Participants
Participants will be invited to share, discuss and debate, as well as eat and relax together for the duration of the project. Each participant will bring a work; whether a static work of art, talk, paper, performance, video or some other contribution. Each will act as a catalyst for group discussion to tackle common and conflicting concerns that emerge. Some works will be installed ahead of time and will remain in situ for the duration of the weekend while others will be part of a scheduled series of events.
Participants:
Loukia Alavanou creates surreal animations and multi-channel installations. Using fragmented images and sounds from film, her work explores the site of cinema in relationship to desire with an emphasis on the female body and domesticity. Alavanou develops linguistic associations that can be made between the process of ‘masking’ in animation and the ‘feminine masquerade’. Her work has a dark socio-psychological humour with a distinct intent.
Ruth Barker‘s performance work involves scripting and memorising substantial literary monologues that draw on classical or mythological narratives to remake them as resonant, current, events. She understands mythmaking and storytelling as ways of describing the fundamentals of the human condition. Reciting from memory, Barker’s performances become a feat of endurance; emotionally loaded and reliant on a concentrated focus that becomes by turns hypnotic, claustrophobic, and cathartic.
Rebecca Birch uses conversation, drawing, video, performance and her red Hyundai Getz to produce works that engender encounters between landscape, inhabitants and guests. Birch does not confine places or narratives to an original location or context, but carries them on to other locations to construct new contexts for further encounters. There is a subtle proliferation in Birch’s strategy, mediated through her own manouvres and the recounting of other people’s stories.
boyleANDshaw work with a matrix of images, phrases and ideas that resonate with them in some way – a few lines of text in an email, a photo torn from the newspaper, an excerpt, real or imagined, from the biography of one of their cultural icons – that they then set about expanding, in a process of abstraction and generation. Their practice is geared towards fostering a sense that: ‘this could go anywhere’. Projects evolve according to their own logics, forces and dynamics.
Sally-Ginger Brockbank has worked her way from fine art through gender studies through the theory of opacity and into food. She now organises catering for events and hosts regular dinners for invited guests at a studio in east London. Sally-Ginger will host the participants’ meals with the assistance of Emma Burgess.
Clodagh Emoe uses liminality as a point of departure and attempts to evoke a threshold state through forms of gathering. Emoe assembles spaces where philosophical thought and experiential affect coexist. Exploring the idea of a collective imagination, Emoe’s work suggests a faith in something other than the individual; a space beyond our enclosures where we might meet.
Paul Goodwin is a curator, urbanist and researcher working independently and at Tate Britain. His practice revolves around researching, supporting and producing critical spaces for the creative articulation of cultural difference. He is engaged with issues of migration, Black Atlantic visual cultures, globalisation and the production of alternative urban architectures.
Francis Halsall is a lecturer in the History/Theory of Modern & Contemporary Art at NCAD in Dublin. His research has focused on systems aesthetics and art after modernism. Through the work of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, Halsall has considered art in relationship to complex systems of emergence that create dynamic, non-linear interactions through the existence of difference. More recently his interest has turned to the systems of the body and the sensual object through a phenomenological approach and the speculative realism of Graham Harman.
Saoirse Higgins is obsessed with natural and man-made power; control and when things do not go to plan. She is interested in revealing the connections between our visions of the world we live in, our expectations for the future and the technology we use to help us with this. She explores the contested spaces of public-private, man-machine, man-nature. Her work is process-driven and has a scientifically influenced yet playful approach.
Jefford Horrigan rearranges furniture; placing and displacing one piece in relationship to another. Through an inter-material engagement of body and thing, Horrigan produces sensual often absurd performances, sculptures, installations and videos.
Jesse Jones works primarily with video to consider the political and social history embedded within everyday life. She is interested in moments when hidden history comes to the surface. Jones plays off popular culture as an expression of collective narrative and restages histories within contemporary contexts; scrambling the initial cultural reference and meaning. Through her ongoing collaborative research project with Fiona Marron, Jones considers alternative histories and speculates about fictional futures.
Thomas Kratz operates across a variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Kratz’s approach is founded on a set of multiple positions, each with clear material and conceptual characteristics. However, these diverse positions are not isolated from one another. Particular objects and gestures re-occur, creating a sense contingency and ritual both within his practice and in relationship to those of others. While Kratz’s language pays homage to other artists, it resists being understood through an objective art history, appealing instead to a subjective poetics of material.
Fiona Marron‘s video practice relates to several interconnected social systems. Through encounters with the contexts and protagonists of labour and trade, she explores behavioural traits implicated in specific environments. Using a combination of staged and documentary approaches, Marron concurrently deals with her research interests while testing the parameters of agency and the viewer as witness. Through her ongoing collaborative research project with Jesse Jones, Marron is interested in considering alternative histories and speculating on fictional futures.
Niamh McCann‘s work invites a re-consideration of our relationship to the world around us. She questions how this world constitutes us as subjects and how we, in turn, give this world form. Her recent work examines the extent to which our understandings of the grand themes of modernity, globalisation and urbanisation are experienced in common. McCann’s performative and sculptural interventions explore philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random juxtapositions and spatial relationships.
Padraic E. Moore is a writer, art historian and curator. The various facets of Moore’s practice are unified by his subjective but rigorous approach to excavating art historical narratives. Within his work there is a reoccurring resistance to scepticism, looking instead towards the positive potential of art as both a material and spiritual force.
Garrett Phelan‘s practice spans drawing, FM radio broadcasts, sculptural installations, photography and animation. His presentation integrates the use of a series of lectures by R.D Laing and Independent FM Terrestrial Radio. Recent work has moved into a study between shared experience and deeply unique life experiences, in particular, the grey area that occurs as information, experience and influence are assimilated yet a final position has not yet been found.
Andrea Phillips is an academic engaged with the aesthetic and political relationship between architecture, philosophy, curating and concepts of insitution-making, publics and public display. Current research projects include ‘Actors, Agents and Attendants’ – a series of examinations of publics, politics and aesthetics with The Foundation for Art and the Public Realm; the aesthetic formatting of transnational space and its relation to contemporary art; the future and implications of practice-based research; and ‘Building Democracy’ – publications and discussions that forefront critiques of participation in contemporary art and architecture.
Stephen Rennicks works to bring people into the present. He develops techniques of engagement for himself and invites others to practice the same. His work evades the beauracracy and capitalism of the predominant system by working with what he has and where he is, one moment to the next. He makes subtle public interventions anonymously and without permission. His work is concerned with a way of living through the potential of art; a manner of attending to the seemingly insignificant through a creative gesture.
Martina Schmuecker makes sculptures in the widest sense of the word. Using herself, as well as directing actors, in her work she creates visually stunning images that remind us of the tableaux vivant. Schmücker’s performances act as moments of still reflection on a sculptural image that centre the relationship between the viewer and art object. She does not simply create an aesthetic illusion for the audience, but simultaneously reveals the mechanics of the constructed image as she lets the viewer be both observer and participant.
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory. Weaving emotion and humour into his critical thinking, Verwoert draws the strategic mind back into the body and soul of physical relations. He promotes a form of thinking and making through caring rather than destroying. Emanating from Verwoert‘s words is a positively infectious commitment to the transformative potential of art.
Laura Wilson‘s work is prompted by an object, event or situation that sets her off on a journey. Her process is one of navigating and negotiating – a repeated accumulation, building up and striping back of elements through evolution and collaboration. Parallel to her process oriented practice is an interest in the history and future of architecture. She explores construction, demolition and reuse through the materiality and re-contextualisation of everyday actions within her works.
Mick Wilson is an artist, writer and educator. He lectures internationally on art research, public culture, creative education and urbanism. Wilson’s research and professional interests are eclectic, ranging from the reputational economy of contemporary art to the rhetorical construction of knowledge conflict, and from the contested reconstruction of the contemporary university to the general arena of critical cultural pedagogies. He is at once passionate and analytical; poetic and political.
Portrait of Space 