Ruth Medjber is an aclaimed photographer, and one of the jury members for this year's This is Art! competition.
This is Art! is an annual digital art competition run by RTÉ in association with the Creative Ireland Programme. It's exclusively for young people aged 0 to 18 throughout the island of Ireland. It’s easy to enter – you just take a photo of your art work and upload it to the This is Art! website here.
To date, the This is Art! team have had over 15,000 entries from artists of all abilities, ranging from canvas to post-its, sculpture to street art, fashion to photography.
We asked Ruth for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
Apocalypse Clown. It's just out in cinemas in Ireland at the moment (and coming soon to Netflix) and it’s utterly hilarious. It’s an Irish production and features some incredible actors but it’s the writing that really steals it. Line after line of just brilliant comedy.
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Also: Three Thousand Years of Longing with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. A fantastic movie from 2022 that really went under the radar for a lot of people.
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MUSIC
I’m on a Lankum buzz at the moment. Can’t get enough of them in any form which leads me down the trad trail further and further. I had zero experience of trad music growing up in Dublin. It’s only recently I’ve been introduced to it through musician friends and pub sessions out west. It’s such a huge part of our culture and I’m so ashamed it’s taken me this long to discover it. I’ve a long path ahead of me and I’m really keen to explore it all.
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BOOK
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. A weird little book that really makes you question our own soul, desires, priorities and societal ethics.
THEATRE
I wish I had time for plays. Genuinely. My evenings off are so scarce that when I am off, I’m asleep by 7pm.
TV
I’m playing catch up with Lost Boy and the moment and I’m hooked. For something a little lighter, I loved Starstruck. It’s just a nice, easy flowing comedy with genuinely likeable characters.
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GIG
Hozier, followed by Hozier and another Hozier. We’re touring across USA/Canada and Europe now, from Sept until Dec. I see the same act every night and thankfully the band are AMAZING. We’re playing a festival next week right before Alanis Morissette and I’m incredibly excited to finally get to see her perform.
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ART
I’m very lucky to be a resident of the Dean Art Studios. There’s 30 artists in total in the group, including musicians, sculptors, painters, performance artists. I adore seeing everyone else’s work. Karen Donnellan just had an incredible show in the RHA entitled Cosmic Wetness, and Aoife Scott is about to present an exciting new body of work in the Dean Art Studio gallery soon.
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RADIO/PODCAST
When touring I find it very hard to get time to listen to the radio, but when I’m home I have BBC Radio 6 Music on non stop for the whole day. I adore Chris Hawkins in the morning, straight into Lauren Laverne. I especially love Cerys Matthews's show on the weekend. Her taste is so eclectic and her voice is so soft and full of passion.
I’ve just gotten into the A Short History Of podcast series. He does weekly episodes that give you a short, succinct insight into historical events or people. The stories about Charlie Chaplin and Cleopatra are wild.
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THE NEXT BIG THING...
Everything on tour is so fast paced. We go from city to city every day. We barely stop to catch a breath and sometimes it feels like the world is whizzing by. I’ve been contemplating this question for a while now and the idea of a "Next Big Thing" is really making things whizz faster. I’ve been going to galleries as often as I can on tour. In the USA and Canada I’ve been really drawn to the indigenous art in the collections. I think maybe the Next Big Thing for me will be investigating the past, learning about our own unique culture and heritage through art and storytelling.
Rather than look for the next big thing, I think I’d prefer to get lost in the past for a little while longer.
A small (but amazing) selection of some of the This is Art! selections from the last three years wil be exhibited at the RHA, Dublin from the 6th to the 29th October. All are welcome.
