Ahead of Dragana Jurisic’s solo show at the RHA in September we republish Stephanie McBride’s examination of the photographer’s 2011 show at the Droichead Arts Centre, studies of urban survival taken during the Celtic Tiger years, revealing Ireland’s struggling society.
A mixed gathering of human figures are frozen in time: waiting for a bus, avoiding eye contact, bent on ‘civil inattention’ in the flow of the everyday. Some are laden down with branded shopping bags, others are caught up in the dazed inertia of mundane rituals. Around the waiting classes are the butcher shop and fishmonger signs, once bright and colourfully confident but rusting now, fallen into disuse, no longer vital centres of a community but bypassed by convenience stores.
Paul Larmour visits the new theatre, which he describes as a boon for the dramatic arts and the most exciting building in Belfast