My performance 'Cyber Horse and I' was created for the touring group show 'What do we Want?' when it was shown in An Gailearaí in Co Donegal. The performance was filmed and photographed by Jacqui Devenney Reed in March 2025.

Jill Gibbon, Bernadette Hopkins, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Manal Mahamid, Miriam McConnon and Tom Molloy. Curated by Olivier Cornet.

To begin, a quote from Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations: 

“Peace is needed today more than ever. War and conflict are unleashing devastation, poverty and hunger, and driving tens of millions of people from their homes.”

This group exhibition is a response to the increasingly dangerous geo-political situation in the world today. It features the work of five artists: Jill Gibbon, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Manal Mahamid, Miriam McConnon and Tom Molloy.  Performance artist Bernadette Hopkins from Donegal was invited to make a contribution to the theme of the exhibition.

‘What do we want?’ is a mixed-media exhibition that includes painting, film, photography and sculpture. Each artist presents work that reflects a personal and creative response to current geo-political threats. Overall, the exhibition is one that promotes a dialogical rather than didactic approach to answering the question what do we want? The work on show forms an arc that connects early 20th Century conflicts to the present day wherein war, through the faux respectability of the international arms trade, is exposed as a commodity.

Jill Gibbon, a UK-based artist, makes the point that to stop wars, we must address the arms trade. In this exhibition, the artist shows a selection of work she made in-situ at international arms fairs in Paris and London. Disguised as an arms trader, she draws attendees and collects ephemera from the stalls. Her pretence as a respectable businesswoman is a metaphor for the facade of respectability in the industry. Her sketchbook drawings presented as a concertina reveals the hidden truth. The exhibition will also include a selection of ‘gifts’ given away to attendees of these fairs. To quote Gibbon “Nothing conveys the chilling priorities of the arms trade as clearly as its marketing”.

Bernadette Hopkins is an Irish visual artist based in Donegal. In this performance ‘Cyber Horse and I’, she addresses several key challenges in global cybersecurity, particularly for neutral countries. She draws attention to the lack of universal recognition and application of international law in cyberspace. Recent weakened ability of the UN to coordinate global responses creates a complex environment for neutral countries like Ireland, as they attempt to maintain sovereignty in cyberspace while more powerful states may be less susceptible to international pressure or consequences for cyber crimes. Neutral countries also face potential risks when installing cyber defence systems with the possibility of spyware from other countries being present in the systems. Closer cooperation with other states for cyber capacity building may be necessary but could potentially compromise strict neutrality and create cyber colonisation…a dangerous fusion of AI and authoritarian regimes. 

Eoin Mac Lochlainn is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In recent years he has made several hundred charcoal and wash drawings to explore the trauma of the Irish Civil War: "Each piece was an attempt to represent a soul, someone with dreams and ambitions, someone whose life had been cut short by the conflict - but that project put global conflicts in perspective for me and, as I continued to develop the work, I began to view War as a failure of empathy, a failure of Humanity. And whatever the cause, when it comes down to it, it’s always some mother’s son, it is somebody’s sister or brother, somebody’s neighbour who is killed."

 In response to the increasingly worrying situation across the world, the artist's body of work is a reminder that peace should never be taken for granted. It needs to be nurtured - and the cycle of violence brought to an end. To quote President Michael D. Higgins: “We have to reject the suggestion that war is the natural human condition or indeed that xenophobia is a natural human condition, or that people of different religions or cultures cannot reconcile (and) live harmoniously… We have to pursue a new symmetry. Our very species’ survival depends on that now, as does our relationship with other species.”

Manal Mahamid is a multidisciplinary Palestinian artist based in Haifa and Dublin since 2020. The Palestinian Gazelle (2017) leads viewers on a metaphorical journey through the landscapes of historical Palestine, deliberately bypassing the numerous barriers and checkpoints imposed by Israeli colonial forces. Holding one of her Palestinian gazelle sculptures, artist Manal Mahamid physically and symbolically retraces pre-Nakba territory, reclaiming a sense of freedom and identity. The gazelle motif—sparked by Mahamid's encounter with a three-legged gazelle in an Israeli zoo, labelled "Palestinian gazelle" in Arabic and English but "Israeli gazelle" in Hebrew—highlights the cultural appropriation embedded in colonial narratives. Through the embodied act of running, The Palestinian Gazelle interrogates the entanglements of land, life, and settler colonialism, prompting viewers to reflect on movement, survival, and the complexities of heritage.

Miriam McConnon is an Irish artist based in Cyprus. Miriam McConnon’s recent work presents the individual stories of young male refugees in paintings and sculpture of personal objects that narrate their journey of displacement, of integration and of aspirations for the future. The work looks at the many layers to these stories, disenabling the categorization of ‘refugee’ to define these young men highlighting the idea that the freedom of movement is a privilege not a human right.

In the series of paintings The Refugee’s Armour, the viewer is presented with a male suit jacket suspended from a wire. Each suit jacket bears decorative patterns that originate from personal objects related to the individual journey of displacement. These jackets represent each young male refugee’s armour or safety net against the issues they face in their attempt to establish a new life following conflict and war.

With these works, Miriam’s goal is to expose the lesser told narrative of integration into a new society following conflict, exploring the vulnerability of the young male in the face of prejudice. Both Cyprus and Ireland (the edges of the EU border) have seen rising tensions against immigrant communities with recent organised protests outside refugee accommodation which seem focused on framing the young males as a threat and a danger to society. Miriam isolates the personal story from the collective narrative in this new body of work, examining the psychological armour to protect, personal objects to connect and clothing to bear witness and providing a voice to tell the most human of stories.

Tom Molloy is an Irish artist based in France. He addresses contemporary geopolitics in drawings, photographs and paper sculptures. His practice is concerned with the examination of power in a political and historical context and how it can be, and has been perverted, which raises philosophical questions about morality. Tom challenges the observer’s perception by creating ambiguous works that investigate the overlap between representation and association. For example, in ‘Contact’ (2010) he creates a contact sheet of 36 iconic war images which are out of chronological order so that in reality it is an impossible roll of film to have taken. His work creates a new narrative of the history of war which tests our understanding of linear temporality and representation.


Oliver Cornet is the founder of the Olivier Cornet Gallery which is located at 3 Great Denmark Street in the Parnell Square Cultural Quarter, in Dublin’s Northside. The gallery is one of Ireland’s most exciting contemporary fine art galleries, representing accomplished visual artists working in a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography and fine prints. The gallery hosts solo exhibitions as well as curated group shows. Olivier collaborates with other cultural workers and practitioners of diverse art forms to engage with the public in new and very interesting ways. He conceived the concept for ‘What do we want?’ and the exhibition was first shown in the Olivier Cornet Gallery in April/ May 2024 before it travelled to QSS in Belfast in August/September 2024