ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Artist In Conversation: Karl Burke and Dr. Francis Halsall

Artist In Conversation: Karl Burke and Dr. Francis Halsall
Thursday 31 January 2019, 6.30pm
Free in.

Artist Karl Burke will be in conversation with Dr. Francis Halsall; art historian and co-director of the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD Dublin. In association with Space Gathers Itself, an exhibition of work by Karl Burke, running until 09 February.
Karl Burke is an Irish artist and musician based in Dublin. He has exhibited widely in Europe and North America including The Royal Hibernian Academy, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery, Project Arts Centre, The Mac, Maria Stenfors Gallery, The Serpentine and The Mattress factory. A site specific practice of primary concern in Burke’s work is the symbiotic relationship between the art object, the space it inhabits and the experiential concerns related to viewership. The work is often minimal or reductive in appearance and takes the form of sculptural installations often utilising the mediums of steel and wood. Video, sound and the photographic image are utilised in other instances.
Francis Halsall is co-director of Master Programs, Art in the Contemporary World, at National College of Art and Design, Dublin and Research Fellow at the Department of Art History and Image Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. His research involves three main areas: (1) Modern and Contemporary art; (2) Philosophical aesthetics (3) Systems Thinking. He has published and lectured widely in all areas.

Active Archive – Slow Institution

Active Archive – Slow Institution is a major research project that delves into Project Art Centre’s rich 50+ year history, uncovering the history (or rather histories) of one of Ireland’s oldest public art institutions.

Over the past six months, recent ACW graduate, Dorothy Hunter and current ACW MFA student, Hannah Tiernan have been undertaking independent lines of enquiry within the centre’s archive. The Long Goodbye exhibition, which opens on Thursday 31st January, is the culmination of this project and will feature highlights from their research.

Dorothy has been researching the disparate threads connected to the “eventualisation” of the Project fires, such as the tension between symbol-making and destruction, how protection and aftermath are dealt with, art that was destroyed and made, and the layered proxy existences within the archive.

Hannah’s research into the LGBTQ+ theatre of Project speaks to the Art Centre’s importance as an artist-led organisation. Having been at the forefront of presenting cutting edge, contemporary and often controversial work, this research looks at the legacy of such an institution and how this reflects in today’s practices.

You, Me and Everything In Between workshop conducted by ACW students in the RHA

Art in the Contemporary World work with the RHA for Learning and Public Engagement, Futures Series 3, Episode 2 with Dublin Youth Dance Company

Working closely with the RHA, Katy Fitzpatrick and Róisín Bohan for the Public Engagement and Learning program for the current Futures exhibition, ACW students, Brendan Fox, Natalie Pullen and Éimear Regan developed You, Me and Everything In Between. A theatrical workshop loosely based around Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, where participants were encouraged to manifest a performative narrative connecting the exhibition content. The artists featuring in Futures Series 3, Episode 2 exhibition are Bassam Al-Sabah, Cecilia Danell, Laura Fitzgerald, Jennifer Mehigan, Joanne Reid and Marcel Vidal. The work on display by each artist in Futures is unconnected and seemingly disparate as the exhibition is a display of their own personal practice rather than a group show that relates to a specific theme or greater narrative. The challenge set forth in the workshop was to develop a constellation between the artists’ work on display, with an outcome of producing and creating a wholly separate piece of performance art. The artists in the Futures exhibition also contributed to the workshop by donating personal objects for a further insight into their world. Among the objects donated were a paint pot cast from layers upon layers of paint, a silver mask and a metal rod. Members of the Dublin Youth Dance Company directed by Mariam Ribon, were invited to participate in the 3-hour-long workshop which took place on Saturday 15 December. The first half of the workshop began with the 11 participants viewing and taking in the work, followed by a meditation and then contained a series of exercises influenced by Boal’s practice where there was a discussion and consequently where the generation of ideas for a narrative emerged. During the second half of the workshop the DYDC participants were divided into three groups and were instructed to develop their narrative of the exhibition through three “moments” that established a final performance. Materials were provided by the facilitators Fox, Pullen and Regan to aid the development and theatricality of the narrative, encouraging the participants to engage in producing a fully embodied piece of art. The dancers infused themselves into the workshop and the outcome was outstanding. Each group performed their finished piece within the space with the artworks as a backdrop. The dancers’ commitment to the workshop was phenomenal and the creative energy generated in the space was quite special.

Éimear Regan, MA Art in the Contemporary World

All photographs by Brendan Fox

Young Hearts Run Free Collective turns 10!

Young Hearts – www.youngheartsrunfree.ie turns 10 in December, and to celebrate the milestone there’s a mini-festival from 7th – 9th December at venues around Dublin city.

As ever, all the proceeds go to the Simon Community -The project/collective was started in 2008 by Siobhán Kane, wanting to promote the creative community, as well as raise money for this homeless organisation.

There are so many great people contributing, from Emmet Kirwan to David O’Doherty, Katie Kim, Lisa O’Neill, Dreamgun – to grab tickets to any of the events click the link below:

https://www.eventbrite.ie/o/young-hearts-run-free-6319407353

Don’t miss out!

six seville

six seville
6 Seville Place, Dublin 1

six seville opens on Friday 30th November, 7 – 9pm

Exhibition continues Saturday 1st – Sunday 2nd December, 8am – 4.30pm

six seville features work by Conall Kelleher, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch, Áine McBride, Blaine O’Donnell, Liliane Puthod, Conal Ryan and Tanad Williams in a formerly vacant building now used as a studio space.

Free event on artists’ writing at Dublin Art Book Fair – Tuesday 27th November

Why do artists write? And do they approach the task of writing differently?

The Art in the Contemporary World MA/ MFA programme at NCAD and Paper Visual Art are hosting an evening of readings at which artists and critics will read their own words, or those of other artists. Speakers include Sue Rainsford, Suzanne Walsh, Fiona Gannon, Jessica Foley, Lily Cahill and others. It will take place on Tuesday 27th November at 6pm in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, as part of the Dublin Art Book Fair 2018.

Free. Open too all. Refreshments served. Please book a place via eventbrite here.

This will be the first of a series of events putting the spotlight on new forms of writing and publishing practices in contemporary art planned for 2018-19.

Review: Furtive Tears by Niamh McCann at The Hugh Lane Gallery by Brendan Fox (ACW)

A New Occult and Encounters with the Invisible Man

A review of Furtive Tears, 4 October 2018 – 6 January 2019 by Niamh McCann at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 2018.

Rodin's The Age of Bronze AKA The Awakening Man AKA The Vanquished One (masked) - Box Steel Frame, Walnut Burl Veneer Panel, Painted Panel, nuts and bolts, The Age of Bronze by Auguste Rodin from Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane’s collection - 2018.Photo Credit: Ruarí Conaty.

Occultation; n. (Astronomy); The passage of a celestial object across the line of sight between an observer and another celestial object; as when the moon moves between the Earth and the sun in a solar eclipse.

Beckoning us through ghostly operatic echoes as we ascend the stoic neoclassical staircase of the Hugh Lane Gallery, McCann’s video work Furtive Tears, Salomé’s Lament eventually drenches us in
an opulent fusion of Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Donizetti’s Una Furtiva Lagrima from here the hybridism of language and landscape becomes only more strange.

An imposing screen seduces us. Boris, a suited man, appears to await our arrival and scales the grandiose marble staircase of Belfast City Hall in a pair of red high heels. In a duo of impassioned tableau vivant’s he mimics the stance of Sir Edward Carson’s statue, situated at Stormont Castle, Belfast, followed by the Jim Larkin monument on O’Connell Street, just meters away. Both prominent twentieth century political figures immortalised in a state of dramatic public address. Outside the gallery they tower over contemporary cities fraught with new political uncertainties, their power redundant, their bodies now relics cast in silence. McCann breathes a last breath into their predominance and within it gives us space to reassess our own position in relation to both historic and contemporary power structures.
In the following scene we follow Boris’s continued ascension as he scales the Ridge View of Black Mountain leaving Belfast city behind having swapped his suit for a panda costume. Still wearing his red shoes, we witness him meandering through dewy grass, climbing fences and encountering mildly inconvenienced cows. He again mimics these political ghosts but this time the man is hidden, masked, he has become a cartoon. The dramatic inhabitance of these two iconic statues becomes a pathetic historical indistinct echo falling on deaf ears. We see his physical intentions without the details of expression, he is present but not apparent, something has passed between us and him obscuring our perspective, our reality.

This notion of occultation is pushed further in the adjoining gallery as we encounter our third immortalised male figure in a work wryly entitled The Age of Bronze AKA The Awakening Man AKA The Vanquished One (masked) pertaining to Rodin’s multi named bronze cast male figure (1876-77), a piece from the Hugh Lane Collection. McCann encases the gallery’s own Age of Bronze in a sharp green box frame, his head and upper body obscured with two panels, one blue the other a walnut burl veneer. This is a mongrel of the opposing sides of modernism but beyond its formal and art historical loft dwells a new space for interpretation. Through McCann’s geometric addition the figure of the naked bronze solider appears vulnerable, even caged. As the linear mechanism contrasts with the details and curvatures of his lower anatomy a palpable intimacy develops, yet he cannot “see” us, he is a pawn in a statement, to be looked at but not fully engaged with.

These historic male statues and monuments bare a contemporary vulnerability. McCann is redistributing notions of power and how we perceive it. She confidently harnesses these icons like a child might put batteries in an old toy and asks us to look again. Paradoxically there is a sense of the prophetic here, these historic regurgitations feel immediate and succeed through McCann’s ubiquitous intentions, her place amid the current socio-political zeitgeist and our own conception of the dawning of a new order.

In another gallery a taxidermied fawn towers above us, its head suffocated with a zipped black balloon, its fore limbs extended to its rear with black curved rods as it precariously sits, like a rocking horse, atop a box frame plinth, containing a dangling umbilical-esque blue neon tube light. From a height a pair of white voile drapes partially veil the rich blue walls before theatrically pouring to the floor surrounding an offering of fresh lilies, their fragrance inhabiting the space in a sharp organic sweetness as if Salomé herself was present, seducing us, dancing the Seven Veils amid this mise-en- scène tempered with sacrifice, vulnerability and power. These works lean on us as viewers to decipher what we do not see, or what McCann chooses to occult; they deftly summon forth the invisible. In the same room a large bronze nose cast from Seamus Murphy’s marble bust of Michael Collins (1949), another work from the Hugh Lane Collection, sits on a faux classical plinth, faceless, ironically pointing at a second green pedestal with a pair of destroyed aviator sunglasses. The monumental male is almost invisible now, surviving only by a nose, snorting contemporary air, like a man drowning in history or to quote Salomé in “black lakes troubled by fantastic moons.”

Art critic Rosalind Krauss writes of the logic of sculpture as being inseparable from the logic of the monument, “It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place”. McCann’s landscape of artefacts is profoundly routed in the space it inhabits; it is of the institution and rebels tangibly and intellectually within that frame. It is quite literally a Trojan horse, it is a series interventional contraptions concealing rebels and soldiers.

Here Salomé no longer dances alone under the gaze of men McCann’s ideas head bang alongside her, amid the Hugh Lane collection, like their parents have gone out of town. Furtive Tears is a spiky romantic affair it confronts us with fact and fiction, real and faux. Like Parrhasius’s curtain the perceived occultation is the work. As McCann’s objects pass between us and the past they momentarily eclipse history and in that darkness dwells a new constellation offering us portals into the alternative, interrogating socio-political shifts and arguing the legitimacy of the relics of politics and art, placing us at the centre of our own truths and preconceived ideas of our idiosyncratic place in story that is history.

Brendan Fox is an artist, curator, film maker and writer living in Dublin, he is currently studying MA Art in the Contemporary World, NCAD

www.brendanfoxart.com

Make Haste, Slowly at the Return Gallery

Photo Credit: Louis Haugh

Make Haste, Slowly
Return Gallery Goethe-Institut Irland, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.

A collectively curated, scripted, performed, and presented exercise in radical pedagogies by the MA Art in the Contemporary World: Jack Cole, Dominique Crowley, Padraig Cunningham, Stephanie Deady, María del Buey, Tamara Derksen, Nicole Di Sandro, Brendan Fox,
Kate Friedeberg, Valerie Joyce, Seánan Kerr, Heidee Martin, Grainne Murphy, Orlaith Phelan, Natalie Pullen, Éimear Regan, and Laura Skublics.
With artworks and collaborations featuring Basil Al
Rawi, Jane’s Bees, Jasmin Marker, Repeater Collective, Noel Sheridan, John Smith, and David and Sally Shaw-Smith. Presented in the context of Liam Gillick’s Denominator Platform 2018, specially commissioned by Art in the Contemporary World for the Return Gallery.
Make Haste, Slowly is part of Common Denominator: Art in the Contemporary World at the Goethe-Institut, a two-year programme that takes as its starting point Walter Gropius’s term, from which collective knowledges progress. Through exhibitions, events, seminars and more we will interrogate and inhabit what it means in our time to speak of political solidarity, civic standards, or even aesthetic values, and to consider
the relation between common commitments and necessary possibilities of individual belief, expression and action.
Art in the Contemporary World is Ireland’s leading taught MA at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin.
Our students are avid researchers whose focus is to advance a project with the aim of understanding, interrogating,
and expanding the role of contemporary practices and their contexts. ACW is led by Francis Halsall, Declan Long and Sarah Pierce.
Supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland in collaboration with the National College of Art & Design. Special thanks to the Kerlin Gallery and IMMA | Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Opening
30th November 2018 6 – 9pm
Exhibition runs through 12th January 2019.