Aengus Hennessy

At the intersection of visual art, performance, ritual and politics, 'Gaming the System' examines power dynamics and asymmetry within the neo-liberal commodified housing model that has led to the present housing crisis.

Childhood games have been reskinned and rewritten so players can enter the world of precarious tenancies, unscrupulous landlords, public housing dereliction and vulture capitalism.

The games have been co-created by different groups with unique perspectives on housing. Eviction—the Game is a collaboration with CATU Ireland based on their recent report on Ireland’s top evictors; Vulturopoly teams up an economist and corporate fraud expert, while Don’t Knock the Flats centres the voices of children to demonstrate that public housing is more than just bricks and mortar.

By situating the housing crisis in the abstract world of games and particularly asymmetrical and biased games I hope to open up alternative narratives for critical play, satire and most of all, for understanding.

Aengus Hennessy is a socially engaged artist interested in examining the differences between how society functions and how it is portrayed and between perception and the reality of lived experience. His work questions hegemony, hypocrisy and class structure in urban development and employs art as a form of resistance. He is a graduate of UCD Arts where he studied English and Classics before embarking on a 20-year journey across Europe and America doing a variety of jobs finally training as a cabinet maker in New York. He is a member of Housing Action Now and a founding member of CATU Ireland. His protest art includes ‘Red Arrows’ against vacancy in Dublin, and ‘Freak Show/House of Horror’ against co-living apartments. He has exhibited as part of ‘Out of the Box’ a group show at NCAD Gallery and as a contributor to Emergency Knowledge by Vagabond Reviews.