... the haunting, impossible worlds generated by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain in her beautifully
textured audio–video installations. She doesn't rely on cutting–edge CGI; indeed, as she notes
herself, she's not particularly techie at all. She just tries to figure out ways of achieving what
she imagines: hypnotic, in–between spaces that are both familiar and utterly strange. We
begin to orientate ourselves in a domestic interior and notice a fish swimming calmly by, then
a school of tiny fish turning in unison, then sheep grazing on a hillside. Ní Bhriain references
the Irish landscape, the sea and an indeterminate elsewhere. The Emigrant is the appropriate
title of her main piece. It has an elegiac quality that recalls Andrei Tarkovsky.