Bryony Dunne, Untitled from The Sky Only Welcomes Those with Wings

Untitled from The Sky Only Welcomes Those with Wings
2023
Photography
50 x 25 cm Framed
Edition of 8
€600 Framed (includes 13.5% VAT)

About the Work

Emerging from a body of research into the entanglement of manmade systems and nonhuman life, The Sky Only Welcomes Those with Wings juxtaposes the vantage points of birds and people, exploring humanity’s preoccupation with control, hierarchies and omniscience. The book departs from two film projects filmed across Greece, Egypt and Ireland that take up themes of migration, border ecologies and ornithomancy. Alongside a selection of stills, script excerpts and research images, Dunne presents her own expository footnotes as well as commissioned texts by artist Suzanne Walsh, film critic Mouwafak Chourbagui and curator Daphne Vitali.

Shifting perspectives and temporalities, it oscillates from the telescopic to the panoptic, from the divination practices of the ancient Greek imaginary to the clumsy artifice of the modern nation-state system, from the rooftop pigeon coops of Cairo to the military and ornithological infrastructure of the Mediterranean. Through the thermal infrared cameras of aid workers, miniature camcorders mounted to eagles, birdwatching binoculars, border surveillance apparatuses and satellite tracking imagery, this lithe volume provides insight into how birds see and are seen, in hopes that we might begin to see our own systems for what they are: neither natural nor inevitable, however normal they may appear.

About the Artist

Bryony Dunne is an Irish visual artist and filmmaker who operates at the intersection of documentary film, sculpture, photography, and the natural world. Building interconnected narratives that often incorporate fact-based fictions and speculative futures, her research-driven projects explore the power dynamics between humanity and nature as well as fantasies of human control. Her work has been exhibited at the Mosaic Rooms (London), Gypsum and Townhouse galleries (Cairo), the Irish Film Institute (Dublin), and DEPO (Istanbul), among other venues. She has participated in a number of international film and video festivals, including the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (Greece), Cork International Film Festival (Ireland), and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. She was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht during the 2021–2022 cycle and is currently undertaking a research fellowship for a new film with Onassis Air in Athens.

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