NCAD Gallery is delighted to introduce lens-based artist, photographer, and maker Louis Scully as the 2024 gallery incubation residency awardee. For the NCAD Gallery Incubation Residency, the gallery space is used as a process-based workspace and field research platform. Scully will utilise the gallery space from June to September 2024 for the research & development of both his practice and recent graduate film work Empathising with the Enemy.
Empathising with the Enemy by Scully is a lens-based project and film work developed through forging a network of individuals and organisations located in the geographic areas of Palestine and Israel - made manifest through a dialogical approach of interviewing activists' of varying communities who voice their wider perspectives' from within the contested occupied territories of Israel-Palestine. The original film work, filmed in March-April 2024, features nine Palestinian and Israeli activist interviews' that include interviewees: Noor A’Wad, Tom Mehager, Naser Odat, Mohamad Jamous, Ofer Shorr, Rana Salman, Danielle Cantor, Rav Hanan Schlesinger and Or.
The work is sensitive, arresting and a significant document at a historically devastating and poignant moment in time, offering an intimate and insightful examination of political failure, and the impact of ideological conviction.
During his time at the gallery Scully will continue to connect with Palestinian and Israeli activists' working towards ending the occupation and achieving peace and equal rights for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to inform his work - which combines modern storytelling processes with traditional media such as analogue photography, darkroom activity and letterpress printing.
Curator Anne Kelly, NCAD Gallery.
Link to Louis Scully's NCAD graduate page here.
Image [video still] Empathising with the Enemy, 2024 by Louis Scully. Video still of Naser Odat, a Palestinian filmmaker, singer, and activist leading the Standing Together movement in Haifa. Standing Together is a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement fighting for peace, equality, and social justice in Israel-Palestine.
