Exhibit
A selection of projects
Folklore Pharmacy Posters
This series of posters presented in Spicebag at Backhaus Projects in Berlin combine the aesthetics of medical posters found in G.P. surgeries, hospitals and other care setting and stock imagery with cures and advice for general well-being found in archives of folk medicine and regional practices.
In general, the posters are titled after the cure’s citation in the folklore archives but the information is distilled and abstracted from its origin when presented in a poster to a contemporary audience creating a disjoint between familiarity and absurdity.
Displacement and Belonging: Home
In the Rua Red Spring Open 2023, Displacement and Belonging - Home, the selected artists are exploring the idea of 'Home'; What is home? Where is home? Is this my home? Thematics emerge such as migration, dislocation, and relocation; from the most personal sense of being connected to a place, and to each other, to the wider context of the prevailing disconnection and uncertainties in society today.
Kurhäuser
This series of posters presented in Spicebag at Backhaus Projects in Berlin combine the aesthetics of medical posters found in G.P. surgeries, hospitals and other care setting and stock imagery with cures and advice for general well-being found in archives of folk medicine and regional practices.
In general, the posters are titled after the cure’s citation in the folklore archives but the information is distilled and abstracted from its origin when presented in a poster to a contemporary audience creating a disjoint between familiarity and absurdity.
The Kildare Folklore Pharmacy
For Culture Night 2021, The Kildare Folklore Pharmacy was situated in Newbridge with the aim of banishing the county’s aches and pains. Inside, the visitor could find Kildare’s only pharmacy that recommended keeping a seventh son of a seventh son on speed dial and that offered suggestions on identifying changelings. During the opening ‘pharmacists’ were on hand to diagnose visitors by reading potatoes before advising on treatments which often involved ferrets, piebald horses and rivers dividing two counties. All of these cures had been compiled from archives of folk medicine and healing.
Invisible Stories
An Investigation of Landscape
Invisible Stories took place in the village of Allenwood with the aim of considering notions of place, landscape and identity through folklore and local history. The mini-festival consisted of a variety of events that engaged different sites in the locality. The project included an exhibition with Vanessa Daws, Pamela de Brí and Sheena Malone, music with Ken O’Brien and local trad musicians, a bus tour of local sites, a series of talks with experts from the disciplines of folklore, local history and the environment, a film screening, and a primary school folklore project which was displayed to the public.
Seven for a Story
Taking 80 year old archival material as it starting point, this project was developed during the CuratorLab research programme. Instead of stories with beginnings, middles and ends, the archive tells tales that are layered, fragmented, incomplete and infinite, existing and surrounding everyday life, still silently embedded in geography. In the archives, names of people today only known as elders, can be reencountered through their writings as schoolchildren. This project used archival material to trace the evolution of the townland’s landscape, scraping away and excavating layers of history, migration, industry, personal and collective memories, local folk knowledge and superstition, which through rapid modernisation, indifference and sometimes embarrassment has been lost.
Imaginary Geographies
Imaginary Geographies was conceived during the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art Summer School in Kuldiga in 2018. The exhibition investigated geography, history and myth-making, re-imagining the landscape of Kuldiga and re-contextualising the collection of the municipal museum. New invented histories were inserted as factual artefacts in the museum’s rooms, asking viewers to question the veracity of history and myth.
In (the) Place of the Oak
Drawing on branches as diverse as conceptual art, folklore, history and economics, the mighty oak tree at Tensta Konsthall provided the backdrop to In (the) Place of the Oak. The audience are invited to gather around and listen, echoing the nights spent in ritualised meditation in Marly forest by the members of Acéphale. During the talk, both familiar and unfamiliar narratives will be explored and the boundaries of fact and fiction will be blurred, thereby creating new mythologies or revising older ones. From an acorn, a glass of water grows.
Programme organised by CuratorLab to coincide with the Goldin+Senneby exhibition in Tensta Konsthall
Ritual Play
Rituals permeate our daily life. We create personal rituals and participate in collective ones. Harking back to the earliest humans, who made cave paintings to ensure a bountiful hunt, rituals are unavoidable, even in contemporary times. Even if we don’t classify the action as such, they function as markers for many of life’s significant events and are formative of who we are and define us in our relation to wider society. While meanings of rituals may have evolved over time we may cling to them as traditions sometimes unaware of their origins…
Open House at IASPIS
This edition of the Open House took on the concept of openness, hospitality, transparency and vulnerability, making access not only to the artists’ studios, but the institution as such and bringing the new public in-house. In a series of day and night events Open House presented the work in progress of Iaspis artists in residence program, as well as hosted the performative interventions of the Stockholm emerging scene, with its collectives contributing with food, self-made publication on demand, and a music repertoire. The main idea was to refer to the Swedish tradition of so-called Open House, when people organize a party open to everybody, an exhibition of their domicile, bringing the world into their life, and their life to the world.
Couchsurfers’ Paradise
Couchsurfers’ Paradise was an exhibition series unfolding in the homes of strangers in which the home becomes a temporary art-space, providing temporary shelter for the sojourning artist, curator, art and audience. In this manner, the residence’s function is transformed into that of a peripatetic kunsthalle which offers a platform for discussion and discovery through engagement with art and diverse audiences. The project broadens the scope of the exhibition space beyond that of the white cube by bringing art from the public realm to into private space. Engaging with the home, interventions are situated alongside the personal effects of the resident, creating a wunderkammer of objects unique to the abode. The art acts as a guest in the home causing minimal disturbance alongside the permanent rather than brashly imposing itself within the space.
The S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm
If the Firm had allowed itself the luxury to listen to its customers opinions, it would have gone crazy a long time ago.’ Rule No. 3.
Established in 1925 as a parody of a commercial enterprise, The S.I. Wikiewicz Portrait Painting Firm are moving their premises from Warsaw to Dublin and despite these uncertain economic times, are reopening for a limited period during the ABSOLUT Fringe Festival. An appointment must be made to attend the Firm’s offices and on arrival, your portrait will be drawn according to strict company policy. Several grades of portraits will be on special offer, from ‘spruced up’ types to the caffeine/ alcohol assisted ones (limited availability).