Image meets design and a soundtrack to create a stunning exhibition in the Docklands superb new exhibition space.
Eamonn Doyle, one of Ireland’s most celebrated and influential photographers, invites audiences into a richly layered, multi-sensory world with his latest exhibition, AS IF. Best known for his instinctive, striking images that capture fleeting moments of everyday life, Doyle’s work has long balanced intimacy with raw observation. Presented in collaboration with artist-designer Niall Sweeney and composer David Donohoe, AS IF moves beyond the traditional boundaries of photography, transforming still images into an immersive dialogue between image, sound, and space.
Presented by PhotoIreland, the exhibition is on view at the International Centre for The Image until April 5th. Rather than positioning photography as a static medium, AS IF is conceived as an environment that unfolds across multiple screens and sensory registers, inviting viewers to engage slowly and attentively with the work.
Over the past two decades, Doyle’s work has played a significant role in shaping contemporary Irish photography, gaining international recognition for its emotional intensity and formal rigour. His images often occupy a space between documentation and abstraction, capturing gestures and moments and feel both immediate and unresolved. While his street photography is widely recognised, Doyle’s practice has increasingly expanded beyond the single photographic image, incorporating sound, sequencing, and installation as ways of exploring how images are encountered over time. AS IF can be understood as a continuation of this trajectory, extending his long-standing interest in presence, rhythm, and physical engagement into a fully immersive environment.
Doyle’s photographic practice has consistently focused on moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed: gestures, movements, and fragments of everyday life that feel both fleeting and charged. His images are often defined by their immediacy, yet they also resist easy interpretation, lingering somewhere between documentation and abstraction. In AS IF, this attentiveness to the everyday is re-imagined through collaboration, expanding the photographic image beyond the frame and into a shared sensory field.
Designed by Sweeney and accompanied by a soundscape composed by Donohoe, the exhibition blurs the lines between visual art, music, and spatial design. Rather than presenting photographs as isolated objects, AS IF is structured as a unified experience in which image, sound, and space are conceived together. Viewers are encouraged to move through the installation, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through duration, repetition, and proximity.
At the heart of AS IF is a collaboration grounded in long-standing creative relationships. Doyle has worked with both Sweeney and Donohoe for decades, and the exhibition emerged naturally from that shared history. “It’s three friends – we’ve been working together for a long time,” Doyle explains. He has collaborated with Sweeney since the early 1990s and with Donohoe since the mid-1990s, with all three artists developing parallel practices over several decades.
AS IF, Doyle says, is “just a natural extension of our work together.” Rather than assigning rigid roles, the collaboration allowed each artist’s specific interests and specialisations to overlap and inform one another. Photography, sound, and design were not treated as separate disciplines, but as interdependent elements within a single work.
Initially, the project began as an idea for a film-like piece made from still images. “We’d made this nine-screen piece and after that we made a single-screen piece,” Doyle explains. Wanting to continue working together, the artists approached AS IF as a continuation of their work. “It was just like, ‘let’s carry on’.’’
As the project developed, its form remained deliberately open. “AS IF actually started as an idea of a single piece,” Doyle recalls, “maybe it was going to be nine screens, maybe it was going to be a weird form.” Rather than committing to a fixed structure, the artists allowed the work to evolve organically over time.
This openness extended to the way the work was made. The artists built a temporary room in a garage in Ranelagh, using it as a closed-off environment in which image, sound, and movement could develop together. “We built a room and put people into it with the intention of ‘let’s just see what happens’,” Doyle explains. Within this space, they began photographing, recording, and experimenting, allowing the work to unfold without a predetermined outcome.
The process spanned over two and a half years and involved drawing, movement, and repeated experimentation. Rather than aiming for polish or resolution, the artists prioritised exploration, allowing the work to take shape through repetition and physical engagement.
Physicality is central to both the making and the experience of AS IF. Doyle describes the project as ‘a very physical work,’ noting that the process was ‘sometimes quite arduous.’ This physical labour – constructing, dismantling, and reconfiguring the work – is embedded within the exhibition itself.
Encountered during installation, elements of AS IF existed in a state of transition: images awaiting placement, screens yet to be fully activated, and the spatial logic of the work still taking shape. This sense of flux mirrors the exhibition’s conceptual foundations, reinforcing its resistance to fixed meanings or viewpoints. Rather than presenting a finished statement, AS IF embraces openness and reconfiguration, reflecting the artists’ emphasis on process over resolution. The work is not positioned as something to be grasped immediately, but as an environment that reveals itself gradually, shaped by movement, time, and attention.
The installation can be understood as an expansion of the original room the artists built, allowed to reform and reorganise itself within the gallery space. Doyle describes it as ‘an expanded explosion of the original set,’ one that resists fixed viewpoints or singular readings. The work does not present itself all at once, but instead unfolds gradually as viewers move through it.
This emphasis on physical engagement reflects the artists’ interest in spaces such as clubs and theatres. “We always go back to the idea of clubs and theatre in some sense,” Doyle explains. A club space, he notes, is ‘a space you bring people to that’s closed off from the outside world.’ Within that space, sound, bodies, and visuals interact in real time, creating an experience shaped as much by presence as by content. Elements of this thinking are embedded throughout AS IF.
Central to the exhibition is the relationship between sound and image. Rather than treating photography and music as separate components, the artists approached AS IF as a unified sensory experience. ‘The sound sort of activates the images and the images activate the sound,’ explains Donohue. Think of them as being the same thing.”
Donohoe continues this sentiment, emphasising that sound and image were never conceived independently. Although they engage different senses, he describes them as working together in the same way we experience the real world. ‘There isn’t just one feed of things,’ he notes. From this perspective, AS IF adopts what Donohoe describes as ‘a multi-sensory articulation of ideas.’
Rather than using sound to explain or enhance the images, the exhibition treats sound and image as equal elements. Donohoe suggests that this approach is no more unusual than the presence of sound in film. “Maybe it’s a filmic approach,” he explains, adding that we rarely question why film includes sound. In AS IF, sound, image, spatialisation, and context are all considered part of the same structure.
Although the project began with the idea of making a film, it was never intended to function as a conventional cinematic work. Structurally, Sweeney explains, it was always ‘about dismantling moments and repositioning them.’ Rather than allowing time to flow uninterrupted, the artists focused on fragmenting and reassembling moments across multiple screens and forms.
One of the core conceptual frameworks behind the work, Donohoe explains, was ‘the multiple potential moments there always are in a single moment.’ This idea informed both the visual language of the exhibition and its approach to time. References to crystallisation and cubism emerge through the way moments are fractured and reconfigured, offering multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Still images play a crucial role in this process. “You’re not just switching on a camera and allowing a flow,” Sweeney notes. “You’re actually deciding on every single still.” Each image is the result of deliberate choice, resisting the passive capture associated with continuous recording. These decisions are mirrored across the installation, where images crystallise into prints, screens, and spatial elements.
In this way, AS IF resists linear narrative and fixed interpretation. Instead, it invites viewers to assemble their own experience of the work as they move through it. Meaning is not prescribed, but allowed to shift depending on where one stands, what one notices, and how long one chooses to remain.
The exhibition reflects a belief that all art forms can operate together rather than in isolation. Doyle describes this simply as the idea that ‘all arts are one,’ with each discipline resonating sympathetically with the others. Photography, sound, movement, and space are allowed to overlap, creating a work that feels both cohesive and open-ended.
Presented by PhotoIreland, AS IF sits within a broader programme that foregrounds experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to image-making. The exhibition’s placement at the International Centre for The Image underscores its departure from conventional photographic display, aligning it with practices that prioritise installation, sound, and spatial experience. Within this context, AS IF functions not only as an exhibition but as a site of encounter, one that asks viewers to reconsider how photographs operate when freed from the wall and allowed to exist alongside other sensory forms. The result is a work that feels attuned to contemporary questions around attention, embodiment, and the politics of looking.
Less concerned with explanation than with experience, AS IF offers a space in which image, sound, and spatial design exist in continuous dialogue. The exhibition reflects decades of collaboration between Doyle, Sweeney, and Donohoe, resulting in a work that feels at once intuitive and carefully constructed.
On view at the International Centre for The Image from February 6th to April 5th, AS IF offers audiences the opportunity to encounter these artists’ practices in immersive, multi-sensory form. Visitors are invited to move freely, linger, and construct their own interpretations, making each experience of AS IF uniquely personal, shaped not only by what is seen and heard, but by how it is perceived over time.
Words: Kate Greene
Images: Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney, and David Donohoe, AS IF
6th February – April 5th 2026
Free Entry 11am-5.30pm. Closed on Mondays.
International Centre for the Image, Coopers Cross, Mayor Street Upper, North Wall, D01 E5Y8
