Dogs Have No Religion

Contemporary Art from Northern Ireland

15.6.2006 - 3.9.2006

19 - 21 Husova St., Prague 1 – Old Town

Ian Charlesworth, Miriam de Búrca, John Duncan, Seamus Harahan, Mike Hogg, Conor McFeely, Mary McIntyre, Locky Morris, Darren Murray, Aisling O'Beirn, Peter Richards a Alistair Wilson.

Over recent years, the opening up of European borders has led to improved levels of how countries are informed about each other. Despite this, Northern Ireland remains to a large degree the subject of stereotypical assumptions based on the narrow vision of news media.

Without some form of direct contact it is impossible to gain a more complex idea about life and culture in Northern Ireland, whose specific - and, in many regards, problematic - character raises a series of urgent and broadly valid issues chiefly concerning people's identity in the ever-shifting terrain of the post-industrial world, where notions of 'margin' and 'centre' alternate increasingly rapidly.

This survey of work by artists - most of them from the younger generation and several of whom were represented at the Northern Ireland presentation at the Venice Biennale last year - is the first ever opportunity in the Czech Republic to get a more rounded view of the diverse and dynamically developing art scene in Northern Ireland. It is also a valuable chance to better understand a society whose fabric incorporates "the ultra-banal, the absurd and the potentially threatening."