Alice Rekab: Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics

Alice Rekab is an Irish Sierra Leonean artist based in Dublin. Rekab takes 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.

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 during their trips to Sierra Leone, and combines them with memories, oral accounts, field notes, and readings, all derived from their encounters with Irish and West African traditions, knowledges, spirituality, and materiality.

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.

Clann Miotlantach / Mythlantics explores themes of familial and artistic connections, diaspora, and sense of place and belonging. It features commissioned, newly made works engaging with the location of SIRIUS in Cork Harbour, an entry point to the Atlantic Ocean, along with a comprehensive selection of previously exhibited at The Douglas Hyde, Dublin, in 2022, and the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, in 2023.

The exhibition showcases materials such as clay, coloured mirrors, books, and salvaged wood and utensils, blended with representations of Rekab’s family members, West African nomoli figurines, West African and European architecture, 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. They generate a symbolic lens by which to imagine a clann miotlantach, or ‘mythatlantic family’.

The use of clay is a distinctive feature of Rekab’s output. This medium conveys an ancestral, primeval quality. The sculptures’ manipulation (the vestiges of the artist’s hands are often detectable), their colours (pale red and light grey, suggesting skin tones), and their animal-like shapes (specifically the snake, a biblical symbol associated with the replacement of paganism by Christianity in Ireland, and the crocodile, an allusion to the ‘wildness’ associated to Africa in the West) turn them into artefacts that speak to the telluric and experiential.

LAUNCH EVENT

SIRIUS
Saturday, 23 November
2-5pm
Free; no booking required

Alice Rekab, Liverpool Biennial 2025 curator Marie-Anne McQuay, and Miguel Amado discuss the exhibition’s vision, key works on display, the politics and aesthetics informing Rekab’s practice, and Rekab’s wider artistic intentions.

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, Rekab 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.

Clann Miotlantach / Mythatlantics is produced by SIRIUS and realised in part with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland through a Project Award. Following the presentation at SIRIUS, the exhibition is travelling across Ireland to Galway Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery, and Limerick City Gallery of Art, in collaboration with producer Rayne Booth, with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland through the Touring of Work Scheme.