Artist Biographies
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles creating visions of resistance, transformation and queer possibility. He completed a BA in Visual Art Practice from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include; THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!, FACT, Liverpool; Biolytic Daughter, VSSL Studio, London (2025); you are in heaven but suddenly everything begins to burn, Kunstverein Aughrim; Uncensored Lilac, Transmediale, Silent Green (2024); ITS DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS, The Douglas Hyde Gallery (2022) I AM ERROR, Gasworks, London (2021) tour to De La Warr Pavilion, Sussex (2022); Dissolving Beyond The Worm Moon, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2019); and Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset, The LAB, Dublin (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Queer Embodiment and Social Fabric at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2021-2022), The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon (2021) and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2020). Recent screenings include the Barbican, London (2022), Transmediale, Berlin (2021), EX-IS, South Korea (2021) and Jeu de Paume, Paris (2021).
His work is part of collections in IMMA, the Arts Council of Ireland and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. In 2023 he received an award of distinction in New Animation Art from Prix Ars Electronica and in 2021 he received the Golden Fleece Award.
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George Bolster has exhibited in numerous museums, institutions, and galleries internationally, including IMMA, Dublin, Ireland; BACC, Bangkok, Thailand; Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berline, GE; MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; RHA, Dublin, Ireland; CCI, Paris, France; Ulterior Gallery, NYC, USA; and MMCA, Seoul, Korea. Bolster has been awarded numerous grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, and is the recipient of residencies at CCI, Paris, France (2019); SETI Institute, Mountain View, California (2016-17); and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, Florida, USA (2013). Bolster’s book When Will We Recognize Us was recently published by Hirmer, and his work has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Irish Art Review. He is curator for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation in NYC.
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Alan Butler (b.1981, Ireland) works with traditional and new media as a means to explore subjects and ideas related to digital culture and their role in the formation of realities. With a production modality that utilises materials and media from the history of image-making, the body of work often examines how 3D graphics, video game and cloud technologies function both ideologically and politically.
His work has been exhibited at Exposed Torino Photo festival, IT (2025); Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, SL (2025); Milan Machinima Festival, Milan (2025); V&A Dundee, UK (2024); transmediale/Akademie der Künste, DL; Royal Hibernian Academy, IE (2023); The Photographers’ Gallery, UK (2022); Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH (2018 & 2021); Akron Art Museum, USA; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2019), Transfer, New York, USA; C/O Berlin, DL (2018); Les Rencontres d'Arles, FR; Malmö Fotobiennal, SE (2017).
As part of the collective ANNEX he represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Alan Butler is represented by Green on Red Gallery, Dublin.
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Cecilia Danell (b.1985) is a Swedish-born, Ireland-based painter with a multidisciplinary practice that incorporates sculpture, film, and textiles. Her work explores landscape, memory, and the psychological impact of place through a distinctive and contemplative aesthetic. A recipient of numerous awards, Danell was recently awarded the 2024 Merrion Plinth Award and the 2022 RHA Hennessy Craig Award. She has also received the ESB Keating Award and Medal at the 190th RHA Annual Exhibition, a Next Generation Award from the Arts Council (2017), and the Wexford Arts Centre Emergence Award (2011), alongside multiple bursaries and project awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. Recent solo exhibitions include The Upside Down World, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, (2026); These Magnetic Magnitudes, Solstice Arts Centre (2025); Kevin Kavanagh Presents Cecilia Danell, Dunamaise Arts Centre (2024); A Stillness Expanded, Claremorris Gallery (2023); Brush Lightly Through Fireweed Forests, Kevin Kavanagh; Tactile Terrain, Luan Gallery (2022); I set a bait for the Unknown, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2020); In a Landscape, Ashford Gallery, RHA (2019).
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Willie Doherty (b. 1959, Derry, Northern Ireland)
Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art film and photography for four decades. Exploring the relationship between landscape and memory, Doherty’s artworks tend to begin as responses to specific terrains and evolve as complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on what stories might be told about their hidden histories. Though his primary geographic reference is Northern Ireland, and especially his native Derry – a city defined and demarcated according to the traumatic divisions of the "Troubles", Doherty has trained his lens on sites of contested histories elsewhere in the world, including Berlin, Granada, and the US/Mexico border. Observing these places in forensic detail, Doherty’s video and photo works reveal the impossibility of objectivity and historical truth, often using diptychs to set contradictory points of view against each other. His videos unfold slowly, sometimes combining material evidence with haunting fictional monologues that speak of shame, deception, brutality and its aftermath, as if leaking the stories contained within the landscape. Assessing how these sites appear to us now, Doherty uses powerful language and disorientating imagery to reflect on how we approach histories of trauma.
Nominated twice for the Turner Prize (2003, 1994), Doherty’s work has been the subject of many solo museum shows including Ulster Museum, Belfast (2021) Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena, Italy (2020) Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea (2017) Villa Merkel, Germany (2016),Museum De Pont, Tilburg (2014) Neue Galerie, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel (2013) Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2012), Towner Gallery Eastbourne (2012) Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane (2011) The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky (2011), Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2009), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2009), Lenbachhaus, München (2007), Kunstverein, Hamburg (2007), Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2006), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2002). Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999) and Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1999). Group shows include Manifesta 8 (2010), 3rd Auckland Triennial (2007), Venice Biennale 2007, 2005 and 1993, Reprocessing Reality, MOMA PS.1, New York (2006), Istanbul Biennale (2003) and the Carnegie International (1999).
Willie Doherty is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich and Galeria Moises Perez de Albeniz, Madrid.
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Rachel Doolin is an artist based in the South of Ireland. Her interdisciplinary practice merges art, experimentation and ecology of place, to create work that is informed by durational led research and driven by a desire to test the parameters of materiality, media and the criticality of issue-based practice. Doolin graduated from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design in 2015, where she completed a BA in Fine Art.
Recent exhibitions include; Open Space, Sím, Reykjavik (2024), Sculpture In Context, National Botanic Gardens (2023); Holdings, Solstice Arts Centre (2023); Heirloom, LHQ Gallery Cork County Council (2023); Heirloom, Lexicon Gallery, Dublin (2022/23); Parklife, Biodiversity in Contemporary Irish Art (2022). New Era, Artists Exploring Climate Change, Solstice Arts Centre, Meath (2020); CONNECTED, Kilkenny Sculpture Trail, The National Craft and Design Centre, Kilkenny (2020).
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Mark Garry is an artist and an educator.
Recent projects include: To hold and be held, Solstice Arts Centre, Meath (2024), Forest: Wake This Ground, Arnolfini, Bristol (2022) Songs and the Soil, Limerick City Gallery. (2021) Songs and the Soil, The MAC, Belfast. (2021) An Lucht Siúl, RAC (2021) Non-Sculpture - Light or ~ Flexible, Changwon Sculpture Biennale. Changwon, South Korea. (2021) An Afterwards. Luan Galley, Athlone. (2017) 17 Dada Post, Berlin (2017) The Hennessy Art Fund, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2017) A Certain kind of Light, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, UK. (2017); A New Quiet, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2015); Revoir Un Printemps, Galerie du 5e, Galeries Lafayette, Marseille, France (2014); We Cast shadows, City Gallery at Waterfront Park, Charleston, South Carolina, USA (2014); A Winter Light, The Model, Sligo.(2014); Karen, The Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2014). Mark was one of the artists that represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
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Hammerheads is an informal group of four Irish artists, Marie Farrington, Sibyl Montague, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Liliane Puthod. Formed during a group show in Solstice Arts Centre in Summer 2023, we have since then engaged in discussions about potential ways to collaborate, exchange and expand our practices together in a visual arts context. We work primarily in sculpture, and our individual practices share common grounds through materiality, objects, ecology, landscape, architecture, and contemporary consumerism.
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Elaine Hoey works mainly creating interactive based installations, appropriating contemporary digital art practices and aesthetics to explore the politics of digital humanity and our evolving relationship with the screen. She describes her process as ‘experimental’ and is interested in creating new forms of art whose language is digitally native though also subject to critique and informed by questions arising from complex social, political and cultural processes.
Her work often addresses and critiques themes arising from identity, place and the bio-political body. Her virtual reality works commonly include immersing the viewer in performative and often uncomfortable roles within her digitally constructed worlds. She works through a wide variety of mediums such as, virtual reality, AI systems, video, gaming, installation and live performance, including remote cyber performance.
Recent exhibitions include Desire; A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age, IMMA, (2019-2020); Unflattering, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, curated by Soojung YI, (2020); Citizen Somewhere Citizen Nowhere, The Crawford Gallery, Cork, 2020. Other exhibitions include The Dictionary of Evil, Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea; Futures, The RHA, Dublin; Turbulence, The Model Sligo; Open Codes, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; Surface Tension, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and FILE SP Fiesp Cultural Centre, São Paulo, Brazil.
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Patrick Hough is an artist from Offaly working with moving image across gallery and cinema contexts. Their practice traces the entanglement of archaeological, geological and ecological worlds, folding deep time into lived experience and material memory. Each project begins with a lingering image, a body lifted from peat, a whale stranded in an Irish bog and develops through research led moving image installations. Within these works, distinctions between human and nonhuman, life and decay loosen, allowing feral forms of relation to surface.
Their work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; MAAT, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; Para Site, Hong Kong; and the Jing’an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai. They are a recipient of the Jerwood FVU Awards (2017) and a Film London FLAMIN Productions Award (2019).
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Bernadette Kiely (b. Tipperary, 1958) studied at the School of Art & Design in Waterford and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Bernadette Kiely's practice is driven by an intimate connection to the places she paints and is the product of a process that involves a close examination of her subject through drawing, photographing and experiencing the landscape first-hand at all times of the day and throughout the changing seasons. Her paintings and works on paper expand on the themes of the passage of time and the transient, fragile nature of the physical world evident in her work to date - shifting landscapes cloaked in fog and mist, the flooding of rivers and land and shadows of trees and plant life. She is a member of Aosdána and is represented by Taylor Galleries, Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include: River(s) of No Return, The Tea Houses, Kilkenny; Towards a future floating, Arthouse, Stradbally, Co. Laois; Ashes + Rain, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny (2025); Don’t Need No Country, Don’t Fly No Flag, Galway International Arts Festival, (2024); A (new) Landscape – scenes of (a) local nature, Thomastown Creative Arts Festival (2023).
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Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh (b. 1977) is an artist based in County Wicklow. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2023, and a BA in Fine Art from Dublin Institute of Technology in 2001. Ní Mhaonaigh is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin. In 2025, Ní Mhaonaigh was elected President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, having served as an Academician since 2023. She was elected a member of Aosdána in 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Snaidhm, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2026); Sruth, An Gailearaí and Regional Cultural Centre; and Bailiúchan, The Hunt Museum, Limerick (2025). Ní Mhaonaigh’s work has been presented at major international art fairs, including VOLTA New York, Art Market Budapest, Art Rotterdam, and VOLTA Basel. Her paintings are held in many important public collections, including The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), The Arts Council of Ireland (Dublin), Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris), Ernesto Ventós (Barcelona), and O’Brien Art Collection (Chicago), as well as private collections across Ireland, Europe, and America.
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Niamh McCann (b. 1971, Dublin, Ireland)
Niamh McCann's diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, installation, painting and video, explores philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random visual juxtapositions and spatial relationships, looking toward themes of travel, globalization and urbanization within very particular social and political contexts. Using everyday objects and images from the contemporary urban environment, McCann makes visible poetry of chance connections, whimsy and paradox. McCann works with found materials, industrial processes and situations - given logos, re-appropriated signs, newspaper montages - that she alters and then reconfigures to create works as alternates scenarios or landscapes to question the quotidian means
A recipient of the 2022 Norman Houston Award from Solas Nua and a recipient of the 2021 Stephen McKenna Fellowship from the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Recent solo projects include Someone decides, hawk or dove, Stable Arts, Washington DC and Solstice Arts Centre, (2023); Someone decides, hawk or dove, The MAC, Belfast (2024); Hairline Crack (a dialogue), Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2023) and Wilhelm- Hack Museum, Germany (2022); Tableau Vivants, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2022) and Furtive Tears, The Hugh Lane Gallery (2019); AT, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2018), La Perruque, MAC, Belfast; Just Left of Copernicus (The Pastoral), Solstice Arts Centre, Meath; Just Left of Copernicus (A Prologue), Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick (2016); Just Left of Copernicus (Roof of the Story), VISUAL Carlow (2015); The Void Gallery, Derry (2011). McCann’s work is housed in the collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon; Limerick City Gallery, Swansea City Council; The London Institute; Hiscox, London and Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. She is represented by Green on Red Gallery, Dublin.
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Eleanor McCaughey (b. Dublin, Ireland) studied at TU, Dublin. Selected exhibitions include Panorama Europa, The Glucksman, University College Cork; Songs to the Siren, The Model, Sligo; Silent Parlours, Linenhall Arts Centre, Co Mayo (2026). When you open your door to a mountain, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; Moments of Being, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2025); A sea change, into something rich and strange, RHA; Whispers of rhythm balance on my hands, Draiocht, Blanchardstown; Swallowing Mist to Lick Your Mouth, Liminal Gallery, Margate, England (2024); Forget your cares, sow your wild oats, sin is a wonderful disease, Kevin Kavanagh (2023); Bones in the attic, Hugh Lane Gallery (2022); Woman in the machine, Visual Carlow; Super Market Art Fair, Stockholm (2021), What remains of this place?, online exhibition (2020), Vignettes, Richard Heller Gallery, LA USA (2019). Eleanor McCaughey is a recipient of the Fingal County Council Bursary (23/22/21), Arts Council Ireland Bursary Award (22/21/20), The Fingal County Council, RHA Residency Award (2022), The Temple Bar Project Award (2021), and the Next Generation Award (2018). Her work is represented in the OPW, Arts Council Ireland art collection, and private collections in Ireland, Europe, United States and Canada.
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Lucy McKenna
Lucy McKenna's work is concerned with the observation and interpretation of data relating to our understanding of the universe. She looks at the systems that attempt to explain our place in it, who owns them and the perspectives that those systems include or exclude. Through research and process, she explores different methods of data extraction, collection and use; including instinct, scientific experiment, technology, language, storytelling, folklore and mythology. Informed by this research, McKenna’s art practice becomes a tool of data capture and distillation itself, seeking to unfold the information hidden in those spaces where the analytic and intuitive concur.
Recent projects include Artifacts,Casa Hoffmann, Bogotá, Colombia (2021), Ollphéist, Ormston House, Limerick (2020), Subliminal Sublime, Roscommon Arts Centre Park Project (2019), Cube Space, The LAB, Dublin (2017); Periodical Review #5, Pallas Projects/ NCAD Gallery, Dublin (2015); Residencies include ISCP New York (2017), The Artist Observatory- Catalyst Arts & Armagh Observatory (2016), Facebook AIR Program (2015). Awards include DCC Artist in Residence Award (2018), Culture Ireland award for international exhibition (2013), Irish Arts Council Project Award (2012).
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Isabel Nolan (b. 1974, Dublin, Ireland)
Isabel Nolan’s exhibitions are rooted in big subjects: cosmology and deep history; religion and mythology; mortality and love. Working across sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing, Nolan responds to the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. Looking at the history of aesthetics, theology, technology, and ideas, Nolan examines how we frame and make our lived experience. Whether inspired by the knees of a 17th century sculpture, the status of a Neolithic artefact, or a solar storm in the 19th century, she looks for ways to like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made.
Nolan has had significant solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including: Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2023); Solstice Arts Centre, Meath (2021); London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London (2017); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Mercer Union, Toronto and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) ; and Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne (2012).
Her work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Artspace, Sydney; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; and Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City, Beijing. She has participated in biennales including Lofoten International Arts Festival, Glasgow International, EVA International, Limerick, and in 2025 she was a commissioned artist for the 13th Liverpool Biennial, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. In 2026 she represented Ireland at the 61st Venice Biennale with Dreamshook.
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Barbara Knežević is an artist working with sculpture, installation and film. Her practice is attentive to how sculptures and other artistic objects engage the body and affect the politics of materials, nationality and ethnicity; historically and in contemporary contexts closely related to her own subjecthood. Materially, her work is comprised of assemblages of objects that are handmade, formed, found, re-purposed or transformed and placed into relationships with one another in exhibition contexts. The method of assemblage extends to her approach to film and moving image where she utilises found, devised and adapted material that together reconsider and revise material and human histories and propose speculative alternative scenarios and relationships to materials, narratives, objects and the past. Her artworks explicate the historical, affective, formal, material, semiotic and political functions of materials and objects through the discourse of sculpture.
In 2024 and 2025, Barbara Knežević is engaged in research in the Balkan region concerning the archaeological site of Lepenski Vir and the Iron gates in Serbia towards the production of an artwork titled The Iron Gates. Solo and group exhibitions include The Iron Gates, (touring), Wexford Arts Centre (2026); Solstice Arts Centre, Meath and Sirius Arts Centre, Cork (2025); Pleasure ‘Scapes, RHA, Dublin (2021); Woman in the Machine, VISUAL Carlow (2021); Immurement, STATION Gallery Melbourne; Lithophone, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2017); Exquisite Tempo Sector, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2016–17); The Last Thing on Earth, MAC, Belfast (2016); City Agents, EKKM, Tallinn (2016); Gallery Augusta, Helsinki (2015).
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Emily Waszak (b. North Carolina, USA) is a Donegal-based visual artist of Japanese-descent working in sculpture and textiles. With a background in industrial weaving, her work is concerned with ritual and ruin in late-stage capitalism. Themes of grief and loss are ever present in her art.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Ancestors, Lovers, Kin, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2026); Enchanting, and Then What Sorrow, The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon (2025); The Land and Others Including the Dead, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2024); Grief Weaving, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny (2023); Shadow and Fold, Arts Itoya, Japan (2023); To Guide Shadows, Old Church Grangegorman, Dublin (2023). Her work was exhibited at IMMA as part of the RDS Visual Arts Awards exhibition (2023–24) and Thresholds to the Unseen, Solstice Arts, Navan, Ireland (2024).
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Grace Weir (based in Leitrim, Ireland) is an artist whose work ranges from film and video art to photographic, painting, installation, web projects and lecture-performances. One area of Weir’s work is her unique approach to research, based on encounters with specifics such as certain objects, books, artworks; particular locations and sources or from conversations with philosophers, scientists and practitioners from other disciplines.
Weir has a distinct interest in unsettling trajectories in the formation of identity through our relationship with dominant systems of time and space, and through corresponding concepts of memory and record, reality and representation within our perception of history and apprehension of the future. Questioning the ways in which thinking is materialised, the works frequently refer to the act of making - a movement over time through the medium in which it is made, including where time itself forms the work
She represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. She was Artist-in-Residence in Trinity College Dublin (2012-2015) and had a major solo exhibition 3 different nights, recurring, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015-2016). In 2019 she was commissioned by The Institute of Physics (UK and Ireland) to create the installation 'Time Tries All Things' for the inaugural show at The Institute of Physics, London. Solo exhibitions include: The history of light, Solstice Arts Centre in Ireland (2023); For every line, a point not on it, Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome, Italy (2023-2024).