12 people met in an artist-led workshop in Dublin, all with different positions on gender, sexuality, and abortion.
The task: to imagine a world where we live together without trying to change one another’s minds.
12 people met in an artist-led workshop in Dublin, all with different positions on gender, sexuality, and abortion.
The task: to imagine a world where we live together without trying to change one another’s minds.
If there is conflict often food or refreshments, bring people together and decreases the anxiety or the stress of attention.
Love means different things to different people. Right wingers love each other. They love their point of view they love what they're standing for. Pro-lifers love each other. They love their viewpoints, they love their standpoint. Left wingers love each other.
Cactuses, spikes. We can put all the people we don't like in the corner.
We have some bridges as well. Bridges and ladders to move around. Sometimes you can't move away or feel trapped.
There's a little rug there with safety written on it in the home, so if you want to go hide, ‘cause I was talking about my own experience, like I live a really quite isolated life. To avoid conflict.
I'm hoping that out of the conflict in my life, that the warm heart can carry it and ray out into all the other spaces that we have.
I don't know... I wish I had an answer to that question of, how can we live with people we don't agree with?
I was walking past — a demonstration, and I very much, like. Just totally agressive. Totally lost my temper.
I think I came into this thinking that an ideal world would be about respectful dialogue and common ground.
But as we've gone through the exercise I've just thought, actually an ideal world, might well be to be surrounded by like-minded people and have that bubble.
Reimagining Opposition | Imperfect Utopias
This online exhibition explores divisions related to gender, sexuality and/ or abortion. We invite you to consider the existence of people who disagree with your positions related to gender, sexuality and/ or abortion; and imagine ways of sharing space without trying to resolve these disagreements.
The exhibition is based on a series of artist-led research workshops held in Dublin (visual art), Vancouver (music) and Glasgow (theatre) in 2023. The workshops were part of a larger research project (Beyond Opposition) interested in social differences related to genders, sexualities and abortions. The project ran in Ireland, Canada and Great Britain from 2019 to 2025. Through our research and project writing, we are developing new ways of thinking about differences related to gender and sexualities.
Find out more about the project here.
See publications and coverage of the research here.
Details on workshops (and discussion groups) here.
Information about the researchers here.
Web Design & Development is by Fallow Media
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Funding for this project was provided by the European Research Council.
Project name: Beyond Opposition. Funding Number: 817897.
https://erc.europa.eu/homepage
This website includes references to people’s positions related to gender, sexuality and abortion. This is what we mean here when we use this term:
Leah Hilliard is an artist, educator, researcher and cultural programmer whose art practice is based in joyful performance and the power of conversation. She regularly exhibits and participates in research projects in Ireland and internationally. Using conversation, colour, materials and texture she explores society, technology and connection in a technology-focused world. Leah lectures in the Media Department in the School of Fine Art at National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
