Exchange Dublin is a collaborative artspace, an extended tribe, a social experiment, and a bit of a laugh. We were established halfway through 2009, and have been open to the world since October, running a miscellany of groups and projects both within and beyond our walls. These range from visual art and installations (and outstallations), dance, comedy and drama, film, electronica and circuitbending, hardcore punk to hardcore crochet, and any mutant-mongrel genre-halfbreed that can be reasonably be called ‘art’.

Exchange comes as a response to a lack; a lack of space for creative people to freely associate, plan, scheme, fail, play, imagine, test, shock, poke, and manifest together, a lack of common resources and an open platform for developing artists  We’re an activity hub for cultural creatives located in Temple Bar, running on consensus, volunteerism, DIY, and a certain amount of deliberate naivety, and we’ve been doing our best to foment an artistic insurrection in city-centre Dublin. We’re also a place where you don’t need to rent a chair by the hour when it’s raining

We’re open all week long, and are always looking for new and shiny projects to put on, so feel free to drop in and get involved, either with one of our established groups, or if there’s nothing on that you like, get something better started!

Our current groups include Stitch & Bitch who meet every Wednesday to knit, stitch, sew, patch and gossip. No Fixed Abode, are a reading group examining critical theory who meet on Mondays at 6.30pm, with the most recent texts including Deleuze and Guattari and Slavoj Žižek. Capoeira Angola meet every Wednesday 9pm and Sunday at 12am and open to all levels from beginners to advanced. There is also a range of Theatre groups starting which cover everything from workshops to production who meet on Sundays at 6pm, and our new creative group for younger children, Melodic Mayhem. Our storytelling-baking mashup, Milk and Cookies, is going from strength to strength, and the sweet deliciousness of cookie-laden narrative has drawn in the crowds, and RTE.

The Exchange Gallery has been playing host to a number of contemporary artists, ‘Dangerous Things’ the result of Samuel Joseph Keogh and Joseph Noonan Ganley’s residency, GUBU by Garvan Gallagher and our current exhibition, ‘Hard Drivin’ a kinetic installation created by Ivan Twohig, Benjamin Gaulon and Brian Solon. Our current residency is a ritualistic work by Jason Dunne, with a collaborative residency from Sharon White and Aine Belton to follow.

We recently began the tradition of holding culture nights  on a monthly basis. Next up we have a Jewish & French nights which include cooking (and possibly more importantly) eating traditional food and watching  films related to or from the culture.
We will also be holding an Open Day in late March/early April, inviting people into the space to showcase what we have been doing and give people a voice on the the future of Exchange and what we hope to achieve. Details of all these events are be on our calender and as always, it’s all open to anyone interested to come in and get involved! We also invite anyone with new ideas or interested in getting involved to come down to our collective meetings which happen every Wednesday at 7pm, discuss how the space operates, and provide a space for suggestions of new ideas and discussion about ongoing projects

go to www.exchangedublin.ie for more info