Destroy Dublin In This New Exhibition Satirising The Housing Crisis
Destroy Dublin In This New Exhibition Satirising The Housing Crisis
A new exhibition, titled Liquid Urbanism, is on display at The Lab Gallery in Dublin 1. The work imagines a dystopian future where a phone box, integrated with overbearing AI, is the first and only step on the property ladder.
Liquid Urbanism brings work together from 10 artists, detailing unorthodox perspectives on Ireland’s housing crisis. This includes ‘Céad Míle(Fail)te’ by Aoife Ward and Eve Woods, where viewers are invited into the “home of the future” – a disused Eircom phonebox.
Powered by a sentient AI assistant, this “home” has everything you could need, apart from space to live. Labelled a “vertical coffin”, the piece satirises an ongoing crisis of overcrowding in Irish rental properties. Ward and Woods legally acquired the phonebox in 2023, making it officially their first piece of property owned.
The work paints a future where Eircom rents out phone boxes as real estate, where the general public are entered into a lottery to be in with a chance of winning this tiny space to live.
Liquid Urbanism is also home to the newest venture from visual artists and video game designers, Han Hogan and Dónal Fullam. Following on from their last project, gamifying the Irish Housing Crisis in Mega Dreoilín, the duo are displaying their newest video game “Grand Canal Demolition Derby”. Here, users harness chaos and destroy Dublin’s docklands, targetting the tech giants that lay along The Liffey.
“Welcome to GRAND CANAL DEMOLITION DERBY, home to the Free State’s Glittering Silicon Docks. Here you’ll meet your Tech Overlords Meta, Amazon, Apple, X and Google who thrive on profit HYPER-EXTRACTION and the TOTAL OBLITERATION of our communities.”
Looking through a lens of rampant privatisation and tax avoidance, littered with PS1-style graphics and Easter Eggs such as conversations from Joe Duffy’s Liveline, former Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s yacht and the dystopian Eircom Phonebox.
Liquid Urbanism is exhibiting at The Lab Gallery until 24 April, you can find out more here.
