A Question of Taste: Suzy O’Mullane

CORK-BASED artist Suzy O’Mullane has a performance/video/sound event at The Guesthouse, Cork, with Harry Moore on Saturday at 3pm. She will also have a solo exhibition entitled ‘There Was Nothing Good About Good Friday’ at the Origin Gallery in Dublin from March 12.

Best recent book: An Area Of Darkness, by VS Naipaul, a travelogue, and forms part of a trilogy. It describes a visit by the author to India, in the 1960s. I like well-written travelogues in general, when they transport the reader to inaccessible places. I also read John Banville’s Ancient Light, which is beautiful in terms of prose style and pathos.

Best recent film: Blood Rising, directed by Mark McLoughlin, featuring artist Brian Maguire. It’s a documentary which is set in Juárez, a city in Mexico nicknamed ‘the capital of murdered women’ where there are lot of femicides, to which the authorities turn a blind eye. Best recent show/exhibition: Carrie Mae Weems who is described as a “socially motivated artist whose works invite contemplation of race, gender, and class”, which I saw at the Guggenheim, NY. Her ‘Kitchen Table Series’ (1990), is a series of b/w studies of African American family interacting at a kitchen table, under a single stark kitchen light. What resonated with me was the intimacy and honesty of these works, which examine domestic, gender and identity issues.