"Mesmerised under the wheezing sky we are dredged in the dust of others"
AS IF is a major new interdisciplinary work by photographer Eamonn Doyle, artist-designer Niall Sweeney, and composer David Donohoe. Shot and recorded across Ireland and Japan, it incorporates silver gelatin prints, film works, montage, sound, music, painting, drawing and text—assembling thousands of images with composed and recorded sound—unfolding as an immersive, psychologically charged articulation of the physical world and the psyche.
Niall Sweeney introduces AS IF below.
We first began discussing the idea of a new work together in 2022/23, having already completed two previous collaborative films. Made In Dublin (2019) was a nine-screen panoramic installation built from Eamonn's photographs of inner-city Dublin, combined with sound and music by David and a text written and voiced by Kevin Barry. This was followed by EX (2020), again developed in collaboration with Kevin on text and voice, and shot quite literally in the coastal waters of Ireland’s south-east. Much of the sound for EX was created by David using field recordings of coastal birds found across Ireland’s seaside landscapes.
Both works were constructed almost entirely from still images rather than filmed sequences, sometimes incorporating drawing, and always treating sound as a fundamental driving force. We knew there was far more to discover through this method: assembling sequences of stills to put time back into them, or to expose the time already embedded within them but not immediately perceptible. By stretching, multiplying and condensing time, we found new meanings, purposes and forms - applying a similar process to sound.
We often describe our collaborative process as being like a band. We might enter the garage with the germ of an idea and begin making things - a thought here, a sound there, a sequence of images set alongside or against one another, some words, some drawing - gradually pushing and pulling elements over time. Through this process, the work begins to cohere, finding its own rhythm, meaning and form, and eventually starts to lead us through its own creation.
This was the approach we consciously activated from the outset for AS IF: a process of setting up conditions ("AS") and allowing occurrences ("IF").
With actors cast from the streets of Dublin, AS IF began shooting in 2024 on an interior set - a single cube-shaped room constructed inside a warehouse. Over several months, two barefoot characters, dressed somewhere between monks’ robes and streetwear hoodies, performed a series of movements, rituals and large-scale gestural drawings using charcoal and chalk. Simultaneously, the same actors were placed in live city-street locations, where they echoed and re-enacted events that had taken place inside the room.
This process expanded into the construction of photographic negatives, photograms, maquettes, films and montages, as well as sound, including field recordings made in Japan and across Ireland.
We had always imagined the events of AS IF as taking place simultaneously within a single structure: a kind of four-dimensional hypercube in which time and consciousness become unstable. While in Japan in 2024 exhibiting Made In Dublin, we encountered a building on a backstreet in Tokyo that we immediately reimagined as this structure—the restless site of an existential nightclub‑arcade‑cum‑photographic‑darkroom.
What has emerged is a work steeped in the uncanniness of being. Moving through the convoluted spaces of this multi-dimensional arcade and its population of angular, hooded figures, AS IF presents beings who at times embody the awkwardness of human incarnation, and at others appear assembled from the broken shards and architectures of the space itself - and of one another. Driven to perform unknown rituals, syncopated movements and compulsive actions, these figures confront their own sentience through cyclical acts of self‑creation and destruction, shaping both the shifting spaces of the arcade and the bodies through which they struggle to exist.
AS IF opens at the International Centre for the Image, Dublin, on 5th February and runs until 5 April - find out more here
