What’s next for … Dublin’s experimental nighttime culture?

Welcome to What’s Next, a new culture column focusing on emerging and experimental art and artists. What’s Next will track new creative endeavours, artists’ ideas, and alternative scenes and events. First up: how cultural space is being reinvented for nighttime culture in Dublin

Towards the end of 2023, some nights out in Dublin city demonstrated a strange and welcome shift in what’s happening after dark. It’s a curious outcome of what happens when the lack of cultural space beyond existing galleries and cultural institutions meets new funding strands, amenable gatekeepers, and inventive artists and promoters.

In early November at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College, Bill Harris, who also goes by Bull Horris, presented Foil Curtains and Fog Machines. It was a compelling and rich evening with a perfectly pitched ambience, featuring the artists Rhys Patterson, Forgetful Angel, Cáit Fahey, Nick Nikolaou and Tadhg Kinsella. As passing tourists stared quizzically outside searching for the source of rumbling bass, a series of performances unfolded that created an alternative path for what a night out in a gallery can feel like.

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The brutalist architecture of the space, performances across dance, live music and Fahey’s brilliant DJ set, all colluded to blur genre and form, creating an evening with an undefined utopian edge. The event asked as many questions as it answered. What is possible in such spaces? And are we seeing a new strand of culture emerge in the capital, where avant-garde performance and ambitious events are finding a groove in the city’s cracks?

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The night after that event, Haunted Dancehall began a three-day-and-evening stint at the National Concert Hall. The impeccably curated festival of experimental music spearheaded by Leagues O’Toole took over the entire building, with magic in every room. The crowd, diverse in age and taste, appeared drawn to the attributes of quality and eclecticism. After just two outings, Haunted Dancehall has solidified its spot as a world-class festival in the Irish cultural calendar.

Commercial development in Dublin has at times literally levelled cultural spaces. So why is art that’s seen as “less commercial” expressing itself so vibrantly in the city? I spoke to Fernando Sánchez-Migallón Cano, the Douglas Hyde Gallery’s learning and engagement curator, and he said their Late Thursdays programming was about “giving space to other voices away from the mainstream and expanding the room for exploration. Our aim – and I hope we’re achieving it – is creating a space for alternative voices, and a richer experience for everyone.”

There are new pockets of funding, some of it flowing from the intentions of the Nighttime Economy Taskforce, such as the Late Night Events Pilot Programme and the After Hours funding strand. Harris’ event was built into the gallery’s regular programming, but funding from the After Hours strand allowed for an expansion of the Late Thursday events.

Harris – who is also involved in the nomadic (by necessity) queer party, Tender – told me this emergence of cultural activity at night in galleries and other arts venues feels like “the space between” clubs and other cultural spaces. “There are certain galleries that young people just wouldn’t be in,” he said, “They can be inaccessible, with big stepping stones needed to get into them. Once you have this little bracket of funding that can enable you to come in for a night, it reinvents the space in ways that are really needed.” He also pointed out the challenges of negotiating a blank space. “Setting up a DJ table and a projector isn’t enough for a space that’s wide and cavernous. It might feel bright, exposed.” A room painted white, he said, “is much more terrifying to dance in than a room painted black”.

In 2022, the collective Temporary Pleasure built an “ephemeral club” at the Complex arts space in Dublin 7. The Complex is another example of an arts space adapting to occasional evening events, such as the horror film event Slaughterhouse, which on January 26th will be at Hen’s Teeth in Dublin 8, hosting a South Asian horror night in collaboration with DJ and broadcaster Tara Kumar’s Kumar Klub.

Working with what already exists is as much about necessity as it is invention. The temporary club space, Silo, at the RDS in Dublin 4, now bills itself as “Ireland’s biggest electronic music venue”. Effectively a hall transformed into a warehouse-style nightclub, Silo began hosting events around bank holiday weekends in late 2023. Most recently, Annie Mac’s Before Midnight party there on New Year’s Eve, was incredible fun.

Yet spaces that aren’t purpose-built for what they’re hosting aren’t perfect. There are sound issues in those cavernous RDS halls, which can both echo and muffle, rather than create the sense of immersion a purpose-built club does. And yet the space is still transformed. In this context, it makes sense for Silo to book the Spanish electronic dance music party, elrow, which goes big on spectacle, this St Patrick’s Day. Silo is operating in a different commercial context to free and publicly funded events, reflected in the admission price, with tickets costing about €70.

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Ephemerality breeds experimentation but it’s not a permanent solution to the dearth of alternative cultural space in Dublin. Yet what’s coalescing now – the weird outcome of there being so little cultural space that people are finding ways to negotiate galleries, cultural institutions and exhibition halls; the opportunity funding offers for programmers to take creative risks; a rejection of the mainstream in favour of something more inventive – is exciting.

One wonders what potential could be unlocked if more spaces existed for those who want to programme quality, experimental art in the capital, and, indeed, if artists could afford to live in the city. The new licensing laws will create a Cultural Amenity Licence for venues that don’t traditionally sell alcohol to apply for a licence to coincide with a performance or an event. If that yields more of the strange and enchanting, and allows artists the freedom to create, rather than the capital orientating itself in opposition to that desire, then things could get very interesting.