bed confinement, the work reflects fatigue, pain, isolation, and reduced capacity, yet asserts presence in public spaces where sick and disabled bodies are often excluded, challenging assumptions about access, visibility, and legitimacy.
Áine doll travels for me
April - Sept 2026
The Áine Doll is a small paper figure created as part of the Affective Forms exhibition at Luan Gallery. The dolls travel around in my place, documenting spaces and experiences that I cannot always access myself as I am often bedbound. Visitors are invited to pick up a doll at the gallery, cut it out, bring it with them into the world, and share images of its journey. Through these small acts of participation, the project explores access, presence and collective storytelling, allowing the doll to move through galleries, homes and public spaces while creating a shared archive of where it goes. If you would like a doll but cannot visit the exhibition, you can contact me directly.
Keep an eye out on my instagram to see all the adventures the Áine doll is getting up to this year!