An art exhibition celebrating the legacy of Dracula and Nosferatu is coming to Dublin for Culture Night 2023.

The interdisciplinary exhibition is called DEAD and features virtual reality installations, 3D animations, video projections, sculptures and more. The exhibition brings vampires, monsters and the undead to life and invites visitors to Merrion Square to explore topics including life cycles, (im)mortality, and transience.

Created by students and recent graduates from six notable arts colleges in Ireland and Germany, the exhibition has emerged from the Creative Pathways programme, an initiative established by the Irish Embassy in Berlin to bring together students and lecturers based in both countries to develop collaborative and interdisciplinary artworks.

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At the start of the programme, artists based in Ireland were paired with artists based in Germany. Artists with complimentary skillsets and practices were matched and their collaboration was guided by lecturers from participating colleges.

The artworks on display in DEAD include:

• Evergreen - In their mixed media installation piece, Sona Smedkova (Atlantic Technological University Galway) and Veronika Pfaffinger (Dresden University of Fine Arts Dresden) explore the theme of immortality through physical and digital landscape.
• Susurration - The single-channel video piece by Stefania Smolkina (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig) and Dunk Murphy (University of Limerick) intertwines cinematic depictions of Dracula with the rendering of contextual aspects captured in Wismar in northern Germany, where Nosferatu was filmed.
• Ashes to Dust - Patryk Kujawa’s (Dresden University of Fine Arts Dresden) and Adrian McCarthy’s (University College Cork) video installation is the first chapter of a two-part project. The piece has been adapted for the show at the Goethe-Institut Irland in collaboration with German artist Luis Kurschner, where the second chapter Lament of Light responds to the light-filled architecture of the institute’s Georgian building in Dublin.
  
• Ana / Pack of Cigarettes - Maximiliano Sinani (Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main) and Melissa Morrigan (University College Cork) present two art pieces: a video piece that interrogates how fiction leaves its traces in the real world, and a sculpture of a modified pack of Marlboro cigarettes that casts the shadow of a coffin.
• Deathlocked Phoenix – This piece consists of an animated short film by Adrian Q. Vardi (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig) and a projection of a generative algorithm that reacts to the film, created by Manuel McCarthy (University of Limerick). The film is presented as a video loop that depicts the futile efforts of a virtual vampire to escape immortality and embrace death.
• Last Body, Last Territory - Rocio Romero Grau’s (Atlantic Technological University Galway) and John Flindt’s (Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main) VR-installation explores the potentially devastating impact of mutations, infections, and ungovernable organisms on our lives. Body and mind, our last territory, are the first to be attacked.

Commenting on the exhibition, Goethe-Institut Director Ulrike Gasser said: “The students and graduates come from a wide range of artistic disciplines, including fine art, drama and theatre, film, and sound art, to name but a few. Through their interdisciplinary work, they explore the joint German-Irish heritage of Dracula and Nosferatu, and raise intriguing questions about life, death and the complexity of the human condition.”

“The exhibition features narratives from different European perspectives and beyond. It has been fantastic to follow the artistic and cultural exchanges throughout the programme, and to see new models for remote collaboration emerge. I encourage everyone to visit us at the Goethe-Institut to see this fantastic exhibition.”

DEAD opens at the Goethe-Institut Irland today and will run until Friday, October 27. The exhibition is free to visit, and all are welcome. For more information, visit their official website.

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