Orla Barry: Belgian Art Prize Winner Explores Text and Memory

Orla Barry, born in 1969 in Wexford, Ireland, lives and works in Brussels. Her work centers on the tension between text, representation, and familiar context. In 1994, she placed strange classified ads in a local newspaper, engaging anonymous readers. She continues this dialogic form in diaries like Blue Volume and Barmaid Notebook, capturing fleeting thoughts. Her abandoned business cards serve as signs of passing moments. She calls her friends 'undercurrents.' Her practice includes performances, exhibitions, and sound pieces with absurd logorrhea inspired by theater, philosophy, fiction, and biography. In the film Foundlings, she films coastal rocks of her native Ireland while chanting names. She collects objects like a child, arranging them in curiosity cabinets at the Dublin Museum of Modern Art. In Stoney Scrabble at Bastardstown, pebbles replace letters. Winner of the Prix de la jeune peinture belge in 2003, she continues with the film Portable Stones (2005), recounting memories in a melancholic rhythm.