Siobhan Hapaska.

SIOBHAN HAPASKA KERLIN GALLERY, DUBLIN BRYNE MCLAUGHLIN

Irish-born, London-based artist Siobhan Hapaska is known for her wilfully enigmatic sculptural and photo works that deal with violence, protest and an ongoing search for an indeterminate elsewhere. She takes up these themes once again in Cease Firing On All Fronts," her first major solo exhibition since representing Ireland at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

The installation reads like a narrative. Part-sculpture, part-photography, each element is a chapter in a dystopian whole. The exhibition opens with a sculpture of a taxidermied donkey fitted with riot-police armour. Behind the donkey is a stand of three palm trees, their bases piled high with sandbags and trunks wrapped in protective armour. Only the top leaves are visible. Here the natural world has been fortified, as if for its own protection. Across the gallery is a pair of Hapaska's signature fiberglass constructions. One is a mulching machine that chews coconuts red into one side of it into a shredded pile. The other is a plinth topped by a steel truncheon and a single coconut. The three eyes of the coconuts make an eerie impression of the human face and a set of coconuts fitted with fiberglass helmets further implicates these as stand-ins for human skulls. The contrast she sets up between her clean, stylized fiberglass sculptures and the defenceless fragility of the coconuts suggests a kind of technically sanitized remove from violence.

The second part of the installation is a series of large-scale photos. In one, the burnt-out hull of a military jet lies crumpled at the edge of a runway. In another, a lone airline hostess walks away, suitcase in hand, from the wreckage of a jet. Both suggest evidence of a destructive tendency and the uncertain future for the survivors who escape.

Is the exhibition Hapaska's prediction of a possible future? Or is she a future archaeologist presenting a metaphoric museum of the 21st Century? As in much of her earlier work, a direct answer to these questions remains vague. The only clue comes in a photo that shares the exhibition's title. In it, a class of primary school students sits attentively as their teacher writes, "Cease filing on all fronts" on a chalkboard. One of the students looks over his shoulder directly at the viewer, signaling we are also part of this lesson. It's a cautionary tale, to be sure, but not one without hope.