Natasha Bourke
Concrete Keys

Natasha Bourke is a Cork City–based artist. She makes performances, films, installations,
and drawings informed by her extensive background in movement, physical theatre, and
new circus. The works address pathos, institutional frameworks, perception, and identity
politics.

Bourke’s films, in particular, depict absurdist and haunting images of the self and society.
The artist often performs in them through her alter ego, Coneface, which she has been
constructing since 2014. To become Coneface, she covers her face with a semi-
transparent cone to morph into an embodied camera lens – the personification of a
mechanical gaze – which affects how she navigates and records the surrounding
environment. She also uses observational techniques like the split screen to capture
dance-like forms.

Concrete Keys is Bourke’s first feature. She shot it mainly in the former site of FÁS, a
defunct Irish state agency devoted to training and employment, which occupied an iconic,
Brutalist-style office block on Sullivan’s Quay in Cork City. The building served as a tax
office from the 1980s to 2008 and later had various uses, including artists’ studios. It was
torn down in 2018 to make way for a project by the property development company
BAM Ireland.

In Concrete Keys, the building becomes a backdrop for dreamlike atmospheres populated
by beings – ‘Business Clown’, ‘Selves’, and ‘A Deviant Twin’, among others –
performing surreal actions. The building adopts various institutional characteristics –
prison, hospital, workplace – and the beings represent ‘imaginations’ of Bourke’s mind.
The beings are projections of Coneface; these anonymised figures, through their appearance
and gestures, position the film close to puppetry or animation in tone. The ‘Business Clown’,
for example, is a matron manager who acts in an authoritarian manner (her persona
references historical and current dictators) and unlocks doorways to the unconscious.

Concrete Keys is a satirical response to the bureaucratic measures that punctuate
everyday life, whether in a professional context or in the private, domestic realm. It
exposes the laborious and imitative qualities of various tasks, duties, and routines through

comic effect. But it also speaks to the oppressive power structures of institutions in
Ireland and beyond, from religion to patriarchy. It mirrors social and personal rituals,
institutionalism and institutionalisation, and the tension between freedom and self-
preservation within the pervasive corporate mentality of late capitalism.

LAUNCH EVENT
Natasha Bourke in conversation with Aideen Quirke

SIRIUS
Saturday, 22 April, 7–10pm
(doors open at 6:30pm; screening begins at 7pm; late admission is not possible)
Free; no booking required

Natasha Bourke and Aideen Quirke, Programme and Operations Manager at SIRIUS,
discuss Bourke’s approach to filmmaking, her engagement with the former FÁS site in
Cork city’s centre while artist studios occupied it, her use of humour and irony, and her
critical understanding of our world.

This exhibition is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, director.