Enda Bowe Love's Fire Song

Gallery of Photography Ireland is delighted to present the Irish premiere of Enda Bowe’s award winning Love’s Fire Song. The exhibition features a sound installation specially created by Max Cooper.

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Over the past 5 years Enda Bowe has worked with young people on either side of the peace walls in Northern Ireland. Taking the symbolic bonfires of July and August as his starting point, Bowe worked collaboratively with people from across the sectarian divide to create open-ended visual narratives.
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Love’s Fire Song is concerned with storytelling and the search for light and beauty in the ordinary. Precise references to political context and geographical locations are underplayed to offer subtle new perspectives, revealing a quiet, contemplative portrait of youth culture. Often defined in opposition to each other by their religious beliefs, cultural background and inherited sense of place, the work highlights instead young peoples’ shared sense of ritual in gathering around a bonfire - which in itself echoes ancient traditions.
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Bowe’s deeply empathetic portraits go beyond stereotypical representations to touch on shared human experiences of longing, vulnerability, joy and celebration. Where others might see mundane, everyday situations, Bowe finds beauty, hope and optimism. Love’s Fire Song looks beyond the often destructive influence of history to reflect on the commonalities that exist between seemingly disparate places and lives.

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To help keep everyone safe, the exhibition area is open for the exclusive enjoyment of just one group - or even just one person - on a timed basis. So treat yourself: book your very own Private View of this exhibition, just for you & your household group.

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"A life, no matter how ordinary, is as beautiful and dramatic as anyone else’s. All the joy, stillness, subtleties of emotion and sadness in the everyday which link us all  – this is what l am honing in on. People like to be acknowledged, they want to have an identity and presence in a world where they may feel they are not seen nor heard. The emotional narrative of everyone’s life is interesting, and that is what l am drawn to.”
‍- Enda Bowe, 2020

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"I wanted to try and capture something of the power and beauty and humanity of Enda's work with the musical accompaniment, but also, to give the photographs space to breathe and have their stories unfold. Having grown up in Northern Ireland, I also have a deep connection to the work, and even thinking of the photographs now as I write this invokes a strong emotional response of so many things I associate with the people and the place, and the intensities involved. There is a power and drive for life which I've only come to see since leaving. In the end, trying to put all of this into words is not something I can adequately do, but with music, I can more directly try to convey my feelings around what Enda has created, and I hope some of those feelings and ideas are stirred in you as well.”

- Max Cooper, 2020

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"I had the great pleasure and good fortune of meeting Enda Bowe around the time ‘Adam & Paul’ came out. He got in touch because he liked the film and felt a kinship there with his own work. I remember the feeling when he shared his images with me - just an awareness of depth and truth and above all a kind of perfect tender empathy and humanity. I’ve returned to his photographs often, when I feel the need to be reminded of that extraordinary relationship that can exist between the looker and the looked-at. Enda’s subjects are responding to him as a very special, deeply empathetic human being and somehow his camera captures that response and with it something essential about that person.”

- Lenny Abrahamson, 2020

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Enda Bowe Biography

Enda Bowe’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including: Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Red Hook Gallery, New York; Gallery of Photography Ireland; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Fotohof, Salzburg; The Visual Centre Of Contemporary Art, Ireland and most recently in The Other Side, Dortmunder U, Dortmund, Germany. His collection of work At Mirrored River received the international Solas Photography Award 2015. He was nominated for the Prix Pictet Award 2016 and the Deutsche Borse Foundation Photography Prize 2016. In the UK his work has been shortlisted for the National Gallery Portrait Prize for 2019 for Love’s Fire Song and was runner up for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2019. Bowe’s first monograph Kilburn Cherry was published by J&J Books and received the Birgit Skiold Artist Award 2014 from the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In self-publishing his photobook At Mirrored River the artist was kindly supported by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Oscar nominated director Ken Loach and writer Colm Toibín. This book coincided with the exhibition of At Mirrored Riverat The Visual Centre of Contemporary Art, Ireland. His third monograph This Thing I Want. I Know Not What, inspired by Carson McCullers' novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published by Paper Tiger Books in 2018.  Bowe recently worked with Lenny Abrahamson on the acclaimed tv series Normal People and was the winner of the National Gallery of Ireland Zurich Portrait Prize 2019.

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Max Cooper Biography

Few have been so successful in interrogating and furthering the intersection between electronic music, visual art, technology and science in the past decade as Max Cooper.  Working with collaborators and large-scale institutions like the Barbican, Zaha Hadid Architects and Dolby Atmos, Cooper has developed a mixed-media approach to creation.  Whether walk-through light installations, groundbreaking use of 4D sound, or club-ready techno releases, Cooper’s output of electronic exploration makes use of available technology while referencing that which came before it, and does so in a human way.

His fourth studio album Yearning for the Infinite was created following commission from the Barbican to respond to their annual theme of “Life Rewired”, exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.  The project encompasses film and web media as well as Cooper’s typically lush and emotive sonics, brings to life our insatiable desire for more via impactful storytelling, abstract visuals and audio.

Synthesising his interests and presenting it in an accessible way that defies conventional format, Cooper explores concepts of emergence, identity and infinity to create an immersion of sound, vision and concept that can totally remove you from your normal experience of reality and put you somewhere new.  At the core, Max Cooper’s mission as a musician, a DJ and an interdisciplinary artist is all about provoking a greater understanding.