‘Productive discomfort’: artists grapple with identity’s contradictions in live ARINS podcast
by Allan LEONARD
8 May 2026

Belfast Exposed gallery on Donegall Street hosted a live recording of the ARINS “My Identity” podcast on 8 May 2026, as part of the BIEN programme — an ongoing series of exhibitions and events under the title “British? Irish? Either? Neither?”. The event was chaired by Professor Colin Graham of Maynooth University, who hosts the podcast series, with the discussion featuring artists Joy Gerrard and Paul Seawright. It was sponsored by the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression (OICE) and co-presented by Belfast Exposed and the ARINS Project, with special thanks to Dr Susie Deedigan of the University of Notre Dame, who coordinates podcast production.

The BIEN programme provides the institutional backdrop for three concurrent exhibitions at Belfast Exposed, each exploring facets of identity in this part of the world. In her opening remarks, Katy Radford, chair of OICE, set out the mission that underpins the event. The OICE works, she said, to recognise that “everybody has the right to celebrate, to affirm, and to maintain and to develop their own cultural and national identity.” It was, she added, about how artists present their work “to allow us to think and discuss, in as gentle a way or as loud a way as we feel is appropriate.”

The ARINS “My Identity” podcast

ARINS — Analysing and Researching Ireland, North and South — is a partnership between the Royal Irish Academy and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Much of its work, as Graham explained in his introduction, is what he called “hard political science”: polling on constitutional futures, evidence-based policy analysis, and research into the most significant questions facing the island of Ireland in a post-Brexit context.

The “My Identity” podcast series sits alongside that harder-edged research as a more personal and exploratory strand. In it, Graham interviews people whose ideas, work, or life experiences shed light on identity on the island — politicians, artists, writers, and others whose perspectives cut across conventional categories. Recent guests have included Drew Harris, the former Garda Commissioner who previously served as Deputy Chief Constable of the PSNI, and Jess Majekodunmi, of Nigerian-Irish descent, whose family, Graham noted with some amusement, turned out to be “more Irish than the average family — three generations through Trinity.” The series seeks people with what he called “an interesting take on contemporary identity”: those who complicate the expected narratives.

The decision to record a live episode at Belfast Exposed was a natural extension of this ambition. Both Gerrard and Seawright have work exhibited in the gallery’s current BIEN programme, and both have spent careers making art that turns political and social experience into something visually arresting and open to interpretation.

Identity as a “slippery” thing

Graham opened the conversation by noting that asking people to talk about their own identity produces a “productive discomfort” — a phrase that captures something central to the BIEN project’s ethos. Both artists reached independently for the same word to describe their relationship to identity: “slippery”.

Joy Gerrard, originally from a large rural family in Tipperary, described an identity shaped by movement and contradiction. Her grandfather served in the British Army as an Irish man; she sees herself as an Irish woman; she spent 18 years in London and has lived in Northern Ireland for eight. “I feel like I float between Ireland, England, and Northern Ireland,” she said. “I’m not altogether comfortable giving myself a very definite label.” Post-Brexit, she felt a particular estrangement: as an Irish European who had benefited from EU funding and felt welcomed in London, the referendum result made her feel, in her own word, “estranged”. The personal and the political collapsed into each other. “Your identity is kind of caught up with internal and external factors,” she reflected.

Paul Seawright, born in a working-class Protestant area of Belfast near the Donegal Road, described his understanding of identity as having evolved “almost in parallel with the practice.” He held what he called a “naive and simplistic view of the political situation” until he left for art school in England, where encounters with people from different communities — including filmmaker Séan Maguire from Derry/Londonderry — opened up entirely different narratives about the conflict. “My understanding of it was a very, very singular narrative,” he said, “and then talking to great friends and understanding their narrative — Bloody Sunday and all of that — was just a revelation.” His early photographic projects — Sectarian Murder, The Orange Order, The Police — were, he said, exercises in “working through my own position in relation to what happened in my childhood in this place.”

Art as witness: politics, protest, and the collective

For Gerrard, the relationship between identity and practice runs through witnessing. Her work is “very much about politics” — a documentary response to specific democratically produced events, photographed from aerial and surveillance perspectives so that individual identity dissolves into the collective: the work becomes about “collective power and agency.” Her Brexit painting depicted the Houses of Parliament as “wobbly”, representing both the precariousness of constitutional institutions and the fractured coalition of those who opposed Brexit but could not agree on an alternative. Her 2021 installation, Dark Europe, responded to the ceremony at which the Union Jack was removed from EU headquarters: hand-painted EU flags on silk, faded and “human and corporeal”, with the Union Jack placed separately on a ceremonial pole — “a visualisation of a moment.”

Seawright’s work moves between the local and the global. His early projects interrogated north Belfast’s built landscape; later work in Afghanistan — where the open terrain made his habitual close-framing impossible — shifted his focus towards Americans embroiled in foreign conflicts. His Volunteer series examined the recruitment of young, often immigrant Americans into the military for Iraq, documenting “the desperation of a government to find enough soldiers.” He is insistent that his work does not impose a reading: he values the “ambiguity and expansiveness” that allows viewers from entirely different contexts to find meaning. He described a visitor from the Russian-Finnish border who had found an unexpected resonance in his work on territory. “What’s wonderful about our practice,” he said, “is that it can do that.”

Hope through collective action

Graham asked whether viewers should approach the work analytically, fearfully, or hopefully. Gerrard was direct: “I see myself as an artist responding by witnessing,” she said, describing her interest in protest as fundamentally an interest in collective agency — “individuals coming together, becoming more powerful, and hopefully being able to change things.” She saw even the dispersal of a crowd as meaningful: “people will come together again.” It is, she said, “an ongoing process of action and response. You have to hope that’s affirmative.” Seawright embraced the full range of responses — analytical, fearful, hopeful. “I’ll take any of them,” he said, adding that what matters most is that the work retains enough openness to still surprise even him.

Deirdre Robb of Belfast Exposed drew the event to a close by noting that a common thread running through both artists’ work — and through the BIEN programme more broadly — is narrative: the stories people tell about who they are, where they come from, and what they believe is possible.