Cork 2005: 'A few potholes along the way" is how Triskel chairman Michael O'Connell described the business of getting Sebastiao Selgado's photographic exhibition Exodus to Cork when he spoke at its opening last week.

The number of pictures (about 500) and the specialised requirements for their mounting became an organisational nightmare for the Triskel Arts Centre and its director, Penny Rae.

Although sponsors O'Callaghan Properties offered its new retail mall at Mahon Point as a venue, this was deemed unsuitable. When the awful possibility dawned that perhaps nowhere in Cork would suit, O'Callaghan Properties offered a ground-floor section of its even newer city-centre retail and apartment block on Lavitt's Quay. But that wasn't big enough. So the company decided to give over two floors of its pristine premises on the quay, amounting to 10,000 square feet - and that for only a section of the exhibition, which will be completed with a display based in Triskel itself from July 18th. But there was another problem: the prospective tenant for that space would have to delay occupancy. City of Cork Vocational Education Committee CEO Dick Langford agreed to a change of date. Then all OCP had to do was transform a retail space into an exhibition space by installing 10-foot-high false walls and specialised lighting frames.

With a huge sigh of relief, Exodus was opened by Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Director of Justice Africa, who endorsed Selgado's injunction that viewers of these images of migration, massacre, famine and displacement must not look away.