Culture Night 2023: 'Dancing Flags', a public artwork by Rema Hamid

Celebrating dancing and movement artist Rema Hamid’s Dancing Flags convey what travels with a migrant community through their culture and creativity.

Rema worked on real size canvases dancing their way across the five flags – using their body to translate the music, mapping movements onto the canvas with paint. This then served as a stepping stone for the flag designs.

Linking directly to their Sudanese culture, the artist explores how physical movement (dancing) as well as geographical movement have a connection. They look to how migrants sustain their culture and how ripples of their cultures seep out from their many locations, merging with and enriching the culture of Dublin city continuously.

Rema Hamid is a multi-disciplinary artist, community organiser and poet from Sudan, based in Dublin. They work mainly through writing - prose, experimental essay’s, poetry and more recently ceramics and script writing. They hold a BA in Sociological and Political Studies and a MA in Activism and Advocacy, both from the National University of Ireland, Galway. They seek to harness their experiences into a creative field, tying their academic experience, their life and varied creative pursuits into one. Their grass roots practice is very much socially engaged creating meaningful collaborations in a community environment.

Image description: Three vertical rectangle deep-blue panels are side-by-side in a row. The three sections have mixed painterly marks in bright yellow, deep purple and cool mid pink. The marks take the form of dashes, dots, squiggles, wavy and circles. The paint marks are sparse and move across the three sections horizontally and vertically.