For VAN’s July/August issue, Joanne Laws and Alan Phelan provide thematic appraisals of the 58th Venice Biennale, while Pamela Lee reports from Art Basel and VOLTA Basel art fairs.

This issue includes a number of timely interviews with artists and curators. Chris Clarke speaks to Richard Proffitt about his recent installation, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, for Cork Midsummer Festival, and Paul McAree interviews Niamh O’Malley, whose exhibition is currently showing in St Carthage Hall, as part of the Lismore Castle Arts programme. 

Pádraic E. Moore speaks to Annie Fletcher, who has recently been appointed as the Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, while Philip Kavanagh interviews Rua Red Director Maolíosa Boyle about the organisation’s recent exhibitions and collaborations. Manuela Pacella also interviews Paul O’Neill about his curatorial practice and his artistic directorship at PUBLICS in Helsinki.

Also focusing on the Finnish art scene, Jonathan Mayhew reports from Helsinki, about his experiences taking part in the TBG+S and HIAP International Residency Exchange. Similarly, Lucy Andrews reports from her recent residency and exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, while Ian Wieczorek contextualises his latest exhibition, ‘Transgress’, at Ballina Arts Centre.

In columns for this issue, Sarah Lincoln discusses research recently undertaken by The Mothership Project. In two fascinating Skills columns, contemporary textile artist Laura Angell discusses the Bargello embroidery technique, while Cornelius Browne provides insights into the practicalities of painting outdoors.

Insights into arts engagement are also provided by Jan Powell, who explores the processes of artistic collaboration, and Ann Quinn, who profiles her ongoing masterclasses in painting and printmaking. We also hear from our VAI Northern Ireland Manager, Rob Hilken, who reports on the artist talks and panel discussions, held as part of the VAI Get Together 2019, which took place on 14 June at TU Dublin Grangegorman.

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Derry City, with profiles from Art Arcadia, Clarendon Studios, Nerve Gallery and CCA. Derry-based artists James King and Gail Mahon also discuss their practice and recent work.

Reviewed in the Critique supplement are: Hannah Fitz at Kerlin Gallery; Karen Daye-Hutchinson at ArtisAnn Art Gallery; ‘See you tomorrow’ at Sirius Arts Centre; ‘Social Commons’ at Liberty Hall; and ‘A Visibility Matrix’ at Void Gallery, Derry.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Pick up your copy in art galleries across Ireland or by becoming a member of Visual Artists Ireland.

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MANUELA PACELLA INTERVIEWS PAUL O’NEILL ABOUT HIS CURATORIAL PRACTICE AND HIS ARTISTIC DIRECTORSHIP AT PUBLICS IN HELSINKI.

Manuela Pacella: Your practice is characterised by multiple overlapping interests. I agree with you that the definition of a ‘research-oriented curator’ can be quite reductive. You unify the various strands of your research as simply ‘the curatorial’ – what does this term mean for you?
Paul O’Neill: Many arguments in relation to ‘the curatorial’ were played out in discussions in the mid-2000s: Irit Rogoff talked about the curatorial as a ‘critical thought’ that does not rush to embody itself, rather it unravels over time; Maria Lind discussed the curatorial as going beyond that which is already known; Beatrice von Bismarck framed the curatorial as a continuous spaces of negotiation; while Emily Pethick described the curatorial as allowing for things to merge in the process of being realised. I found these four propositions important, in asserting the exhibition as a collaborative research action. I think that the curatorial exists in all aspects of my work as a teacher, writer, researcher, exhibition-maker, event organiser, organisation director and so forth. But I am also using the curatorial as a kind of contested term – not yet fully disclosed or constructed – which captures forms of curatorial practice that don’t necessarily result in exhibitions, objects or material forms. Exhibitions can be really productive outcomes, but I think that exhibition-making is only one part of the curatorial constellation. 

MP: Perhaps you could discuss your forthcoming book, Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (edited with Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson and Simon Sheikh)?
PO’N: The book (out in September) is the third anthology in a publishing series between the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Luma Foundation and MIT Press. The first book was called The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?; the second was How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, which examined prominent institutional practices being developed globally by small and medium-scale art organisations. This third anthology emerged out of a symposium held at Luma Foundation in Arles in 2017. It looks at the dynamic relationship between politics, curating, education and research practice within institutions, and how these relations reimagine the intersection between the local and the global, the regional and the national, during a moment of political fragility for human rights across the world. The book addresses curating with respect to this new global condition, defined by issues of locality, geo-political change, the reassertion of nation states and the hardening of national borders. It profiles local initiatives that are engaging with the global in different ways, beyond the constraints of nationalism, sectarianism or protectionism.

MP: The idea of ‘co-production’ has become increasingly important within your practice. Can you discuss the rationale and relationships underpinning some of your long-running projects? 
PO’N: ‘Coalasce’ was an open exhibition model in which many different artists collaborated under the thematic: “How can we build an exhibition together?” ‘Coalesce’ is a metaphor for the exhibition as ‘landscape’, which functions as a structuring device for the three different groundings: the background, which surrounds the viewer who moves through it; the middle ground as the place where the viewer can partially interact with it (thinking about lighting, exhibition furniture, wall labels, seating, display cabinets and so forth); and the foreground, being that which contains the viewer in the space of display. Artists were commissioned to engage with one of those special coordinates. It began with three artists in 2001 at London Print Studio and ended with maybe 100 artists in 2009 at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam. It was an evolving exhibition which expanded over time, as artists invited other artists, creating different layers and cross-fertilising different artistic positions into the project. 

Conversely, in the first phase of ‘We are The Center for Curatorial Studies’ at Bard College, each of the invited artists (30 at that stage) were invited to exhibit, research and teach (with the exception of William McKeown, who is no longer with us). Primarily, they exhibited work which could be defined as curatorial, bringing together a constellation of differences; giving lectures, workshops or seminars with the students of the Graduate Program at CSS; and carrying out research with students and staff. We explored ways for the final exhibition form to emerge over a long period of time, with artists visiting at different stages. The exhibition itself became a teaching and learning environment for the students; every phase provided opportunities to learn about constructing an exhibition, working and collaborating with artists and so forth. There was also another exhibition called ‘We are the (Epi)Center’ which happened at P! Gallery in Manhattan. Several artists did performances, screenings or talks there, as well as working at Bard College, which is almost two hours outside the city. 

MP: The closing event of the free-school project, ‘Our Day Will Come’ (2011) at University of Tasmania, was held in a nightclub, involving a symposium and a disco. How do you think the two different ‘publics’ perceived these experiences? 
PO’N: ‘Our Day Will Come’ was a response to an invitation to take part in a month-long series of public art projects, curated by David Cross, called ‘Iteration Again’ in Hobart, Tasmania. I worked as an artist-curator, setting up the project’s ‘free-school’ structure with curator Fiona Lee, and inviting Sarah Pierce, Gareth Long, Mick Wilson, Jem Noble, Rhona Byrne and many others to participate along with local actors, agents and school members. Each week of the month-long project began with a question: What is a School? (Week One); What is Remoteness? (Week Two); What is Autonomy? (Week Three); What is Usefulness? (Week Four). These four inquiries structured our activities, with a school each week. Our small school building was set in an old labourer’s tearoom, inside the central courtyard of the University of Tasmania, where the art school is based. We worked with existing school activities – from classes and workshops to school dinners – and we published a school zine at the end of each week, edited, designed and printed with the expanding group of participants. We also had some formal lectures and a school radio station, developed by Garrett Phelan. The school disco was the final project, formally titled Death of a Discourse Dancer, which juxtaposed two simultaneous discursive forms: the night club and the conference. Each of the conference speakers also deejayed. I was interested in these two different audiences: one coming for the symposium, which looked at the thematic of schooling, remoteness, autonomy and usefulness; the other coming to the nightclub, where people could just dance. I was very interested in this space of publicness – the coming together of different constituencies amid moments of contestation. I had previously enacted this project at Club One in Cork in 2005, at the invitation of Annie Fletcher, Charles Esche and Art/not art. It was initially called ‘Mingle Mangled, Cork Caucus’ and worked really effectively, with everybody embracing the event. Whereas in Hobart, there was a bit more conflict or antagonism, because many of the regular visitors to the club in Hobart were not as amenable to this coming together of different audiences during their nocturnal festivities.

MP: The term ‘Publics’ has become increasingly important for you, not least since your appointment as Artistic Director of Checkpoint Helsinki. Perhaps you could discuss how the organisation’s legacy and core activities have informed this new phase?
PO’N: About 18 months ago, I was appointed Artistic Director of Checkpoint Helsinki, an initiative set up in 2013. The invitation was to reimagine how Checkpoint Helsinki could evolve and develop in the future. Checkpoint Helsinki was established as an association by a group of artists and activists to resist the Guggenheim coming to Helsinki. They developed public art projects, conferences and publications and brought international curators and practitioners to engage with Finnish art and to show alongside local artists. As an activist organisation, another priority was to monitor how decisions are made in the city, in terms of the distribution of funds towards culture and the arts. Some of these elements and commitments – like critical and social thinking, working together and being engaged in emerging debates – are still very important to PUBLICS. I proposed to the board that we could change the name to something more proactive and positive. The term ‘publics’ suggests a constellation of different practices, projects and productions. There are many diverse groups of people that constitute the public, whether imagined or abstract, real or actualised. The public means different things in different parts of the world and has diverging implications for various disciplines, from sociology and anthropology, to contemporary art and philosophy. Always plural, the term ‘publics’ is also maybe moving away from this binary of private and public, suggesting that all spaces are public in some way, while linking with contested spatio-temporal locations and discourse across the world.

We now have a physical space and it’s the primary site for the PUBLICS Library (designed by Julia studio who also designed PUBLICS’ identity). We have a specially commissioned lightbox sign – called Eat the Rich (2018) by Liam Gillick – which sits outside PUBLICS. It can be seen when approaching the space and is sited above one of PUBLICS large, open, highly visible, street-level windows, allowing the passer-by to have a sense of what happens inside. PUBLICS is situated in a mainly residential area, traditionally a working-class area, in a moment of early gentrification. Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts is just a ten-minute walk, so we collaborate a lot with them, through teaching and library access. The library – which currently has about 6,000 publications – is unique within the city and possibly Europe, with such a specific focus on the curatorial, publicness, activism and the spaces where philosophy and political-thinking intersect with contemporary art. Talks, events and performances happen regularly at PUBLICS, often in collaboration with other organisations in the city, regionally and internationally. The backbone of our programme is the commissioning and co-production of public artworks outside the normative spaces of galleries and museums. Sometimes PUBLICS is an exhibition space, a cinema, a school, sometimes we remain a library or a gathering space. We have previously exhibited work with artists such as Chris Kraus (when we installed all of her films), Harold Offeh, the Karrabing Film Collective, Kathrin Böhm and held screenings with Tony Cokes, and many others – however, PUBLICS is not primarily a gallery. 

MP: How do you feel PUBLICS is resonating, both within the local context of the Finnish art scene and internationally?
PO’N: It is definitely resonating significantly within the local scene. When we set it up, we did a lot of public talks and events and we were always packed out. We want to bridge certain discussions that are happening in the city already, with the conversations we want to have around inequality in the arts and with discrimination in all forms. Our focus is to try to diversify audiences for the arts, so that means taking on issues relating to gender politics, queer politics and so forth. We held ‘listening sessions’ where we brought together people (who may or may not have known each other) to listen to one another. Our ‘Parahosting’ events have been another way to highlight issues that weren’t so well represented before PUBLICS. ‘Parahosting’ can be everything from a book launch, residency or durational performance, to a reading group, week-long conference or pop-up installation. Parahosting is about PUBLICS giving up its programme to the work of others, and to those initiatives who are in need of space to practice and to support the realisation of their projects publicly. PUBLICS becomes the host to other people, other bodies and their ideas; it is taken over and on many levels is preoccupied by them. We try to fully engage with the local scene, operating as a kind of fulcrum for diverse and relevant critically located discussions, but we are also thinking more widely about the Nordic region and the Baltic region. In trying to ‘de-centre’ Helsinki, we are currently working on collaborative projects with Index in Stockholm, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga and Oslo Biennial in Norway. 

Our current focus is financial sustainability and bridging the gap between small-scale organisations and the larger institutions, such as museums, across the city. There is very much a project-based culture here, where organisations and initiatives are funded for maybe three to four years, and then you have these big infrastructures, like Kiasma or HAM, that are secured beyond that. In the middle, there is very little activity. We are trying to grow our organisation into a medium-scale organisation, as a way of supporting the ongoing, sustainable and long-term economic system of support for culture and contemporary art in the city and region. For ‘Today is Our Tomorrow’ – an annual cooperative festival project initiated by PUBLICS taking place in September – we are trying to establish a collaborative methodology whereby different organisations can collaborate on representing diversity and difference. This might end up being a substantial annual project, as a new model for working locally and internationally, in order to sustain small-scale organisations. 

Manuela Pacella is a freelance curator and writer based in Rome. 

Dr Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS.
publics.fi

Feature Image
Liam Gillick, Eat the Rich, 2018, outdoor lightbox commissioned by PUBLICS; photograph by Noora Lehtovuori; courtesy of PUBLICS.

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JOANNE LAWS PROFILES SOUND ART AT THE 58TH VENICE ART BIENNALE.

The 58th Venice Art Biennale 2019 makes great strides in averting criticism of previous editions by delivering a roughly equal gender balance, while featuring only living artists. This significant gesture is further augmented by a strong representation of younger artists, manifesting slick new media and interdisciplinary practices. Deviating from past iterations, curator Ralph Rugoff has assembled dual exhibitions across the two main spaces – an effective presentation strategy that allows each of the 79 artists to reveal multiple strands of their practice, while creating more memorable dialogue between the two traditionally autonomous venues.

Several press reviews have lamented the inclusion of many works previously shown elsewhere; however, I did not find this problematic. It was rewarding to revisit standout pieces previously encountered in other contexts – like Suki Seokyeong Kang’s enigmatic textile sculptures, shown at last year’s Liverpool Biennale, or Shilpa Gupta’s haunting sound installation, originally commissioned by Edinburgh Arts Festival. Substantial new audio-visual commissions from The Store X The Vinyl Factory are premiered, including Data Verse 1 (2019), a multi-sensory installation with a minimalist soundtrack based on white noise, by Japanese electronic composer and artist, Ryoji Ikeda, who also installed spectra III – a Kubrick-style, fluorescent light corridor, embodying a ‘blizzard of data’ at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. In addition, Hito Steryl’s epic new multi-screen installation, This is the Future (2019), mines the psychedelic mythologies of ancient and futuristic civilisations, in search of answers to current global anxieties (like hate speech, austerity propaganda and social media addiction), noting that “entering the future is a massive health hazard”.

Further responding to current geopolitical instability, many artists present timely works exploring borders, prisons and other forms of enclosure. A fractured concrete wall, topped with razor wire, is one of the first barriers encountered by viewers, when entering the cluttered frenzy of the Central Pavilion. Titled Muro Ciudad Juárez (2010), by Teresa Margolles, this wall previously provided a backdrop to the drug war in Ciudad Juárez – a Mexican town bordering the USA. Perhaps using the physicality of walls as a provocation, the biennale includes an unprecedented array of sound art, creating acoustic environments that reverberate fluidly throughout the vast exhibition spaces. 

As noted by Lebanese artist and composer, Tarek Atoui – whose interactive sound work, The GROUND (2018), is installed in the Giardini – the ‘abstraction of sound’ is pulling us away from the ‘weight of the image’, thus liberating us from a visually-saturated world. Drawing on the legacy of 1960s composers like John Cage, Atoui seeks to expand notions of listening, through spatially responsive and durational sound performances. Within Atoui’s tactile and aural environment, handcrafted musical instruments produce sound autonomously, based on field recordings made by the artist along the River Delta in China. Audiences, musicians, instrument-makers and other improvisors come and go, yet the performance holds momentum, as a collaborative interface and as a sonic forum for active research. 

Among national participations, the more successful sonic works include Panos Charalambous’s installation for Greece’s National Pavilion, which comprises 20,000 drinking glasses, configured to form a floor-based, transparent stage. As visitors walk across the platform, they generate layers of tintinnabulation, which echo throughout the pavilion like a vortex. Sculptural elements, such as megaphones and a taxidermy eagle, function as remnants of Charalambous’s previous sound performance, described as an ‘ecstatic ultrasonic dance’, aimed at playfully recomposing forgotten histories, silenced by hegemonic power structures. In the Japanese Pavilion, black and white video projections by Motoyuki Shitamichi depict ‘tsunami boulders’ washed up on shorelines, while a series of wall texts convey anthropological allegories, based on folklore linked to the tsunami. These elements are unified by a score, reminiscent of birdsong, performed on automated recorder flutes to imagine a sonic ecology in which humans and non-humans can coexist. 

Rumbling throughout the Giardini are periodic crashes from Shilpa Gupta’s mechanised residential gate, which cause the supporting wall to crumble and crack. Gupta frequently explores the physical and ideological function of borders, as well as the structures of surveillance permeating these sites. Gupta’s second sound installation, located in the Arsenale, consists of 100 hanging microphones. Rather than acting as recording devices, they function as speakers, transmitting an immersive and layered soundscape of whispers, static and clapping. Giving voice to 100 poets who have been imprisoned or executed for their political alignments, the haunting recital includes readings in different languages, while fragmented verses, inscribed on pages, are violently pierced by metal spikes. Among the gentler soundscapes is an enchanting vocal, emanating from an installation by South African artist, Kemang Wa Lehulere. This tribal song forms part of a male initiation ceremony, traditionally performed by the Xhosa people, who were oppressed by colonial and Apartheid governments. Speakers are embedded within a school chair, while birdhouses, fabricated in wood from salvaged school desks, channel current critical debate in South Africa, regarding the decolonisation of school curricula. 

Less successful sound works included Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc for the New Zealand Pavilion, in which an inventory of vanished, extinct or invisible phenomena is electronically broadcast in frustratingly muffled tones, via tree cell towers located around Venice. This list is printed concurrently in the otherwise empty Palazzina library, highlighting the vacuity of this underwhelming sonic encounter. Grating sounds emanate from Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s equally vexatious robotic artworks in the Giardini and Arsenale, while horrendous automatons resurface in the Belgium Pavilion – fashioned as a 1940s heritage museum and flanked by prison cells – as traditional harpsicord players generate music to ‘soothe the condemned’.

Also addressing the ‘acoustics of incarceration’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s compelling video installation, Walled, Unwalled (2018) was a standout work that helped me consolidate my thinking regarding the biennale thematic. Set within the Funkhaus sound studios in East Berlin – from which East German State Radio was once broadcast – the film features Abu Hamdan’s lecture-performance on the ‘politics of listening’. He chronicles the Cold War and the Regan-Thatcher era as precursors to current global border fortification, before outlining legal cases in which evidence took the form of sound heard through walls. He relays the experiences of prisoners, who train their ears to surpass the walls of their cells. With the prison complex operating as an echo chamber, sounds of interrogations and torture happening in other rooms are amplified exponentially, generating an ‘architectonic form of torture’. 

As described by Salomé Voegelin, in her book, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2018), “a geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events; invisible trajectories and configurations between people and things”. Porous and immaterial, sound has the capacity to permeate, transcend and defy inescapably solid structures. If the emerging sensibilities of sonic materialism are without social boundaries, then the convergence of so many expanded sonic practices in Venice this year generates extreme positivity and hope. This polyphony of voices, both harmonic and dissonant, offer ways to resist segregation or enclosure, by visualising and enacting a more connected world.

Joanne Laws is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. The 58th International Venice Biennale continues until 24 November.

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Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2009, MS Mobile Gate, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition; photograph by Francesco Galli, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

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ALAN PHELAN NAVIGATES GENDER IDENTITIES AT THE 2019 VENICE ART BIENNALE.

The biennale opened a week before the Eurovision. In terms of kitsch nationalism and tone-deaf politics, there could not be a better analogy. Difficult national politics can get art-washed – or tourism promotion can have a stronger grip than the art – but this year, these were outweighed by strong feminist voices or, better still, work that had opposing values to the country they were representing or the curatorial theme they were nestled into. The ‘big show’ that tackles the ‘big ideas’ of the day can easily lose out in a city littered with hundreds of shows, exhibits, projects and even performance artists baying for attention – but it does generate many starting points. 

When rumours began circulating about the €30 million cost of Christoph Büchel’s raised migrant boat, Barca Nostra, the artist had succeeded in playing the art crowd. Gossip replaced information, followed by moral outrage and indignant memes. Eventually, facts followed in a slew of articles (see theartnewspaper.com for a good overview) but spectacle was the real winner. This is part of the backstory, as it tied directly into Rugoff’s theme, despite nobody seeming to get that – this was art fake news in action.

In many ways, there are 89+ individual attempts at museum standard shows competing with the main biennale themed exhibition which, despite only having 79 artists in this edition, is still enormous. There is a lot to describe but there is already a slew of ‘top ten reviews’ which do that job very well. A simple search will yield many such lists – I can recommend artsy.net, domusweb.it, news.artnet.com, as well as vogue.co.uk (featuring a profile on female artists at the biennale, in which includes Eva Rothschild, who represented Ireland). 

What generally happens however, outside of the firm winners and favourites, are the accidental patterns that emerge outside of the great curatorial plan, like the prevalence this year of gender/queer work, science fiction and dance music across the city. I must confess, these are part of my subjectivity, informed by my interests as an artist – the results of my internal filter that tries to resist the pushy media packs of press week. 

It sometimes feels that misinterpretation is the only way to navigate the flood of art. Crowds are dense during press week and tempers and patience can be short. But as this is art, some artists deliberately misdirect – making one thing, saying another and then publishing an entirely different array of ideas. Sometimes by plan, sometimes by mistake, as press release and wall text lingo gets garbled between language translation, art theory and hyperbole. Many interpretative skills are required. Brief descriptions of all works can be found at labiennale.org however, split between the national reps and the big show, plus the collateral pay-to-be-there and special projects.

For the national shows, many will generally have taken the best part of two years to realise and are, in many instances, a culminating point or pinnacle in an artist’s career. Many will have an advanced visual vocabulary or be at the height of their popularity, which has led to that national representation and pavilion. Good examples from the Giardini’s ‘Empire Avenue’ would be France, Great Britain and Germany – Laure Prouvost, Cathy Wilkes and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, respectively. These three artists offered emotional and conceptual arrangements of displacement and loss, each charting differing courses through national identities in their signature styles and all demanding different durational commitments. Provost did fun climate change; Wilkes did sad domestic and Sadr Haghighian was someone else. 

Between spectacle and anti-spectacle, all three were extremely sophisticated and nuanced presentations of well-oiled practices and all three left me content but a little cold. I got drawn to the dance music in the Korean pavilion instead, a thumping hard techno soundtrack by Siren Eun Young Jung in a rear room, to a video showing four characters performing gender, disability and DJing. It should have been trite, but a very polished visual edit and music mix made it work. A special edition of Harper’s Bazaar Korea, like the special edition Monopl magazine at Germany, did not help any interpretative questions I had, but acted as a good reminder of a blander commodity culture underwriting so much of what is on show at Venice. 

The nearby pavilions of Switzerland and Spain, who both had collaborative groups, also played out a gender/queer fuckery with a trickster dance tone. It’s difficult to ‘present as’ counter-culture in such a bourgeois setting, but both functioned to unnerve the heteronormative bias that otherwise dominates. So, when Austria failed to make the mark of reviving a feminist genius, nearby Brazil excelled at presenting the liveliest and somehow most authentic show. Clearly in defiance of the Bolsonaro government, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca presented a proud trans-gendered ghetto war dance, ‘horizontally’ created with participants, reappropriating Beyoncé moves to push back pop culture, to own it and ‘serve’ it. 

The piece succeeded with ‘realness’ in a way that Shu Lea Cheang at Taiwan could not quite muster. Despite a huge, complex and super-camp production, the work felt like a literal rendition of curator Paul B. Preciado’s writings, channelling Foucault with a panopticon video display in a prison with gender and sexual outlaws. It was cutting yet funny, but too close to texts like Testo Junkie. A live version of the piece – with many of the performers, served with penis cake – was apparently more successful, so said a colleague who managed to attend it on San Servolo, the ‘Island of the Mad’.

If you lived between London and Berlin in the last few years, you would have seen it all, so another colleague said. As I only live in Dublin, the Arsenale and Giardini Central Pavilion are a great way to catch up on the works of Arthur Jafa, Kahil Joseph, Hito Steyrl, Teresa Margolles, Nicole Eisenman, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rosemarie Trokel and many more. These works are all too eclectic to describe or discuss here, but those dealing with aspects of social justice and gender politics were strongest. Similar themes occurred with other artists around robots, sauerkraut juice and weepy CGI, but did not work as well. 

Science Fiction operated between the AI aspirations of the main show, from the ridiculous Halil Altindere space refugee, or tedious Mars diorama by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to the sublime Larissa Sansour at Denmark. And then there was Stan Douglas; his quantum identity-swapping character fared better in an exquisitely made B-movie, successfully questioning race in space. The Mexican pavilion could be seen as a deranged time-travelling, Bible re-enactment epic, but that was not the intention of artist, Pablo Vargas Lugo. Larissa Sansour’s work has long dealt with finding parallel Sci-Fi narratives for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet her film for Denmark provoked a long online conversation with a friend, who pointed out that the the eco-disaster theme was actually anti-Semitic and not the ‘radical alterity’ proposed by the curator.   

One of the last shows I saw was Charlotte Prodger, who represented Scotland. The 39-minute video was slowly paced and the opposite of Laure Prouvost’s 20-minute film which was of a frenzy of edits. Both works share an authority of self-conviction, that kind of public self-belief unironically riddled with self-doubt and diary structures, probable humility and apparent intimacy. Both let the cameras roll around their largesse and the people and places important within their narrative. It reminded me why Lithuania won the Golden Lion, as that work had a different and decided generosity. The singing beach goers were casually directed, giving the impression they really were enjoying their day out, singing about climate change and the end of the world. Maybe it was the collaborative nature of the piece, from production to performance, that brought me back to the staged authenticity that worked so well for Brazil, offering a fresh twist on what post-truth can become.

Alan Phelan is an artist based in Dublin. His trip to Venice was self-funded with press accreditation arranged through VAI. 

Featured Image
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019; film still courtesy of the artists and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

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CHRIS CLARKE INTERVIEWS RICHARD PROFFITT ABOUT HIS RECENT INSTALLATION FOR CORK MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL.

Chris Clarke: Your recent installation at University College Cork was entitled May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set. Can you tell me about this title and its significance to the project?
Richard Proffitt: I was thinking about this recently. The main overriding theme of the exhibition was this idea – both theoretically and physically for a viewer – of creating a space to where you can escape. It’s this immersive environment within which you can acquire some degree of solace. So, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set was a kind of narrative device, suggesting that you can escape to a new place, a kind of non-descript landscape or environment that exists within your own consciousness or psyche, rather than a physical place. The title also recalled the idea of blessing a place, of wishing a place well for the future. 

CC: Your work mixes different materials, references, codes, symbols, and you’ve previously talked about spirituality and subcultures as informing this approach. What about the visitor who is unable to decipher some of these associations? Is that decoding important to you, or do you consider the general, overall effect to be the predominant feature here?
RP: There are always going to be references within my work to particular forms of subculture that I’m interested in, whose origins may not be initially apparent to the viewer. But I don’t envisage that as being a problem. I guess the viewer often acts as somebody who stumbles across something; they can then decide whether they want to piece the different elements together. These ideas might be familiar to some viewers – who might have a passing or a keen interest in some of the themes – but I think the more interesting stance is when a viewer approaches the work as if it is purely alien to them. It becomes this combination of codes, symbols, signs, slang, different types of language, that forms a puzzle.

CC: The use of sound played a significant part in the installation. Can you tell me about your process of composition and how you see its role in creating an immersive effect?
RP: My composition of music uses a technique that is very similar to the way in which I make visual work. It is a collage technique, using pieces of sound sourced from a variety of places, including old and degraded cassette tapes that are specifically selected and cut up, looped and distorted. In some instances, they’re unrecognisable from their original form, becoming ambient, trance-like snippets of music and voice, repetitions and drones. The sounds sourced from tape loops are often collaged with field recordings and improvised instrumentation, to create this fluid, mournful, drifting soundtrack that appears to be from a time period that couldn’t have occurred, and, in this way, it has certain hauntological characteristics. The combination of sound and lighting is crucial, in generating an atmosphere which leads to immersion. I think sound is the most emotionally immediate of the senses; it changes the place it inhabits instantly, while also altering a person’s perception of that place. It functions like the idea of a ghost – it’s there and it’s felt, but it’s rarely seen.

CC: The installation was situated in the very particular site of St. Vincent’s Church – which has been taken over by UCC’s Music Department – with the main installation happening in the basement space of O’Riada Hall. How did the context and the physical architecture of that building inform your choice of materials, effect and layout?
RP: I don’t know if this relates to the place itself, or if it comes from my experience of being immersed in Irish culture, but there were more references than usual to Christianity in that work. A lot of the stuff that drives the work is the accumulation of materials and often these are selected for their purely aesthetic condition. So, if you’re sourcing materials in Ireland that reflect upon or have reference to faith or belief, then 90% of the time, they’re going to be Christian in their appearance.

CC: But a very particular Christianity – there is that sense of ritual or mystery that seems inherent to Catholicism. 
RP: That’s something that I have become more interested in. I grew up as a lapsed Protestant, so I had no idea of the ritualistic aspects of Catholicism – the whole smoke and mirrors, the sense of theatre and occasion. So perhaps that fed into the work but, essentially, it was still embedded in this ongoing quest to restore elements of spirituality to contemporary art, in a way that doesn’t only use those references ironically. I’m not trying to make light or to joke about these things. It’s trying to emphasise their good qualities.

CC: There was a real sense of trajectory from the upstairs entrance and corridors, into this crypt-like basement, where the artwork was installed. Could you expand on this sense of passing over or descending into the work? Is this primarily a means of creating anticipation, or a ritual in its own right – a way of initiating the visitor into this ‘other’ space?
RP: Well, the building has this very strong sense of character anyway, but yes; the entrance doors and corridors, with the pattern-tiled flooring, gave way to a feeling of being in an ‘other’ place and I guess the visiting public are not usually privy to this building. It has a feeling that, once all the students and lecturers go home and it’s just the caretaker left, it could well be home to many spirits, returning to the building’s religious origins. But before entering the O’Riada Hall – a magnificent space in its own right, with its huge neo-gothic windows and ceiling arches – I think it was necessary for this gradual descent into the main space to occur. It relates to that feeling of discovery, of something being amiss, of a ritualistic entering of a tomb, if you will; a space with a very determined atmosphere, an experience encouraged by the presence of the sound work, which reverberated along the corridors leading to the O’Riada Hall.

CC: You mentioned the installation as something that the visitor surrenders or escapes to. Does this connect in any way with your strong interest in contemporary popular music and the specific sub-genres and subcultures around music?
RP: Subcultures become religions for a lot of people. They obtain or acquire their own set of rituals, beliefs, props or ways of dressing.

CC: There was a suggestion of entering something otherworldly, transcendental and beyond the prosaic rituals of everyday life. Was there a sense that the installation – as an enclave or a site of refuge – allowed one to step away from the mainstream world outside?
RP: I think that aspect of the work comes from the way that I personally expect to experience art. I want it to take me somewhere else; I want to feel like I’m somewhere else when I’m in an exhibition. Paintings can do that when you’re transfixed on a work – the same with sound or a video piece – and I think that all the best art does achieve that. It takes you away from where you’ve been, and you forget that you’ve just stepped in from the street. I want the viewer to experience something that they weren’t expecting or haven’t felt before, a way of experiencing objects or materials in a way uncommon to them. 

When I was young, I was always a child that would stupidly travel across the railway tracks, if it was the quickest route somewhere, or wander along the embankments, where you weren’t supposed to be and where you would see all kinds of discarded and forgotten things – I’ve always been like that. I was interested in the idea of great discoveries, like the tombs in Egypt and this idea that, behind this locked door, or behind this gate or fence, lies an entrance point to something that people have not experienced before or didn’t realise was happening. It’s like stepping into a cave in the south of France and discovering paintings from thousands of years ago or stumbling upon a burnt-out car on a wasteland. These are experiences that have always fascinated me.

Richard Proffitt’s installation, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, was curated by Chris Clarke for the Cork Midsummer Festival. It took place from 14 to 23 June at University College Cork’s Department of Music, Sunday’s Well, Cork.
richardproffitt.net

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Richard Proffitt, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, 2019, installation view, University College Cork Department of Music; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and the Glucksman.

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PAUL MCAREE DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF LISMORE CASTLE ARTS AND INTERVIEWS NIAMH O’MALLEY, WHOSE EXHIBITION IS CURRENTLY SHOWING IN ST CARTHAGE HALL.  

Lismore Castle Arts (LCA), a not-for-profit gallery, was founded in 2005 in Lismore, County Waterford. We are committed to the presentation of contemporary art across two separate exhibition venues. The main gallery space within Lismore Castle hosts one major exhibition of international art per year. In 2011, a second venue opened in St Carthage Hall – a former Victorian church hall in the heart of Lismore town – which presents a diverse programme of contemporary Irish and international art and graduate work, as well as learning and community projects. LCA has also developed an offsite programme, including partnered exhibitions in Ireland and overseas. We seek to be a major contributor to the cultural and visitor economy of Lismore and the region, offering unique experiences with contemporary art. 

In 2005 the long-derelict West Wing of Lismore Castle, the private family home of Lord and Lady Burlington, was transformed into a state-of-the-art contemporary gallery. To date, LCA has commissioned and presented unique projects by Gerard Byrne, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Anne Collier, Dorothy Cross, Rashid Johnson, Richard Long, Wilhelm Sasnal and Pae White, amongst others. We have also occasionally invited national and international curators to lead our main gallery exhibition programme, including Aileen Corkery, Polly Staple, Mark Sladen, Kitty Anderson & Katrina Brown, Allegra Pesenti and Charlie Porter. Lismore Castle Arts’ main gallery exhibition for 2019, ‘Palimpsest’, is curated by Charlie Porter and features Nicole Eisenman, Zoe Leonard, Hilary Lloyd, Charlotte Prodger, Martine Syms, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Andrea Zittel, many of whom have created new work for the show.

The unique location of the castle gallery within a seven-acre site means exhibitions can spill into the castle’s gardens, offering the potential for outdoor work. Almost every exhibition we have hosted has seen work extend into these gardens, with the most notable instance being Rashid Johnson’s exhibition in 2018, involving the presentation of seven outdoor sculptures, which were gradually overcome by plants as the summer progressed. Luke Fowler also presented a new sound work in a tower in the gardens in 2017 – a unique work researched and developed across multiple visits to Lismore and presented in collaboration with the Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas, Texas. 

In 2013, Dorothy Cross exhibited Eye of Shark at St Carthage Hall, an installation of nine reclaimed cast-iron baths which had their scum-line painted gold, along with a tabernacle embedded in the wall containing a shark’s eye. The work subsequently toured and expanded to include 12 baths. The installation is now permanently housed at Lismore Castle and will be open to view on 6 July and 3 August. Core funding for Lismore Castle Arts programmes is provided by Lord and Lady Burlington, with additional funding sought from the Arts Council of Ireland and Waterford City and County Council. Going forward, LCA will continue to present evermore exciting and ambitious contemporary art, while expanding the offsite, learning and events programmes. For LCA’s 15th anniversary in 2020, our main gallery exhibition will be multi-sited across Lismore town. 

The following is an interview with Irish artist Niamh O’Malley, whose solo exhibition is currently showing in LCA’s St Carthage Hall (1 June – 25 August). 

Paul McAree: Perhaps you could discuss your current areas of interest – what are you working on and what materials are you using?
Niamh O’Malley: There is a current compulsion in my work to make something still and to make something solid. I think perhaps this comes out of anxiety; a sense of a rapidly changing, unreliable planet. I’m not sure what it means to be absorbed and to scrutinise – to give attention to making in this circumstance – but that is what I’m finding myself doing. In terms of material, I’ve been stretching lines in steel, making polished wooden handles and sanding the edges of slivers of glass. I’ve also been working on a film which feels quite fidgety and agitated – but that’s for later in the year.

PM: Your solo exhibition for Lismore Castle Arts is currently showing in the small chapel-like space of St Carthage Hall. Later this year, you will exhibit in the large space at the RHA. How does the contrasting scale of exhibition spaces affect your approaches and thinking?
NO’M: I really enjoy the challenge of working with different kinds of architecture, and solo shows offer you a particular opportunity to position the viewer. St Carthage Hall feels very intimate, as a space. It is a building which was evidently conceived to contain thought and reflection. There are windows but you can’t really see out and, perhaps because you step down to enter, it also feels very grounded and calm. It has definitely impacted on my decision to focus on mostly floor-based sculptural works. Because the development of a large body of new work has coincided with invitations into these contrasting spaces, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to occupy the volume of a room. In both venues, I am using steel as an obvious component for the first time; its structural capacity and strength will hopefully allow me to create complex delineations within both venues. I’m trying to find techniques to choregraph and locate the viewer, without building or relying on the walls.

PM: You recently used the phrase ‘furniture’, when discussing your new work, which incorporates beautiful pieces of wood; can you explain this idea of artwork as furniture, or vice versa?
NO’M: I’m mostly interested in the idea of furniture because of its relationship to the body. While obviously taking in a wide variety of objects, the term connotes positioning, touch and a sense of habit. My works won’t necessarily provide the functionality of a chair or a table, but I like the idea that they might feel familiar; that you will know how it feels to run your finger across the surface. There is also a stillness and stability to furniture: it produces place from space; gives you handles to facilitate your encounters with the world.

PM: How do you balance your interests in film and sculpture? How do they work together and how do you think about an exhibition that doesn’t contain any film work?NO’M: Recently when I have presented video in gallery spaces, it has been displayed on monitors, occupying a similar physical status to the sculptural objects and flat work – except that moving image produces a different kind of activation in the viewer. I’m interested in the idea that in a show made up of many different materials and things, the insertion of movement and time can activate the solidness and stillness of the others. I decided early on not to show any film in St Carthage Hall – the space seemed too small, in a way, and a video would always be too present and distracting. There is also the proximity to the street – the door opens onto the village. I think that that closeness of life and movement is operating as the film in this show.  

PM: Over the last few years, you have experimented with handmade glass. How has this developed within your practice, as a material, tool or symbol? 
NO’M: Glass is of course a very ancient material, somewhat magical, produced from sand. It is a molten translucent liquid caught in solid form. I began using it as an optical filter in front of the video camera and it gradually made its way in front of drawings and into sculptures. Having the glass lying around the studio, I became more aware of it as an object with edges and depth and form – not just something which directs us to look through, but something which we can look at.  

PM: You are from Mayo, live in Dublin and have two solo exhibitions this year, in Dublin and Lismore. Does the setting and location of a space matter?
NO’M: The setting and location definitely affect the encounter. I was invited to show as part of the ‘Mayo Collective’ exhibition in 2013. It’s a really innovative exhibition initiative, curated in my case by Patrick Murphy, which involves five visual arts venues in the county working together. (Áras Inis Gluaire, Customs House Studios & Gallery, Linenhall Arts Centre, Ballina Arts Centre and Ballinglen Arts Foundation). In that situation the work’s relationship to the landscape became heighted; the journey between the venues inevitably formed part of their reading. In Lismore, the village and gardens and the journey (if you’ve made one) will also reframe the work. Preparing for the RHA, I have the luxury of developing an exhibition in the city I live in, so I can call in regularly and terrify myself with the scale of that room. I can also remind myself of how it feels to walk into the venue from the busy city centre. This is all more difficult with a single site visit to an international venue. I think different kinds of venues in a diversity of places all add to the wealth of our potential experiences with art. 

PM: How do you feel artists are resourced in Ireland (regarding fees, production and technical support) compared with our international counterparts?
NO’M: Over the years my practice has been generously supported by Arts Council bursaries, studio awards and residencies in places such as MoMA PS1 (New York), Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, HIAP (Helsinki) and IMMA. I think, in many ways, I have been privileged to work in Ireland. Most of the public institutions I have worked with in Ireland and abroad are genuinely working hard to resource the artists they work with – within their limited means. The reduction in funding post-crash continues to hurt everyone but I am relieved that galleries, in the main, recognise that to pay artists means to support the wider artistic ecology. Without artists there will be no work and even if we had a rich commercial environment, I would not like to see us relying on it as barometer or funder. Who gets to make art, show art and to look at art, matters and I do worry that the opportunities I have had – such as free education, Arts Council grants (to help me to live, work and pay childcare), free access to galleries and artists’ fees – are not something we can take for granted. It is important that we continue to talk to each other and advocate for each other. 

Paul McAree is Curator at Lismore Castle Arts. Niamh O’Malley’s exhibition continues at St Carthage Hall, Lismore, until 25 August. ‘Palimpsest’ continues at Lismore Castle Arts until 13 October.
lismorecastlearts.ie

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Niamh O’Malley, Production Still, 2019; courtesy the artist and Lismore Castle Arts.

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Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh
2 May – 7 July 2019

‘See you Tomorrow’ – an ambitious collection of public projects, led by Australian artists Elizabeth Woods and Kevin Leong – has transformed Sirius Arts Centre into a hub of activity. On first impression, the space was busy and alive, albeit slightly confounding. Bread machines whirred in one corner of the room, while leaflets were scattered across a table in another. A video work depicting a serious looking performance of semaphore occupied one end of the space, while at the opposite end, a pile of booklets lay under a bell jar. Amidst the frenetic activity, I was invited to engage with the exhibition’s bakery and to taste the fresh bread being made onsite – a proposition that allowed me the time and space to digest my surroundings. 

‘See you tomorrow’ is impressive in both range and scale. The exhibition forms part of ‘This Must be the Place’, an annual event in Cobh and Great Island that encourages participation in the arts centre’s activities. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information presented, yet there is also an underlying simplicity to the exhibition. Literature is provided (with the entire project having been documented by Professor Patricia Hoffie) however, engagement with the gallery staff helped to further illuminate the details of the various projects. Leong and Wood have a well-established collaborative practice, focusing on site-specific and community-based arts projects, with ‘See You Tomorrow’ being one of their most expansive projects to date. Each of the projects involved collaboration with residents and local artists, with Leong and Wood acting as both facilitators and co-creators. The artists’ primary research began in 2016, when they conducted interviews with locals, posing the following two questions: What would you like to change about Cobh? What would you like to keep? These recorded interviews – entitled Evolution Interviews – were screened as part of the exhibition. In addition, the different concerns raised by interviewees were mapped out statistically and displayed on the gallery wall, providing a useful visual aid.

Two new publications aimed to promote a positive relationship between the younger and older communities in Cobh. The booklets were developed in collaboration with artist Peter Nash and emerged from workshops with local youth groups. Elsewhere, a video performance by local artists Lynne-Marie Dennehy and Nicole Flanagan, titled Sign Bearers, saw the artists using flag semaphore to communicate a poem. As Cobh is a maritime town, the visual language of semaphore is part of the local heritage. This project articulates concerns over the loss of traditions and identity within the community. A hieroglyphic, digital-looking translation of the poem – which imagines the mythical Hawthorn Tree awaking to a future Ireland – was displayed on a wall adjacent to the video. This project also assumed an autonomous identity during the exhibition, with the artists performing at various locations in Cobh town centre.

To the right of this screen, were chairs and a table, suggesting the remnants of another performative project. A series of election-style posters occupied the wall, detailing a public event, titled The Long Table. As part of this project, politicians running in the local elections were invited to speak at the arts centre. Each candidate was given the opportunity to discuss their plans for the future of Cobh. The concept for the event originated from concerns raised by interviewees about a widespread disillusionment with local politics. This project also brings the political motivations of the exhibiting artists to the fore, with the philosophy that the ‘personal is political’ resonating throughout the exhibition, through a social examination of the Cobh community.

Addressing a similar concern was a real-estate style display of vacant buildings in Cobh. Images of each property were accompanied by textual descriptions of imagined future purposes. ‘The Vacant Building Appreciation Society’ accepted submissions from locals, who dreamed up everything from alternative nightclubs to activist art collectives. In addition, a large-scale mural by artist Mark Hathaway is slowly being completed during the exhibition, adding a further sense of activity to the space. Another project, ‘The Green Light’, invited Cobh residents to participate in installing green lightbulbs in the gallery – a wonderfully simple gesture signalling that they are giving the ‘green light’ to the future.

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in County Cork, who recently graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design.

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Sirius Bakery, installation view, ‘See you tomorrow’; photograph by Kevin Leong, courtesy of Sirius Art Centre

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Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
2 – 12 May 2019 

Presented in the congenial lobby, stairs and bar areas of Liberty Hall Theatre, ‘Social Commons’ was curated by Kathryn Maguire and Siobh McGrane for May Fest – SIPTU’s “celebration of workers’ culture”. Where the ‘commons’ denotes a shared physical resource, ‘social commons’ can mean a dispensation of peer-to-peer relationships, parallel to private and State structures, aimed at promoting a ‘general good’. The term refers not just to redistribution, but to transformative communal self-understanding. At the base of Liberty Hall – a monument to Irish socialism and nationalism – the notion conjured unbounded scale. A tension was felt between consummate, utopic vision and piecemeal inflections of potential. 

Kate O’Shea’s Hardwired (2018) was a pivot for such unfurling schemas. Planted inside the glass doors and winding around the stair column, O’Shea’s installation of imbricated ink-printed pages reached the upper landing. With dislodged, floating political text, these zesty monochromes relayed urban or construction signage. The effect – frenetic but sanguine, like ‘80’s graphics – was calmed at the lower reception area, through the display of artworks by young people from Kilbarrack Sphere 17 Youth Centre (sphere17.ie). Six Portraits (2019) were tall and arresting works on paper. Carly Greene rendered a face with shuttered eyelids, her temples massaged by fingertips and displaying a patch of gaffer tape at the mouth. Alphabet of Sexuality (2019) was a considered, personal index of concepts relating to sexuality and identity, comprising a hefty stapled handbook of entries and sprightly letters affixed to the wall. 

The juxtaposition of young and amateur artists alongside trained and professional counterparts provided a compelling expression of inclusiveness. Upstairs, on windows overlooking Burgh Quay, were columns of small, acetate letters. This was Double Disadvantaged (2019), impactful spoken-word text developed by young Travellers associated with Sphere 17: You say, why should I stay in school/I say, education informs me, stop treating me like a fool/ You say, our traditions are backwards, outdated, stuck in the past/ I say we value our singing, our story-telling and long may it last… Amid The Garland of Worries (2019) – teary crêpe paper wind chimes, also created by Sphere 17 – was Safe Space (2019). These photographed clay sculptures and collages – with visages of Eminem, Tweety Bird and other characters – were made by children from an anonymous homeless hub in Ireland. 

Eve Olney, a member of the Athens-based ‘Urban React’ architecture group, presented videos works, entitled Kaisariani (2017). They document an innovative, ad-hoc regeneration project in this area of Athens and illustrate structures and relationships befitting a ‘social commons’. With local government tolerance, and backing from Bern University and crowdfunding sources, the project was endorsed by local residents, whose participation gave them direct access to Urban React. Founder Dimitri Panayotopoulos states that, returning to Greece as an unfamiliar immigrant without a social network, he began to orient himself through activities deriving from moral instinct, rather than habit. 

Áine ní Chíobháin’s Remedy for Wild Atlantic Dismay and A Lament for an Empty Sea (both 2019) were brittle ruminations on found and organic material; tenebrous disk-like forms on little supports. They were earthy and awkward in this artificial and frenzied environment (my visit coincided with an ‘Alternative Ulsters’ punk event), connoting policy and environmental dysfunctionality. The exhibition’s universal political concept was frequently disturbed like this, by showing the close proximity of social issues. In an untitled photograph by Daniel Idini from 2018, a figure in a sleeping bag blocks a doorway, with a plastic bag under their head and a paper cup close by. Food packaging is wedged in the door handles, while in the window, a ‘Jelly Babies’ poster displays an anti-racism message – “we’re all made of the same stuff” – evoking the dismal emergence of xenophobia and racism with competition for resources. By imbuing its prone subject with surreal beauty, the photograph reveals insidious powers of objectification and distancing. Such reflectiveness was also inescapable in Francis Fay’s opening-night performance, The Knight of Mirrors (2019), borrowed from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which Fay loitered absurdly outside the building’s entrance, wearing a white suit with trailing sleeves and trouser legs, with mirrors for his face and hands.

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.

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‘Social Commons’, installation view’; photograph by Kathryn Maguire.

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ArtisAnn Gallery, Belfast
2 May – 1 June 2019

‘A Harlot’s Progress’ refers to William Hogarth’s series of the same name – a moral tale of the short life of one Moll Hackabout, who travels from the countryside to London, falls into prostitution, and succumbs to syphilis and death. Artist Karen Daye-Hutchinson’s interpretation of the sequence goes beyond the scope of Hogarth, not only in comprising 12 etchings (as opposed to Hogarth’s six engravings), but also via a prologue in which we learn the motivations of the young woman to leave her ‘shit hole’ of a village and seek her fortune in the big city by following her father’s suggestion (and against the will of a ‘disapproving mother’) to attend art college. 

In Where you came from, our young protagonist stands awkwardly in a dark space of her own – a foreshadowing of the slab she will later lie on. Buildings loom in the background – one pencil-like (a reference to art college?) and turreted like Rapunzel’s or St Barbara’s tower. Is the horse her mode of transport (as with Hackabout), or a reference to the village, or a symbol of her father next to a Guernica-like face in profile which strains to follow her, the mother perhaps?

Leopard on a pedestal features the eponymous large cat, next to what appears to be a Dyson ‘pedestal fan’. Posed odalisque-like on the floor is our writhing protagonist, seemingly entranced by the lures of the metropolis. The horse and floating face observe in silence.  The marriage sees her dressed in a simple white gown and oversized shoes beside the ghostly figure of the groom. On the left, an ominous black bird with splayed wings perches above a tasselled rug with a snake pattern. The presence of man, woman and snake is like the premonition of the fall from grace. 

In Under the spotlight, the heroine is sexier and more confident, reclining with a drink in her right hand. A child-like silhouette on the floor unsettles the harshly lit scene. Without volume it is like a stain, or a miscarriage, a shed skin, or the artist herself. On a pig’s back recalls the dog in Hogarth’s Bridewell Prison scene, or the decadence of Rops’ ‘Pornokratès’. The Orgy features, we assume, the husband and wife from plate four, sharing a bath with a bloated grinning hyena and a pale diaphanous female figure. The outline of the bath passes unobstructed through both of these figures: they are transparent, illusory or symbolic. In The wicked: they wait, malevolent creatures seem poised to attack. 

The hyena returns in The onlookers, accompanied by another in the shadows. The animals are beautifully executed – the artist applying a tone using aquatint, and then burnishing it back to create soft chalky lines. In The cat and the blackbird, a white figure lies Marat-like on the ground in an ambiguous eyrie-like space, watched over by a white cat and a black bird. In The ascension, the blackbird is now a dove taking flight – the conjunction of both birds reminiscent of Delargy’s Beckett series. A head (or two?) emerges from a flickering bonfire, while a shadowy angel conjures the apparition from the flames or simply warms his hands beside the fire. The background is a gorgeous velvet black speckled with stars where the artist has perhaps applied a hand-shaken aquatint or spattered the area with stop-out varnish. 

As with Horgarth’s final scene, The beginning or the end has a cyclical quality to it. We seem to be back in the countryside of the prologue or the afterlife. But this is no ‘shit hole’; rather a bucolic landscape with the heroine reclining under a tree, in Moll’s hat and nuzzled by sheep. The father and mother figures reappear but seem softened. 

From Joyce to Atwood or indeed David Hockney – who interpreted Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (recently exhibited in Belfast) – the use of a prototype source has been employed by the artist as a framework for inspiration. Although conceived in the same spirit, with similar use of animals as symbols, snippets of text, and biblical and contemporary references, Daye-Hutchinson’s suite of works is not a modern retelling. Her print cycle is more elliptical, steeped in mood and symbolism, and she shows compassion towards her young heroine. There is much to take in here. Like Hogarth’s, the prints ask to be read; yet their meanings can never be pinned down. In terms of technique, the works are a masterclass in printmaking, with a balance between premeditation and spontaneity. The catalogue urges viewers to consider each print as a complete work in its own right; however, to only view the pieces in isolation would deny us of the subtle interplay and enduring impact they achieve as a whole. 

Jonathan Brennan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast. 
jonathanbrennanart.com

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Karen Daye-Hutchinson, The wicked – they wait, artist proof 36 × 31 cm; courtesy of the artist and ArtisAnn Gallery

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Void Gallery, Derry
16 April – 8 June 2019

I’m standing in a dark forest. I can hear an ambient rustling and that distinct murmur of the wind, only audible to a fabric microphone. Disconnected rectangles of leaves and sky are visible at eye level; I can briefly feel the forest as I look up towards the grey-blue light diffusing onto the walls. Then a voice declares: “Abort! Lacking power or effect” – and it’s gone.

A forest of identical televisions is installed in pairs throughout Void’s galleries – some are back to back, others at perpendicular angles. Each screen is accompanied by a speaker, either directly below or elevated to the side. The speakers broadcast, in unison, a narrator issuing commands at intervals: “Randomise – Harmonise – Reverse!” The onscreen footage changes from a forest, to a landscape, streetscape or aerial view, presenting scientific data, and a range of other content from a network of contributors across diverse fields. Some footage is simultaneous across the displays (“Harmonise!”), while other footage is spread in patterns, sometimes related and sometimes not (“Randomise!”).

Drawing inspiration from early video-installation work from the late 1960s and early ‘80s, A Visibility Matrix is directed by artists Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne. Working with an editorial team, they propose a space for crowdsourced video content as an alternative to social media, generating a kind of offline, ‘back-to-the-future’ experience. 

A migratory project, it has so far been situated at The Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Le Printemps de September (Toulouse) and Secession (Vienna), until pitching up here in Derry, at Void. Its evolution has, we are told, been shaped by this journey, but the markers of evolution are unclear: has the content library grown? Have more editors become involved? Have the audio-visual combinations changed? It seems unreasonably difficult to determine this on observation alone – the work’s accumulative nature is imperceptible, its mechanisms obscured. Of course, there is absolutely no requirement for any artist to work with transparency, but if we’re discussing a media platform, the processes become a matter of public interest.

The televisions are physically connected through a bundle of black cables that engorge exponentially as they snake through the galleries, ending in a smaller, darkened space where they separate and climb upwards into an unseen mezzanine. On an adjacent wall is a vertically aligned panel, displaying command-line text that appears to instruct the exhibition through code. But is this an authentic command-line? The syntax is more ‘plain-English’ than any programming language I know of, and the font is proportional, not the monospace font regularly used in programming interfaces. If other critical elements of the project are only referenced, not documented, then why relay the digital backend with this screen of pseudo-code? A large, wooden spindle of black cabling sits next to the data cables but is physically disconnected from them. It’s just there, and unless it has Wi-Fi, I doubt it’s an active part of the system. Maybe its inclusion further symbolises the ‘obscured physicality’ of digital media – a point that is already abundantly made. This final space illustrates the backend of the system in a way that betrays conceptual purity for aesthetic gestures, revealing the ‘hand of the artist’.

Of all the narrator’s interventions, it is the W.B. Yeat’s line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, from The Second Coming, that stands apart for its poetic gravitas, amid the otherwise prosaic commands. It is the strange fate of The Second Coming to have been absorbed intravenously by popular culture, such that even complete ignorance of Yeats or poetry-in-general is no barrier to knowing what these words mean. Their spectral reoccurrences here, semantically out of place, symbolise the pathology of viral culture.

It is proposed that A Visibility Matrix “speculates on an alternative to the […] subject + smartphone + online-video-sharing-platform” paradigm. It aspires to abjure social media, but the immediate viewer experience actually mirrors it: both are driven by an obscured, proprietary algorithm. The idea of systemic content generation is a priori; it seems accomplished, so long as we respond using the language provided. But if we dissent, there is a messier, more human authorship to be glimpsed amid the occasionally sublime moments that occur outside of the system.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

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Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne, ‘A Visibility Matrix’, installation view, Void; photograph by Tansy Cowley, courtesy of Void.

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