Kilkenny Arts Festival

Various venues, Kilkenny Until Aug 19 (some exhibitions run on kilkennyart.ie

The moving image dominates the two centerpiece exhibitions of this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival.

At the Still Point, curated by Josephine Kelliher, is a multi-venue survey of the work of Irish women working in film or video. It includes works with a strong performative element, including Possession by Aideen Barry and Cecily Brennan’s Unstrung. Áine Phillips takes on the performing role in Redress, a collaborative allegorical work about institutional abuse in Ireland, made with Vivienne Dick. Jesse Jones’s The Predicament of Man (above) dips into the apocalyptic sci-fi genre. Anita Groener’s Somewhere Else is a drawing-based animation. Niamh O’Malley meditates on space, movement and time in Island. Tracy Hanna and Deborah Smith both use a variety of means to transform workaday perceptions of the world.

The Butler Gallery, meanwhile, features selected video works by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck, whose Sea of Tranquility was seen as part of Dublin Contemporary. It’s showing with three other works, including a new piece. Hypnotic and visually remarkable, with lavish production values, they’re well worth seeing.