Isabel Nolan presents Dreamshook at the Irish Pavillion at the 61st Venice Biennale.
The word Dreamshook describes the feeling of waking from a dream, when reality is destabilised and realms of possibility linger and dissipate. In the Irish Pavilion, Nolan’s installation of hand-tufted tapestry, drawing, and sculpture, represents thresholds, dream states and narratives that strain the distinctions between the immaterial and the actual. The work develops from her sustained fascination with the frameworks that shape any understanding of the world and the widespread human desire to make order within chaos.
Nolan looks to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an era mirroring our own time. It was a profoundly turbulent period marked by religious and political upheaval, a time transformed by plague, wars and famine. It was also a time when cultural and technological developments in Europe reshaped what it is to be human, challenged the nature of authority, and both witnessed and cultivated profound ideological change.
The work draws on key cultural events from these times that have shaped the present-day. References that are emblematic of the spread of Classicism, Christianity, literacy, and art, include: the emergence of Humanism; 13th and 14th century Italian painting and architecture; the Book of Kells, a 9th-century illuminated Christian manuscript; the invention of the printing press and the use of moveable type in Europe. Nolan focuses on the figure of Aldo Manuzio (c.1450 – 1515), an innovative, influential printer and publisher based in Venice who, as the century turned, transformed the culture of reading in part through the production of numerous, portable, pocket-sized books. She uses these moments of discovery and invention to signal how architectures of belief and knowledge are constructed and, in so doing, celebrates how we encounter the world in all its messiness and debatable beauty.
From the fields of literature; history; religion; and mythology, Nolan grounds far-reaching subjects in intimate, material encounters, exploring how connection and meaning, the matters of love and death, are forged in the turmoil of the present day. Dreamshook invites speculation on how the complex dynamics of wonder, belief and power shape expectations and human experience.
Isabel Nolan said: “Even if there is much to be appreciated about it, it can be tricky to love a European heritage. It’s a place that wielded privilege as a weapon and progressively built wealth and culture through extraction and subjugation; a lesson quickly learnt growing up in Ireland. But there is much within the cultural history of post-medieval Europe, albeit produced and shaped almost exclusively by and for a wealthy, white, Christian patriarchal society, that I still love and learn from.
There’s a Goya aquatint called The sleep of reason produces monsters. While reading into the history of humanism which birthed generous ideas and a remarkable legacy, I recalled his work: mindful that the dreams and desires of reason also produced many monsters.
Dreamshook might be a show about ambivalence, about the literature and art of western Judaeo-Christian, classically inflected, enlightened society, that I both hate and love. What it means and what it entails to be human, or even humane, is being tested. It feels timely to look at a period when some of what we have taken for granted about being ‘modern’ humans for 600 plus years is subject to new pressures and potentially revolutionary change”.
The 61st Venice Biennale takes place from Saturday May 9 and runs until November 22. Dreamshook by Isabel Nolan is commissioned by Culture Ireland in partnership with The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. It is curated by Dr Georgina Jackson with The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art and produced by Cian O’Brien. Isabel Nolan's Dreamshook exhibition will return home to Ireland for a national tour in 2027.
