BECOMING
TALLAGHT
24—27 SEPT
2025
Thresh/Hold by Emma Brennan, Becoming Tallaght, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Thresh/Hold by Emma Brennan, Becoming Tallaght, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Borderline Project by Shiro Masuyama, Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Borderline Project by Shiro Masuyama, Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Hot Air by EL Putnam at Rua Red, Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Hot Air by EL Putnam at Rua Red, Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
About Becoming Tallaght
Participating Artists: Emma Brennan, Tara Carroll, Austin Hearne, Maryia Hoyin, Rachel MacManus, Shiro Masuyama, Katherine Nolan, El Putnam.
Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival will take place from 24—27 September in Rua Red and at various sites across Tallaght. This will mark the third in a series of Performance Art Festivals commissioned by Rua Red.
Curated by Olivia Hassett and Paul Regan Becoming Tallaght is an ambitious four-day Festival showcasing the work of eight performance artists, including three bespoke workshops, and culminating in an artists’ symposium. We are also delighted to announce that the first iteration of Xchange, an open improvised performance jam, will also form part of Becoming Tallaght, and will include performance artists from Bbeyond Belfast.
The state of becoming is a transformative process. Just as live performances often involve a transformation through embodied action at a specific site and in the presence of an audience, Tallaght is also experiencing a cultural evolution, reflected in its people and urban landscape. Join us in September as we embark on the journey of Becoming Tallaght.
Performances
Borderline Project by Shiro Masuyama
24.09.25 – 26.09.25
12:00—17:00
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
As a Japanese artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Masuyama has converted the interior of a caravan into two parts: one half related to Irish culture and the other half to British culture. Many of the items, symmetrically displayed on their respective sides, have counterparts in both cultures. Since relocating to Belfast in 2010, Masuyama has often grappled with the nuances of what separates Irish and British identity within the region’s complex society. This project has become a way of learning and exploring those cultural subtleties through conversations with people who step inside the caravan. The work is continually evolving, as the artist adds new objects, refines the display, and adapts it in response to dialogue. Approaching the project from an outsider’s perspective, neither religious nor politically aligned, Masuyama brings a sense of neutrality to the inquiry. While the caravan can be difficult to entice people into, given its association with private space, those who do enter are invariably intrigued. Visitors often begin reflecting on Irish and British culture, wider society, and their own personal histories.
Hot Air by EL Putnam
24.09.25
13:00—16:30
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
We give them data–they give us hot air.Terra is an android technological diviner who has been hired to map the route of heat produced from the AWS data center through the public utility system that is used to warm select municipal buildings in Tallaght. Her embodied actions create a double tracing through footsteps and collected breaths; bodily rhythms keeping pace with machinic tempos. The performance culminates in a Ritual of Tracing to be presented outside the South Dublin County offices.
Hot Air asks what happens when we attune ourselves to the invisible flows of our computational infrastructures, drawing attention to our unacknowledged entanglements and complicities with these systems.
This performance is part of an ongoing collaboration between Putnam and author Mike McCormack, initially presented as Under the Feet of Shadows, which merges science fiction with folklore, imagined and actual mythologies, and histories of technology in Ireland as a multimedia speculative inquiry.
Thresh / Hold by Emma Brennan
24.09.25
14:00—15:30
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
Thresh/Hold is a site-responsive performance rooted in the grotesque as a methodology of excavation, disruption, and transformation. Set within the Losset at St. Maelruain’s Church, the work stages a charged encounter between Tallaght-born poets Katharine Tynan and Alice Furlong. Through live action, text, and ritual, it explores entangled legacies of empire, faith, land, and gendered voice.
The performance draws a sharp contrast between Tynan’s Palestine: 1917 and Furlong’s The Warnings. The friction between the two becomes a way to confront ongoing histories of erasure. The Losset once a vessel of communal sustenance, becomes altar, protest, and threshold. This performance act is an embodied gesture of resistance and solidarity, calling attention to what is being omitted in our histories, our present narratives and our potential future records.
Geographies of Grief by Mariya Hoyin
25.09.25
13:00—14:00
- Location
The Tallaght X sculpture in Library Square - About the Performance
In exploring the history of the name Tallaght, I discovered its Old Irish roots, meaning “a place of burial” or “a high grave.” Its etymology is stark: one part linked to death, contagion, and impurity; the other to stones, monuments, and remembrance. These weighty, archetypal associations connect deeply with my reflections on the war in Ukraine; now in its eleventh year, including seven years of hybrid conflict and over three years of full-scale invasion. This war is about loss and suffering, about bodies that no longer breathe and hearts that struggle to trust. It is about scars — visible and invisible — etched into the body of a nation, into memory, language, and the architecture of silence.
My performance seeks to bring together the visible and the invisible, to show how war imprints itself on cities and on the human body. It lingers in the cracks of buildings, in inner fractures, in memories that disturb sleep, and in silence that echoes across generations. This silence is not emptiness, but the roar of pain without words. Performance as memory. An archaeology of suffering. Ecocide. The ethics of presence.
Mother Load by Katherine Nolan
25.09.25
15:00—16:00
- Location
Lidl, 24 Main Rd, Tallaght → St.Mary's Priory - About the Performance
A mother walks through Tallaght village, laden down with little bodies, their arms clutching at her neck and legs dangling as she moves. Both visceral and absurd, this performance asks viewers to consider what it is like to bear the weight of care. Mothers' bare bodies in their bodies, sometimes those bodies are lost or never come into being, sometimes mothers are unable to nourish the bodies they are tasked with caring for. The physical and emotional burden can be at times unbearable, and yet invisible. The Mother Load makes the weight of motherhood visible, in all its burden, messiness and absurdity. Travelling from the mundanity of the supermarket, this performance drags motherhood through the streets to the elevated heights of the arches at St. Mary’s Priory.
Audience members can choose to bring and donate an object of their relationship to motherhood if they wish: a baby grow outworn or one never worn, something sullied, something precious – if it’s hard to let go, the Mother Load will bear the weight for you.
Priory Pansy by Austin Hearne
25.09.25
16:15—16:45
- Location
St.Mary's Priory - About the Performance
Oh dear Tallaght Priory, your brutal 1970s concrete arches loom over the new families of husbands, wives and the many children that make up this growing townland. Behind you, frock-clad men spew forth twisted ideas about women, the family, sexual morality, contraception, abortion and homosexuality. My peachy baby head was dowsed with holy water over your baptismal font in 1973. I didn’t ask to become a member of your rotten organisation, and I have no recourse to leave. So 52 years later, I’m back to prance and dust away cobwebs from your concrete arches like the big pansy that you abhor. This is, after all, my church.
Keep Fit Tallaght: The Middle Way with
Rachel Macmanus
26.09.25
13:30—15:30
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
Nowadays, exercise has become a marketed, commercialised commodity. Fitness and weight loss are equated to being good, and the lack of being perceived as bad. Trying to find a middle ground is not always easy for people, and in Ireland, we struggle with high obesity levels. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha taught a Middle Way between sensual indulgence and severe asceticism, leading to freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth and suffering. In Keep Fit Tallaght, exercise is neither a punishment nor a panacea. The Buddha as exercise instructor teaches a middle way between ultra marathons and staying on the couch. Our fitness class will be a community experience, a joyous spectacle, a middle way where your instructor invites you to consider: who do we worship and what brings us joy? What is valuable to us?
Participation: Please join in, for as little or as long as you like. The class will repeat every 30 minutes, and participants can join at any time. Suitable for all levels of fitness and accessible for differently abled audience members.
Dis/Embodiment of Wholeness by Tara Carroll
26.09.25
16:30—17:00
- Location
St.Mary's Priory - About the Performance
The performance explores the ways that sacred, disability and transgender embodiment(s) are all structured by reference to notions of wholeness, perfection and cure. The social order dreams of a cure for both disabled bodies and trans bodies. Their existence challenges the notions of completeness and transcends bodily possibilities.
The performance will take place at the bulán stones in St.Mary’s Priory Garden. Bulán stones are said to be where saintly bodies have touched or rested on. The disembodiment of a sacred body on their journey to sainthood offers completeness, either through the reunion of parts into a whole or through the assertion of a part to become whole. The saintly body is produced by and shared among a community.
The performance challenges the fixed senses of community, instead creating asynchronous communities through ripples, touches and interflows. It pivots on the transference of touch; we are in community with others we might never meet.
(Dis)Comfort Workshop, Tara Carroll (2023). Photo by Tun Ping
Daily walk, Co. Clare (2023). Photo by Rachel Macmanus
Paul Regan and Lauren Kelly, Performance Art Jam, Re-rooting Tallaght Perfprmance Art Festival 2025
We are Bodied (2015), Katherine Nolan and Eleanor Lawlor. Live performance at 126 Gallery. Photo by Amber Baruch
Workshops & Events
Care for Carers with Katherine Nolan
24.09.25
10:00—12:00
- Location
Rua Red Performance Space - AudienceSuitable for Adults / Carers
- About the Performance
This workshop invites participants to explore performance art and embodied practices as a means of self-care. It offers a supportive space grounded in the interconnectedness of body and mind. Through breathing, movement, free writing, visualisation, and gentle peer sharing, participants will be guided in practices that nurture wellbeing.
All are welcome, with particular care extended to those in caregiving roles, whether for children, relatives, friends, or colleagues, who are often focused on the needs of others.
No prior experience is required.
(Dis)Comfort with Tara Carroll
25.09.25
10:00—12:00
- Location
Rua Red - Audience
Suitable for ages 16+ - About the Performance
(Dis)Comfort is a participatory workshop with artist Tara Carroll, exploring the embodiment of discomfort and the ways we combatively seek comfort individually and collectively. How do you distinguish the feelings? Why do we need discomfort to go beyond our comfort zones to enact change? How do we create comfort for other people? We will engage with these themes through creative exercises that utilise the body, text, and spoken word.
The artist asks for each person to bring one object that represents or gives their body/mind comfort and one object that represents or gives their body/mind discomfort. As a disabled, trans and queer artist, Tara will discuss themes through the lens of disability/illness, gender and queerness. The workshop openly invites anyone to join.
Carroll’s art practice advocates for inclusivity and accessibility for all in the arts and society. They want to ensure the inclusion of our disabled and high-risk friends by making this a masked event to ensure the safety of everyone in the space. This is to practice harm reduction and community care during a time when capitalism and individualism often take precedence. They ask everyone who can mask to do so. High-quality FFP2 masks will be provided on entry, and a HEPA filter will be present in the space.
It will be a relaxed environment with breaks and snacks provided. The exercises are adaptable to suit individual capacity.
Dis/Embodiment of Wholeness by Tara Carroll
26.09.25
16:30—17:00
- Location
St.Mary's Priory - About the Performance
The performance explores the ways that sacred, disability and transgender embodiment(s) are all structured by reference to notions of wholeness, perfection and cure. The social order dreams of a cure for both disabled bodies and trans bodies. Their existence challenges the notions of completeness and transcends bodily possibilities.
The performance will take place at the bulán stones in St.Mary’s Priory Garden. Bulán stones are said to be where saintly bodies have touched or rested on. The disembodiment of a sacred body on their journey to sainthood offers completeness, either through the reunion of parts into a whole or through the assertion of a part to become whole. The saintly body is produced by and shared among a community.
The performance challenges the fixed senses of community, instead creating asynchronous communities through ripples, touches and interflows. It pivots on the transference of touch; we are in community with others we might never meet.
Becoming Tallaght Panel Talk
27.09.25
12:00—14:00
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
To mark the final day of the programme, join us for a panel discussion with the curators of the Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival, Olivia Hasset and Paul Regan, alongside rapporteur Day Magee. Together, they will reflect on the week’s performances and explore the wider context of performance art in Ireland.
Xchange Performance Art
27.09.25
15:00—17:00
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
We are pleased to announce that the inaugural edition of Xchange, an open and improvised performance jam, will be held as part of Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival. For this event, we are honoured to welcome a group of performance artists from Bbeyond Belfast to join the Xchange.
Inspired by the monthly meetings organised by Bbeyond and in response to the lack of similar opportunities to perform collaboratively and improvisationally in Dublin, Xchange was founded by Olivia Hassett and Paul Regan. Xchange seeks to provide a platform to create live art and to explore encounters not only between those who take part but also those who witness.
Our objective is to promote performance art in the local community and beyond as an unconventional and vital art form for the times we live in. Future editions of Xchange will take place every two months at Rua Red.
VestAndPage Workshop, La Pocha Nostra & VestAndPage,Alumni Summit at Live Art Ireland. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Katherine Nolan (2021). Images from Fluid Fresh, performance to camera. Photo by Aoife Giles
Under the Feet of Shadows, EL Putnam and Mike McCormack, 2024, video still
Priory Pansy by Austin Hearne, 2025.
Perpetual Succor by Rachel Macmanus. Photo by Sean McInerney
A Call From An Olive Room (2022) Live Art Ireland, Tipperary. Photo by Emma Brennan
I Plead, I Beg (2024), Tara Carroll. Photo by Léann Herlihy
Borderline by Shiro Masuyama, 2013—present
Featured Artists
Originally from Japan, Masuyama studied architecture to MA level, a background that continues to shape his art practice through site-specific and architectural interventions. Drawing on both his architectural training and his Japanese identity, he creates socially engaged works that connect people and society in meaningful ways. Interaction is central to his practice; he regards dialogue and participation as vital processes that can lead to unexpected and transformative outcomes.
Following international residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006), and Flax Art Studios (2009), Masuyama settled in Belfast, where he has lived and worked ever since. His multidisciplinary practice spans performance, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. As a Japanese artist rooted in Northern Ireland, Masuyama occupies a unique position from which to question how the region’s dominant political forces shape personal and cultural identity.
EL Putnam is an artist working predominantly in performance art and digital technologies. Their practice focuses on borders and entanglements, particularly the interplay of human embodiment with the machinic. EL actively presents artworks and performances across the United States, Europe, and beyond. They have received funding from Culture Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Westmeath County Council. Exhibitions of note include Under the Feet of Shadows with Mike McCormack at Mart Gallery in Dublin, Ireland (2024) and CIACLA in Los Angeles, CA (2025), the solo exhibition PseudoRandom at Emerson Contemporary in Boston, MA, USA (2023), and Living Canvas in Dublin, Ireland (2022). They are Associate Professor of Digital Media at Maynooth University and reside in Co. Westmeath.
Emma Brennan is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in performative practices, including multimedia installation, moving image, and collaborative processes. Based in Belfast and originally from Dublin, her practice finds public outcomes in exhibitions and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. Brennan is a current board member of Bbeyond, Belfast and Live Art Ireland, Tipperary. She is also the founder of QRIT Belfast, a queer crit group.
For some time now, her practice has been occupied by the presence of the Grotesque within mythology and the exploration of this through a Queer Feminist lens.
Recent works include her solo exhibition It Is & I Am (2024) at Belfast Exposed Gallery, on a cultural exchange with MOCA, Yinchuan, China (2024) and performing alongside Sandra Johnston, Alastair MacLennan, Brian Patterson and Thomas Wells as part of Catalyst Arts Belfast’s 30-year anniversary programme MANTLE (2024). Brennan was the sole recipient of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Visual Arts Bursary for 2024/25.
Mariya Hoyin (b. 1982, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary artist working in analogue and digital photography, performance, video, collage, and graphic media. A graduate of the Lviv National Academy of Arts, she has exhibited widely in Ukraine and internationally. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Hoyin has been creating Diary in Times of War, a daily photography project sustained until the war ends. Each anniversary of the invasion, she tattoos a new number on her forearm as an act of remembrance and resilience. In 2022, she developed the art book Diary in the Time of War during the Multimedia Ukrainian Plein Air in Ustka, curated by Veronika Teplitzka. That same year, she produced Comic about the Daily Life of the Labyrinth Gallery during a residency in Lublin. Earlier works include Trzy kropki (2017, Gaude Polonia) and PERYFERIUM (2016, AIR Wro).
Katherine Nolan is an artist, lecturer, and curator. She works primarily in live and lens-based performance, investigating themes of gender and embodiment in live and digital spaces. Her recent project Fluid Flesh explored the maternal and the mortal through embodied experiences across performance, photography, and audio-visual installation.
She has performed extensively at international venues such as Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm, MeinBlau Projecktraum Berlin, Mobius Boston and Panoply Performance Lab New York. Other notable performances include a twelve-hour durational as part of Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol (2016). Solo exhibitions include Fluid Flesh (2021) and The Mistress of the Mantle (2017) at MART Dublin. Recent group shows include The Irish Contemporaries (2023) at the Centre for Irish Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Hold on Tight (2022) at The Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast.
She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Digital Media at Technological University Dublin and co-curator with Livestock: Performance Art Platform.
Austin Hearne is an artist from Dublin. He holds a MFA from NCAD (2016). His film work Whispers won Best Irish Short at the Gaze film festival (2022). Recent solo shows include Love Letters to Cardinal Raymo at Gorey School of Art (2021), Slabs at The Complex (2021), Requiem For Raymo at The Royal Hibernian Gallery (RHA)(2022-2023), Slabs II and Whispers at The Mermaid Arts Centre (2023) and Raymo’s Spawn at Garter Lane (2024). Recent group shows Images Are All We Have at PhotoIreland Festival (2022), Speech Sounds at Visual (2022), Confessions at Lismore Castle Arts (2023), Mysterious Ways at The Glucksman (UCC) (2024) and Staying With The Trouble at IMMA (2025). Austin is a founding member and one-half of the experimental queer goth music act Satin Shadow, they have released 4 albums to date. He is currently a 3 year studio member at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.
Based in Co. Clare, Ireland, Rachel’s practice spans drawing, performance and public art. She holds a Master's in Fine Art, OCA (UCA) 2019 and a BA in Visual Communications, NCAD 1997
A former fitness professional and competitive lifter, Rachel returned to art in 2016 and has been exhibiting and performing nationally and internationally since.
Rachel co-facilitates Creative Circles, a monthly meeting for Clare-based creatives. She founded the art collective Negative Space, which have painted over 42 public artworks in Co. Clare since 2022.
In 2023, Rachel founded Here and Now; a performance art collective, and facilitates p(art)y Here and Now- a monthly participatory performance art event in Co. Clare. Rachel is the founder and co-director of the annual Here and Now Performance Art Festival, Co. Clare.
Tara Carroll is an artist with a social practice which takes the form of performance, installation & creative social spaces. Their practice rests upon the perception of the body, impacted by socio-political narratives; and its placement in society. During difficult times of embodied conflictions as a queer non-binary disabled person, their community supports them in creating new pathways of care. Exploring ways in which we seek solace and autonomy, Tara uses their work as a site to create communities and collaborations to advocate for people to access art.
Projects and exhibitions include: ‘Art as Pilgrimage’ [2022-25]; ‘84 Steps to Solace’, Planta Alta, Madrid; ‘(Dis)Comfort’, Planta Baja, Madrid [2023]; ‘Seeking Solace’, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios[2024]; ‘Just There’, TBG+S [2024],
Recent awards include: Arts Council’s Arts Participation Bursary [2023-24] & Agility Award [2022]; Creative Ireland Bursary [2023]; Create AIC R&D Award [2022]; and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Project Studio Award [2024].
Olivia Hassett is a performance artist who frequently collaborates and engages in interdisciplinary projects. She earned an MFA from NCAD in 2012 and a BFA in 1997. Hassett regularly performs with Bbeyond in Belfast and co-founded Xchange, an open platform for collaboration among live art practitioners, dancers, poets, activists, and sound artists, alongside Paul Regan. She is also a founding member of several performance art collectives: Cerberus (with Rachel MacManus and Deej Fabyc), Synaptic Space (with Rachel MacManus), and pre form (with Alan Delmar, Debbie Guinnane, Alan Magee, Ciara McMahon, and Tanya O’Keeffe, 2012–2014). Notable interdisciplinary projects include Diaphony, a permanent sculpture at Tallaght University Hospital inspired by dermatology consultants during a two-year residency, and the Trinity College Trees collaborations and exhibitions with Professor David Taylor, David Hackett, and TCD microscopic lab staff in 2017 and 2019.
In addition to co-curating the Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival and Xchange event with Paul Regan this September, other upcoming events include Push/Pull, with Rachel MacManus as part of Synaptic Space for the Clifden Arts Festival, and preXchange group performance with Paul Regan and invited artists Lauren Kelly, Fenia Kotsopoulou, and Marian Marcote at Rua Red for Culture Night.
Paul Regan [b. Dublin 1970] has a background in painting and image making, holds a MA in Visual Arts Practices IADT Dublin. Recurring themes in his work pertain to faith, religion, ritual, cultural identity and misappropriation. In recent years, he has developed a live performance practice to expand on ideas of compulsive action through site-specific interventions and activism. He has presented and performed at several international platforms including Manifesta [Zurich], The Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Documenta [Athens], Venice International Performance Art Week, PAB Open Bergen [NO], Performance Crossings Prague, Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, Performensk [Minsk], National Palace of Culture Sofia [BG], Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart [DE]. He has been involved with Rua Red’s annual performance art festival programme, co-curating in 2024 and 2025 also has been involved with Live Art Ireland, having previously served on the board.
Address
Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre
Plás Parthalán
Tallaght, D24 KV8N
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Admission to the gallery is free. Rua Red is proud to be supported by the Arts Council, South Dublin County Council, Creative Ireland, and the Government of Ireland; Project Ireland 2040.
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