Kate Nolan, Baghdad Dawn

Baghdad Dawn

In 1981, when Nolan was just two, her family moved from Ireland to Baghdad for the following five years. Nolan’s father was the photographer of the family, and it’s his curated albums that the artist has been re-visiting, trying to understand and recollect their time there. A civil engineer and a tourist, the images switch easily between architectural, family album, and holiday snaps. He was employed by a German company to work on the construction of Haifa Street under the direction of President Saddam Hussein. Haifa Street was designed by renowned architect Rifat Chadirji, as a new modernist street synthesising Islamic culture with key principles of the international architecture of the 20th Century. 

For Nolan, there are no real memories, just a sense of experience from what the family album evokes and the documents and ephemera her father has kept. Through ongoing conversations with her parents and sister, Nolan hears of the disconnect as ‘ex-pats’ from the local community, the fearlessness of her mother driving around Baghdad with her two young daughters in what was wartime, and Nolan continuously questions her memories of what felt like a long holiday.

Kate Nolan

Kate Nolan is an Irish visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland, focused on extended photographic stories that examine the nature of identity in areas in flux. 

Intrigued by the effects of shifting histories, her practice is centred on sustained collaborative engagement with local communities and geographical locations where identity and territory are contested. Combining contemporary and archival images with oral histories and sound, she highlights the contradictions and tenuous relationships between political borders and cultural identity. This has resulted in her projects as multifaceted exhibitions, publications, and online re-narrations. 

Recently, her long-term project LACUNA (2016-2022) has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and was a recipient of the Irish Research Council Scholarship for her Master’s by Research: Borders as a Peopled Space, at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. Nolan has recently exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, as part of Paris Photo Fair and PhotoSaintGermain. She has been the recipient of several residencies, recently in The Shelter, France, Digital Hub, Ireland, Headlands Centre for the Arts, California, and Walkers Photographer in Residence, Ireland. Nolan’s work is held in public and private collections in Japan, the USA, France, Portugal, Mexico, the UK, and Ireland.

Kate Nolan, Baghdad Dawn
New Irish Works series 2025–27
Launch 6pm Thu 14 May 2026
Running 15 May–9 August 2026
At the International Centre for the Image