SIOPA SEALADACHWEST BELFAST

Visit West Belfast Partnership’s exciting new POP-UP Shop in the heart of the Gaeltacht Quarter. The POP-UP Shop will provide artists, craftspeople and creatives with the opportunity to present their products and develop business and marketing skills. An exciting series of workshops are planned which will stimulate ideas generation and the development of innovative products with a west Belfast flavour.

West Belfast Partnership have invited one of Ireland’s leading artists Rita Duffy to launch the POP-UP Shop with her contemporary art project The Thaw Factory – a new retail experience presenting a range of post conflict multiples and more.

P O P U P S H O P

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THAW is a contemporary art project that fuses notions of the political and the familiar. Back in 1982 when I was working as a student in the USA, I met the artist Andy Warhol in a small Montauk grocery store. It was an inspirational meeting appropriately surrounded by shelves of canned soup and boxes of cornflakes. This was the artist who encouraged us to look again at the familiar and created a place in the art world for the concept of ‘multiples’. The ‘produce’ in our Souvenir Shop is an exploration of our shared lived experience, historical, political and social issues are reworked and presented to the viewer as irreverent thought provoking everyday commodities.

Each artifact has its own narrative and explores the role that cultural production plays in a religiously divided society. Household items are transformed through the processes of art into a selection of groceries and gifts that have multilayered and darkly humorous undertones.

The labels are a compilation of text that I have written, photographic images, or my drawings/paintings reproduced to create the ‘Thaw Factory’ brand as designed by Hurson.

Rita Duffy

P O P U P S H O P208 Falls Road, BelfastOpen Monday-Saturday 10 – 6 p.m.Sunday 1-5p.m.Telephone 02890 809202www.westbelfast-partnership.com

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