Kevin Gaffney

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Kevin Gaffney/ Caoimhín Ó Gamhna is an artist and filmmaker, based between Dublin and Belfast, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. They graduated from Technological University Dublin with BA Fine Art in 2008 and from the Royal College of Art’s MA Photography and Moving Image with distinction in 2011. In 2014 they were an UNESCO-Aschberg laureate artist-in-residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong residency in South Korea and their work was shown in two solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Institute CAI02 in Japan (2014 & 2018).¹

Caoimhín’s work has been shown at the Cork Film Festival (2016 & 2018), the 10th Imagine Science Film Festival (New York, 2017) and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2021), where it is part of the collection. A monograph of their work, Unseen By My Open Eyes, was published in 2017. They are currently completing a practice-led PhD on queer artist filmmaking at Ulster University, and this work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork (2020-21).

“My work in the still and moving-image explores identity through outward-looking satires of geopolitics and capitalism, inward-looking meditations, and surreal scenes and images which aim to envision alternative worlds with their own logic and possibilities. The scripts I write are often slightly absurd and are set in an undefined future, without traditional narratives or character arcs, to create an unsettled terrain. Often the characters’ roles – or way of performing – change from scene to scene, creating an ambiguity that reflects on the shifting nature of identity and which draws attention to the constructed nature of cinema itself. Archival footage is intercut to disrupt the films’ representation of time and space, and to create both connections and friction between recent history and fictional visions of the future.”
²

Unseen by my Open Eyes