SOD SCRAPER PROGRAMME
Exhibition opening 18 September, 2025, NCAD Gallery, 6—8PM. All are welcome to attend. Performance by Jack Galligan on the opening evening at 6.30PM sharp (duration appox. 10 minutes).
Exhibition continues 19 September—15 October, 2025. Monday—Friday, 11AM—6PM.
Culture Night 2025 19 September, NCAD Gallery, 5PM (40 minutes).
Join the artists Jack Galligan, Jennifer O'Brien, and Nicholas Sidarchuk with NCAD Gallery curator Anne Kelly on a public Walk-Around the exhibition with audience Q&A.
Panel Discussion Event 24 September 2025 (60 minutes, event time tbc).
Join us for our public panel talks and Q&A event with invited speakers Donal Lally (TU Dublin), Sinéad Mercier (UCD), 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 performance, documentation, and site research, O’Brien navigates the entangled histories of protest, industrialisation, and erasure, drawing a line from the contested M3 motorway - cut through the Tara landscape and the wooden henge at Lismullen - 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 distance and controlled access.
Together, the exhibition articulates 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 stone circle and 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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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.
NCAD Gallery, 100 Thomas Street, Dublin D08 K521. Contact: Anne Kelly, Curator, NCAD Gallery.
