Opening reception Tuesday 2 June 4 – 6pm. Welcome!

Emergency Weather is the product of a year of research during which visual artist Ulrika Ferm (b.1972, Finland) carried out an exhaustive study demonstrating her interest in forgotten, neglected or unexplained historical phenomena. She attempts to shine a light on a specific episode in Ireland’s past; the Emergency Powers Act (1939-46) adopted by the Irish government as a way of demonstrating its neutrality during World War II. During this period in Irish history various kinds of information, including weather reports, were censored to avoid the unforeseen arrival of military aircraft or ships on Irish soil. The work is composed of a hundred archival photographs from the National Library of Ireland showing magnificent misty landscapes taken at the time of the Act. With this material Ferm has attempted to create, or speculate on, a statistical registry of meteorological conditions of the time. Her conclusions are made credible by her approach, similar to that of a scientist in the way she has collected data and carried out interviews. Yet, the individual and collective memories she has drawn together are shaded with her personal interpretation and waver between subjectivity and objectivity. Slipping between reality as it exists and reality as it is shaped, the work takes on a hybrid quality, existing as both document and fiction. Ulrika Ferm’s research is born of questions about the nature and role of censorship and raises a crucial issue for our hyper-informed world of the suppression and subsequent disappearance of information.