Boundaries

Project Partner:
Dara McGrath

Date: 2 – 23 July 2005
Venue: A3 Billboards around Cork city

Project Description:
‘Boundaries – Europe between the Lines’ was a three-week photographic installation with a difference: rather than being presented in an exhibition space or gallery, ‘Boundaries’ was visible throughout the European Capital of Culture on a series of poster sites at key junctions and crossroads in Cork City.

The images, a visual documentary of internal EU border checkpoints, were the culmination of a three-year project by Dara McGrath, the documentary photographer. McGrath, a prize-winning artist, systematically documented the frontiers between 1999 and 2002. Desolate boundary outposts mark the European homeland, where travellers were often abruptly detained and inspected. Images of these border areas stimulated the connection between site and site, and ideas of inclusion and exclusion. In McGrath's art these became more than political borders: places of disruption and loneliness, of shadow and repose.

Ten separate images appeared and reappeared on mini-posters around the city for three weeks. They were placed at eye level and engaged directly with the busy urban passer-by, encouraging an awareness of one’s own identity and location in relation to other communities within the city, and bringing a European dimension to a local level in Cork.

These photographic posters on the mini billboards were particularly apt for this type of presentation - they were small, intimate, quite beautiful, located at eye-level and non-threatening, unlike conventional large billboards. Their purpose was to catch people’s eyes – to see an interesting photographic image stand out from other commercial posters.

Boundaries