Lost Boys: The Territories of Youth: Glucksman Gallery, Cork

Lost Boys: The Territories of Youth (Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, 2013), a curatorial project co-produced by geographer Denis Linehan and curator Matt Packer that brought together works of contemporary art to interrogate the lived experience of young masculinity in an era of deepening social and economic precarity. Staged at a moment of acute crisis in Irish public life, when youth unemployment and mass emigration had reached their post-crash peak, the exhibition mobilised contemporary art as a critical lens through which to examine the contested territories that young men inhabit, negotiate, and are increasingly excluded from. Situating the exhibition within debates at the intersection of urban practice, and contemporary art, Lost Boys exemplifies an emerging mode of curatorial practice that draws on spatial thinking to reframe social questions ordinarily relegated to policy discourse. By foregrounding the affective, embodied, and representational dimensions of male youth experience, the exhibition challenged reductive framings of young men as either economic casualties or social threats, proposing instead a more nuanced geography of aspiration, drift, and belonging. In doing so, it contributed to broader conversations within socially engaged art practice about how exhibitions can function as sites of critical urban inquiry, making legible the spatial injustices that shape everyday life in post-crash cities. Drawing on the work of artists including David Haines and Stephen Shearer, the exhibition reflected on its capacity to hold together the intimate and the structural, connecting personal experiences of dislocation to the wider political economies that produce them. It concludes that Lost Boys represents a significant instance of geography and curatorial practice in productive dialogue, offering a model for thinking about how art institutions can engage critically with urban crisis, masculinity, and the precarious geographies of contemporary youth.