Dublin Gallery Weekend | 'Freed from desire' — A screening by Temporary Address

The screening brings together the film works of Luke van Gelderen, Frances Hennigan and Lana May Fleming and explores how identity, emotion and politics are increasingly performed through digital culture. Across Chatroulette encounters, Taylor Swift performances and the absurd persona of a pig, the artists examine the ways we present ourselves, respond to others and construct meaning online. Moving between humour, awkwardness, and confrontation, the works question where performance ends and authenticity begins, revealing how online platforms and pop culture shape our self-perception.

The total runtime for the screening is 18 mins. This will be followed by a Q&A and some light refreshments.

Luke van Gelderen
Chatroulette, 2019
10mins

Chatroullete is a durational online performance that explores the relationship between social media users through the random encounters facilitated by the video chat platform Chatroulette. Over the course of two hours, van Gelderen assumed a passive role, appearing on screen while holding a handwritten sign that asked a single question: “How do I make you feel?” By allowing each participant complete freedom to respond and choosing not to end any connection himself, the artist created a situation in which users determined both the nature and duration of the interaction. The work invited participants to confront their own reactions to another person, highlighting how digital spaces often reflect users to themselves. The resulting edited video reveals a range of responses, humorous, indifferent, awkward, and deeply lonely, offering a portrait of human behaviour, vulnerability, and self-reflection within contemporary online culture.

Frances Hennigan
Swift Economy, 2024
4 mins

Swift Economy takes its name from a term in financial media: referring to the estimated five-billion-dollar boost to the global economy generated by Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The tour's cultural reach became measurable in economic terms. This conversion from feeling to image to value is where the work begins. Fashion, music and gesture have always carried political meaning. Now they are continuously refined for emotional impact, circulation, and minimal audience alienation. The aesthetics of activism move through the same channels as everything else: optimised, circulated, performed. Swift Economy asks what happens when the aesthetics of politics and politics itself become one and the same, when the gesture gives us the feeling of action without requiring action itself.

Lana May Fleming
I’m Not A Girl (Not Yet A Woman), 2024
4 mins

Performing as a pig-fluencer, a strange hybrid character caught somewhere between human, animal and online influencer; the video follows Fleming dramatically oinking along to Britney Spears’ 2001 hit, I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman. The work plays with the familiar language of pop culture, beauty, femininity and online self-presentation, pushing it into something much stranger and sadder. This character imagines a future where human x pig genetic modification and online animal subcultures (see furries) overlap; exaggerating the ways in which we alter, groom, and optimize our bodies in the pursuit of an ideal version of ourselves. The pig becomes both ridiculous and unsettling, a body that has been transformed, performed and displayed. The video uses humour and absurdity to explore the increasingly blurred line between the physical body and the digital self and asks what happens when our desire to improve modify and reinvent is no longer confined to the limits of the human body

Dublin Gallery Weekend runs 5 – 8 November 2026, and is hosted by Contemporary Art Gallery Association (CAGA). In its fourth year, Dublin Gallery Weekend brings together Ireland’s most exciting artists, galleries, cultural institutions and creative spaces in a citywide takeover.