The Kite Ballet
Thaís Muniz
20 June — 22 August 2026
Visual artist Thaís Muniz explores displacement, mental health, and joy through her ongoing research, New Atlantic Triangulations (2022—present), shaped by her mixed identity as a Brazilian woman of Yoruba and Bakongo heritage, with Irish citizenship. To mark her solo exhibition The Kite Ballet at The Dock, you are warmly invited to join Thaís for a guided tour in conversation with Maeve Connolly, on Saturday 4 July at 12pm. Admission is free and booking is required.
The Kite Ballet by Thaís Muniz intertwines poetic and mythical elements with political, historical, and symbolic themes, amplifying the voices of local activists from the Itapuã area in Salvador, Brazil. The eponymous film portrays a group of kite runners in their weekly communal ritual, highlighting the threat of private development and ecological displacement of Afro-Indigenous sacred territory, where joy and spiritual practices have thrived for centuries.
About Thaís Muniz
Thaís Muniz received two Visual Arts Awards for her film The Kite Ballet from the Royal Dublin Society in 2025: the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency and the R. C. Lewis-Crosby Award.
Muniz's work has been presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles. Her first solo show, Rites of Care, Curse and Comfort, took place at Sirius Arts Centre in 2024 in Ireland. Muniz earned an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, in Dublin, Ireland.
About Maeve Connolly
Maeve Connolly is a researcher focused on changing cultures and economies of art and media practice. She is the author of TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014) on television as cultural form, object of critique and site of artistic intervention, and The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009), on aspects of the cinematic turn in art. She is also the co-editor, with Orla Ryan, of The Glass Eye: Artists and Television (Project Press, 2000), a collection of artists’ projects exploring the televisual.
Recent publications include catalogue texts on the work of Jordan Baseman, Irina Gheorghe, Barbara Knezevic and Phillip Warnell, and contributions to various edited anthologies, including Theorizing Film through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019) and Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (Bloomsbury, 2019).
For further information and access requests, please contact Erika Holum at erika.holum@leitrimcoco.ie.
