Oppositions & Dialogues understands opposition as an essential, productive force of our culture and politics. Strikes, election campaigns, parliamentary debates, peace treaties, divorces, and legal proceedings are only a few key words that make the character of political and private everyday life clear. Differences of opinion, standpoints, or convictions often lead to conflicts in the political or public field. Aside from the negative aspect of the conflict, opposition or duality also contain the positive, productive aspect of joint debates and rapprochement through which innovations can come about. The exhibition presents the use of opposites and juxtapositions as a means of artistic expression as well as artistic dealings with political and cultural oppositions and areas of conflict. The productive aspect of dualities is often expressed in contemporary art by means of interaction. Juxtapositions are constructed in order to dissolve them through a form of interaction. An essential aspect of the exhibition is therefore the representation of pictorially imminent as well as actual forms of interaction in contemporary art.

An Eye for an Eye chronologically traces developments in Irish history by including artists who have visually represented events such as the rise of revolutionary and constitutional nationalism, partition and statebuilding, to the years of violent conflict beginning in the late 1960s and known as the Troubles . Irish artists have left strong images in response to these events. Yet none of the artists in the exhibition gratuitously extol violence. Nor are any of the artworks propagandist in nature. Rather the artworks suggest alternative responses and relationships to conflict in Ireland; from Jack Yeats personal and introspective Going to Wolfe Tone's Grave or Sir John Lavery s grand Pro-Cathedral Dublin Michael Collins), which addresses the aftermath of conflict on the scale of national mourning, to TP Flanagan s poignant The Victim a highly personal work, universal and local in its significance, which tells the story of innocent, civilian death as a result of conflict. The exhibition seeks to offer moments of twentieth century Irish history to the viewer for examination, contemplation and even revision. The artworks have been chosen to encourage reflection on a complex period of history. By presenting images of quality and importance, which provoke a questioning of presuppositions or received views the exhibition is an invitation to reflect on the complexities of the past rather than a formula which seeks or offers answers

Exhibition guide to Getting Even: Oppositions + Dialogues in Contemporary Art and An Eye for an Eye: Representations of Conflict in 20th Century Ireland, exhibitions held in the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork, Ireland, from November 14, 2008 to March 1, 2009.