SOD SCRAPER PROGRAMME
Exhibition opening: 18 September 2025, NCAD Gallery, 6—8PM. Performance by Jack Galligan on the opening evening at 6.30PM (10 minutes). All are welcome to attend.
Exhibition continues 19 September—15 October 2025. Monday—Friday, 11AM—6PM.
Culture Night 2025, 19 September, NCAD Gallery, 5PM (40 minutes). Join artists
Jack Galligan, Jennifer O'Brien, and Nicholas Sidarchuk, along with NCAD Gallery curator
Anne Kelly, for an artist talk & public walk-around of the exhibition, followed by an audience Q&A.
Offsite billboard artwork, postcards! by Nicholas Sidarchuk, 22 September—5 October 2025.
Location: Macken St. Railway Bridge, Dublin 2. Join us on a site visit of postcards! on Friday, 26 September, 5PM.
Panel Discussion Event 24 September 2025, 5PM (60 minutes). Join us for our public panel talks and Q&A event with invited speakers. Donal Lally (TU Dublin), Sinéad Mercier (UCD),
and Paul O'Neill (University of Galway). All are welcome to attend.
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Programmed as part of the student Open Call 2025, the NCAD Gallery is delighted to invite you to SOD SCRAPER, a programme of talks, performance and exhibition of works by artists, Jack Galligan, Jennifer O'Brien, and Nicholas Sidarchuk.
Collectively, SOD SCRAPER examines the shifting relationship between Ireland’s landscape, its histories, and the hidden architectures of the global data economy. The exhibition explores the intersections of personal narrative, contested land, industrial expansion, and the cultural re-framing of digital infrastructure.
Jack Galligan’s performance work situates the body as both an operator and a spectacle within the flows of data. From a sculptural bench, echoing the stark repetition of data centre architecture, Galligan uses a mobile phone to stream live to a facing screen, transforming the act of sitting into a public stage. Ephemera, objects and tools appear as part of the staged recreation of the landscape in question. Here, self-representation becomes a form of labour - adapting, performing, and reconfiguring identity under perpetual surveillance. The bench, an object of public utility, becomes a theatre for the social performance demanded by the data economy.
Jennifer O’Brien’s Grazing Licence grounds the global in the local. Her research traces the story of Mannix Coyne’s appeal against the development of a 24.5-acre data centre in Clonee, Co. Meath, on land he had rented to graze horses. The work unfolds as a contemporary re-reading of John B. Keane’s The Field, recast in the context of globalised land appropriation. Through field recordings, documentation, and site research, O’Brien navigates the entangled histories of protest, industrialisation, and erasure, drawing a line from the contested M3 motorway to the sprawling footprint of Meta’s data centres—her work questions where the human narrative sits in a system that measures value in economic terms.
In his work Data Heritage, Nicholas Sidarchuk repositions the data centre as a tourist attraction, revealing its strange kinship with ancient monuments. Through a billboard, a heritage-style plaque, and an official-looking tourist information sheet, Sidarchuk mimics the language and visual codes of state heritage agencies. The effect is absurd, yet incisive. Industrial fortresses, normally inaccessible to the public, become 'sites' to be visited, interpreted, and consumed. His work makes visible the way both heritage and industry manage the public’s relationship to land through curated distance and controlled access.
Together, the artworks form a layered portrait of a country where global capital reshapes ancient ground, where personal histories collide with corporate expansion, and where the monumental can be both a stone circle and a server farm. SOD SCRAPER asks, who owns the infrastructure, the field, the view, and what is the cost of our connection?
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SOD SCRAPER Gallery Map
Jack Galligan
1. Waste Maker, 2025, performance and accompanying digital video, 10’mins. 1. (2) Place holder portrait image.
2. Contemporary Bench, 2025, cast and laser-etched concrete, teak, 161L x 51d x 45hcm.
3. Trip Over The Bin, 2023, MDF, paper card, printed paper and galvanised steel. 60L x 20w X 25h cm
Nicholas Sidarchuk
Data Heritage -
4. site notice!, 2025, A3 stainless steel plaque, black PVC backing base. 46w x 34d x 150h
5. information!, 2025, laser etched plywood, wooden dowel, timber frame, plywood board, poster paper, sand bags. 103w x 107d x 220h cm.
6. postcards!, 2025, off-site billboard artwork, Macken St. Railway Bridge, Dublin 4.
Jennifer O’Brien
7. Grazing Licence, 2025, 12:45 mins, 4k, 2 channel video.
8. Fridge, 2025, field recordings, 20 mins, 5:1 surround sound.
9. Headbent Slightly, 2025, dibond signage, galvanised steel, concrete base. 124w x 45d x 204h cm
10. False Monuments, 2025, laser etched acrylic panels, teak. 120w x 10d x 128h cm
* 11. Untitled, 2025, Jennifer O’Brien, digital print on hahnemühle archival paper, 42w x 59.4h cm. *
50 euro; Student price 25 euro. We are donating sales proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Payments: Revolut @artpassenger.
Please leave your contact email address with gallery@staff.ncad.ie.
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SOD SCRAPER Exhibition Team & Thanks to NCAD students: John MacAvin & Megan Denieffe, Exhibition & Gallery Install Assistants. Thanks to NCAD Colleagues: Dr. Feargal Fitzpatrick - Head of Media, Mickey Smyth - Media Senior Technical Officer, Michelle Byrne - Sculpture Technical Officer, Alan McLeod – William Walsh Workshop Technical Officer, Denise Beck - Digital Printing Technical Officer, Brendan Begley - Sculpture Technical Officer, & to NCAD Facilities: Barry Kelly, Mark Costello, and Martin Fitzpatrick.
Curator, Anne Kelly, NCAD Gallery. NCAD Gallery, 100 Thomas Street, Dublin D08 K521.
Icon image credit: Digital reproduction by Jennifer O'Brien on the occasion of the exhibition SOD SCRAPER, 2025, NCAD Gallery. Original © image courtesy of Council.ie, photographer Robert Reynolds Photography. SOD SCRAPER billboard artwork, postcards! by Nicholas Sidarchuk, kindly sponsored by Global, Dublin.
