paper visual art journal –

A yellow rose was a recent exhibition by Colin Martin, Owen Boss, and Tom O’Dea in The Freemasons’ Hall on Molesworth Street – possibly one of the most charged and uncanny buildings in the city centre of Dublin. For Boss, Martin, and O’Dea, college friends who graduated from MFA in NCAD in 2010, the point of departure for the exhibition was their shared interest in ‘the complex relationship between art and reality’.[1] They used a short story by Jorge Luis Borges titled “A Yellow Rose” as a backdrop for their investigation into the ‘futility of art as a means of conveying reality’, a sentiment echoed by the unusual setting chosen for the show – itself a place which struggles with the burden of representation, of rituals, public image, and perception.

Colin Martin: Basic Spaces, 2012, HD video, installation view; Image courtesy the artist.

A yellow rose created an extraordinary opportunity to navigate through the ritualised spaces of the Freemasons’ Hall and to become familiar with this terra incognita via a negotiation of the artworks.  From the outset, the audience was put in the position of an inquisitor: you had to look daringly and inquisitively around in order to notice and acknowledge the artworks, to differentiate between the intentional and the incidental.

The latter was particularly relevant in reference to the Post-Minimal aesthetics of Tom O’Dea’s work which quietly occupied the ground floor. Finding it required a deliberate effort. Guided to the library as the first stop by the map provided, O’Dea’s small abstract drawings made with permanent marker on paper were found behind the glass doors of the bookshelves, leaning against the sedate rows of aged book spines. The drawings, often coupled together, formed unlikely and delicate geometrical shapes which were unassuming and seductive in their fragility. Non-representational, from a distance they seemed to serve a practical purpose, as if a bookmark or a post-it were left behind to draw our attention to a particular volume. Further to the right, two small artefacts rested among the books. Resembling minerals or desert fossils, they both looked quite antiquated and weather-beaten, as if left exposed to the elements for centuries. O’Dea’s work subtly questioned what belonged in the space. Some objects quietly mimicked the architectural features of the building, its skewed corners or bulky carvings, others challenged its ritualistic denomination. On my way up to the second floor, I nearly missed a small piece of drafting tape which glistened among the cracks in the wall only a shade darker than the paint (O’Dea’s Waning and Remaining).

Tom O’Dea: Bay, 2012, lino, wax paper, 200 x 80 x 10mm; Image courtesy the artist.

The reference of the latter piece to the temporal and the cyclical, set an ideal foundation for the encounter with Colin Martin’s Basic Spaces – a single channel video depicting seven different sites: from a mundane office space, a garbage dump, to the studio of the artist Michael Warren. Often devoid of natural light, the sites depicted seem to be suspended in time and at first sight, are strange and unfamiliar. It is the furniture, and decorative and architectural aspects of the spaces, that expose the nature of their use. This work reflects the Martin’s ongoing investigation into what Robert Venturi called the “decorated shed as a conduit for social, cultural and political value.”  The fact that the work was projected in the Prince Masons’ Chapter Room further compounded the conceptual tension as Martin’s ideological inquest into idealised spaces collided with the ornate and charged surroundings.

Yet what really makes Martin’s work exceptional is his sensitivity and patience for the objects with which he chooses to engage. In both Basic Spaces and Vitrine the HD camera lens travels at a steady speed, always from left to right giving the audience a full panorama of what is on view. By default the camera picks up the most prominent colours, the piercing blues and reds, infusing it with a dream-like quality. The emerging images look as if they were ‘frozen in a moment’ and it is that momentary suspension that fixes our gaze and allows for a more intimate engagement. In Vitrine – a two-channel cinematic study of a defunct exhibition hall in the National History Museum during its refurbishment – the steady camera pace creates an illusion of looking at a painting. However, by projecting the video onto both sides of a rectangular tank which sat upon a plinth, this visual experience expanded three-dimensionally from within the screen out beyond it. This reflection of space was enhanced by the immediate surroundings: replicas of Egyptian sphinxes, ancient artefacts, and religious paraphernalia which prompt strange confusion and overlap of realities.

Colin Martin: Vitrine (2012), HD video; Image courtesy the artist.

At first glance Owen Boss’ work jars with that of O’Dea’s and / or Martin’s. It didn’t immediately push the same emotive buttons. The overtone of his two videos Anything for a quiet life and Testimonial is far more matter-of-fact than subliminal. In both works Boss uses existing footage as the starting point, which is then edited in a staccato-style – sharp and witty, yet jolting and disruptive at the same time. There is no space here for contemplation or indirectness; instead we are consumed by hasty narration and quick-paced images. Having put these first impressions aside, the links contextualising his practice with that of his colleagues started to emerge, since he, too, investigates the complexity of representation, even if how he approaches it is less ceremonious. In Testimonial, Boss replaces the original voices of Brian Clough and Don Revie (two football managers of English clubs in the 1970s) with voice-overs from a British movie The Damned United, and vice versa, and as the scenes unravel the incompatibility of mouth movements and voices becomes more and more disturbing. The dubbing motif reoccurs in another context in Anything for a quiet life, which recalls the career of the actor Jack Hawkins, who continued to act after losing his voice to throat cancer, but had his speaking parts dubbed over by other actors. Here, abruptly edited frames from his movies are juxtaposed with extracts from his autobiography and the medical diagnosis of his illness. Boss’ application of the dubbing motif in two different iterations injects an extra layer of complexity into the inquiry of the parameters of representation and reality. Toying with perceived divisions between what is real and what is a manufactured substitute, he ‘calls into question the original occurrence’.

Owen Boss: Anything For A Quiet Life, 2012, installation shot, HD video; Image courtesy the artist.

Any decision to stage an art exhibition outside the white cube scenario carries the inherent risk of allowing a charged space dominate the narrative of the show itself. This, I imagine, must always be of particular concern to artists or curators who embark on such a journey. It can particularly be the case, when the challenges posed by the venue are not solely architectural but rather of ideological nature.

The latter aspect calls for a wide-angled and multi-directional viewpoint that transforms the potential negatives of a charged space into the show’s advantage, thus bringing the focus back to the artwork itself while at the same time, avoiding loading the artwork with unwanted context or, at worst, suffocating its potential meaning.

Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll is currently based in Dublin.  A recent graduate of the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD, she has been involved in a number of exhibitions and projects in Ireland.  She has organised the sound/performance/radio event Sound+/-Vision that will take place at the Joinery later this month.

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[1] All quotations are from the press release, unless stated otherwise.

A long forgotten city in the sky

I was asked to write, in February of this year, about Tracy Hanna’s work at the Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. I visited twice during this time. Since then two very forgettable memories from over a decade ago, when I was working as a young engineer, have re-appeared to me.

One of my first jobs after graduating in 1999 was as a junior design engineer with Banagher Concrete in Co. Offaly. I spent three months there before getting another job with the Irish Rail engineer’s section in Pearse Station, Dublin. At the time Banagher Concrete were casting, among many other things, two very large reinforced concrete fins. When you walked into their workshop / factory floor, it looked as if two huge shoulder blades from some extraordinary beast had been deposited there, amid the roar and dust. You can see these fins now if you look underneath either end of the Millenium Bridge, supporting it quietly as it spans between ‘The Italian Quarter’ and Temple Bar in Dublin.

For the brief period I spent in Banagher I rented a room in the house of one of the factory operatives. His wife would make me breakfast every day – cereal, toast, rashers, egg. The egg was always boiled and always grossly underdone, but I was far too gormless and polite to say anything, and would spoon a cursory few dollops of it into my mouth each morning, wince, and leave for work. In the evenings, I would go to the pub in town and read – then walk home, the mile or so out the dark, hedge-lined road to my temporary lodgings.

When I worked with Irish Rail, I was involved in maintenance, which in terms of engineering means constantly measuring the tracks (the ‘permanent way’) – to see if they were shifting. One particular job I was given during my time with Irish Rail was to oversee the marking out of the sides of the underground tunnel that links a section of the Dublin Connolly – Heuston line. The luminous arrows used as markings were fixed onto the side of the tunnel and were supposed to indicate the location of the nearest safety alcove in the tunnel wall – for those working on the track. One day when I was working in this dingy tunnel, a large diesel engine came through, passed us by, and, after a few moments a large, ponderous cloud of dark smoke billowed slowly up upon me. When I eventually opened my eyes I could see what I think one could describe as almost nothing. Then I coughed for many minutes.

Hanna was the first artist to avail of the new Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. The residency is the initiative of and is run by The Arts Council with Cavan town and county councils. It is a brave and welcome addition to the growing number of visual art residency opportunities appearing in rural Ireland. And their assistance in Hanna’s work here was committed and crucial.

The Bullock Lane residency building was supposed to be a semi-detached pair of two-storey dwellings. The road directly in front of the residency building, Bullock Lane, is extremely steep. It runs down to a very narrow lane (barely wide enough for a car) where it joins Main St., across from an Eason’s.

I made one visit during the residency, then I returned a couple of weeks later for the experimental final exhibition / event of the residency – Do nothing till you hear from me. It featured a number of videos, video projections and sculptures that considered the building itself in an attentive manner. At one stage I spent some time upstairs looking out the front window at some apartments across the way. The top section of the window was ajar. Out of this section dangled a chunky sculpture made from screwed together pieces of timber. The shape was almost a decagon. There were ten sides, but it didn’t complete its loop; a sort of open decagon, or a decagon that doesn’t want to be one. It swayed clumsily over and back beside my head, softly knocking on the glass.

In the other upstairs room, earlier in the night, everyone who came – there were about thirty to forty people at the event – spent a very curious ten minutes in near darkness discussing this near darkness. Shiva Linga paintings, portals, space-time, sensation, etc. were also brought up, followed by silences. The room had been transformed into a sort of cave. The only light came from a series – two on one side, two on the other – of barely perceptible, egg-shaped slivers of light. The light from these slivers was that orange/yellow hew of the street lights outside. There was a smell of plywood in the room, and for a moment or two the world seemed smaller, or larger. I couldn’t say for sure.

Earlier again that night, Kate Strain (a curator) and Hanna in conversation, walked us around all of the other works on show, pausing to talk about them. At times Hanna would give responses from a scripted Q & A session that Strain had written. Sometimes, in this scripted session, her answers were simply “yes.” Other times they spoke naturally, and briefly about the works. One of the pieces on show was a projection of a mound of building rubble. The mound, in the video piece, had now been flipped around the horizontal, and it took on a sort of approximate oval shape – it seemed to hover forlornly, like a long forgotten city in the sky, trying to tell me things about its own re-making.

I had come across some of Hanna’s work before meeting her at this residency, her sculptural projection piece Hillwalker in the old Broadstone studio gallery, and again in the Douglas Hyde gallery in Dublin. More recently I saw her solo show A Day is a Room at The Dock in Carrick on Shannon. I called in late last year with my father, who is not a regular gallery goer. We navigated quietly around all of the sculptural / projection pieces, peering at the work and how it was presented in the darkened gallery space. He told me afterward, as we drove back to Longford, that he enjoyed the show. I am drawn toward work that people who are not in the business of art can enjoy, and can say so comfortably. I think it is because work like this wishes the viewer into it. The viewer is offered a space to extend into and play with the work, and this open-ness comes from generosity, and a sort of unspeakable precision that appeals directly to one’s movements and curiosity – a starting point that, for the viewer, is at once straightforward, fertile and exciting.

*

Ballyhaise House is about four kilometers outside Cavan Town. Hanna visited it during her residency, accompanied by a local historian called Michael Swords. She gave those who came to Do nothing till you hear from me a ‘goodie bag’ (envelope) holding a lovely collection of small photographs with exterior and interior shots of Ballyhaise House, and a short, clear text which had been written by her. The text relayed that the house was designed by an architect called Cassels. Apparently he designed Leinster House too, and that Cassels, according to Swords, had mentored the Irish architect who eventually designed the Oval Office in The White House in Washington D.C. Swords also brought Hanna on a tour of the Cavan town, where she learned:

- that the windows on the top of the Georgian front doorways were also used to throw light out onto the top steps leading up to the entrance.

- that the freemason’s hall on Farnham Street has been active since 1855, and that long before this a river had flowed where Farnham Street is now.

- that the old Cavan town center is where the Eason’s is now, and that there once was a bullring on the Main Street, where the butcher would bring out a beast before it was slaughtered and let dogs attack it so as to tenderise the meat.

The works on show during this end of residency evening showed a moment in a process. There was a short looping video piece of a torch-lit tree projected in the front room of the residency building. Alongside the projection was a small forest made from curved strips of plywood. These strips were wedged vertically between the floor and the suspended ceiling causing some of the ceiling tiles to pop up and out of their railings, revealing a furtive non-space between the tiles and the first floor. Another sculptural piece upstairs comprised a tube of thin white polythene spanning between two radiators, the hot air from the radiators inflating, and gathering the polythene into an uncertain, shallow arch. It split the room, and people had to navigate awkwardly under or over it.

There was another small video piece projected onto the reveals of one of the ground floor windows. It showed a hedge-lined road leading out of Cavan town, again, flipped on the horizontal like the mound piece, only here an absence was created giving us a sort of tunnel to a strangely recognisable world, or offering a route to another place of forgotten memory. The movement from sculpture to thwarted documentation to a mixture of the two spoke of the building itself, the steep lane outside, the apartment complex across they way, the enveloping town and its histories from below, the ruptures outward to the suburbs, and further to Ballyhaise House. All of these fragments were collected with a gentle curiosity and re-presented in an affecting way that offered brief moments of mystery to re-imagine into.

Adrian Duncan is a writer based in Dublin.

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All images courtesy of Tracy Hanna.

List of images:

1. Test 1 (Mound), installation shot, 2012

2. Test 9 (Oval), installation shot, 2012

3. Test 3 (Plastic Haircut), Test 4 (Plastic Tube), Test 5 (Undecagon) –detail, installation shot, 2012

4. Test 5 (Undecagon, with missing piece), installation shot, 2012

5. Test 1 & 2, installation shot, 2012

6. Ballyhaise House interior ( photograph from goodie bag), 2012

7. Test 6 (Polygon Tunnel), film still, 2012

8. Test 10 (plywood intervention) – 5, installation shot, 2012

Many thanks to Tracy Hanna, and Catriona O’Reilly of Cavan County Council.

www.tracy-hanna.com

Cavan County Council’s arts programme is supported by the Arts Council.

Ciarán Walsh’s latest exhibition at Pallas Projects consisted of a tripartite arrangement offering viewers disparate modes of experience via a collection of static visual material, a looped video, and a booklet. Presented under the rubric this brief visual pattern, its components comprised a complex and circuitous interweaving of images and text that not only provoked viewers with their unconventional narratives, but also tested their cognitive abilities.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In the gallery’s back room viewers were able to drift through the Image as it Appears (2010-11) – what amounted to a didactic presentation bereft of any labels or sheets of explanatory information – and parse the links and potential meanings posed by an assortment of old photographs, painted text, a geometrical structure, and some partially obscured watercolours. While the objects’ arrangement according to a colour coded system conferred museological underpinnings, other aspects contradicted such precepts. Visual and physical access to the artworks, for example, varied dramatically and their organisation intimated no timeline or other logical type of progression. Whereas some objects had been placed beneath glazing, others rested on top of it, and translucent white paper veiled two of the images. Pictures of an aboriginal bear costume, an ancient terracotta mask, and a diaphanous hooded figure represented diverse cultures and referenced a spectrum of practices that included primitive ritual, theatre, and investigations of paranormal phenomena. Similarly, the sole 3-dimensional component contributed to this evocation of transformative possibility and mystery. The portion of the form that should have projected laterally out into space from the edge of the table appeared to have been affected by a structural quirk. Instead, it gravitated downwards directly toward the floor.

Perusal of It’s Just a Shadow Away (2011), the work in the front room, tendered an equally enigmatic experience. This looped video projection depicts two actors performing scenes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a Russian film adaptation of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel of the same name. Set in the bleak surrounds of a production studio, the actors speak a language neither of them understands in an attempt to convey the emotional and psychological content of a story that features conversations between a man and a hallucination of his dead wife. Even for those familiar with this slow moving tale about the strange events on a space station, the work disorients. Walsh alternates performance excerpts with English translations of the Russian dialogue. While the format recalls the structure of a silent movie, viewers first stepping into its continuous pattern of play found it difficult to tell if the translations preceded or succeeded the actors’ scenes. Though ongoing observation eventually established the correct sequence and allowed me to modify my first impressions, I initially drew what I could from the sounds of the performers’ voices and their body language. Then, as the subjects’ predicament became more legible, it also assumed greater intensity. Moreover, key words and phrases stood out, particularly the brief repetition of a short clip in which Kris’ ex-wife Hari says “listen.”  In one sense the word represented an obvious contradiction as it implied listening to a language that I could not understand. But in another it functioned as an imperative that, reworded, could be understood as ‘pay attention’, a term that implied the use of more than one’s ears. Ultimately, recurrent viewings of this charged and awkward encounter failed to dispel the video’s haunting aura. I became preoccupied with all the ambiguities of the narrative. For a time I was stranded between states imaginary and real.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In essence, the publication no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future brackets the presentation. Released in the form of a pdf file in advance of the opening and a print version, it formed an introduction, became a component of the installation, and functions as a souvenir/reference that can be read and reread long after the exhibition’s closing. The content, which clearly mirrors themes evident in the gallery works, consists of edited correspondence between the artist, curator Pádraic E. Moore and Friedrich von Bose, a scientific assistant with the Department of European Ethnology. Though it is concise, the discussion touches upon a broad range of concerns. They range from the complicated position of museum objects and established conventions associated with their presentation to notions of time travel, abstract sound poetry, non-rational responses to artwork, unobservable phenomena, and the role of the audience. Of course, the gist of the discussion revolves about the ways we experience and translate works of art and other cultural artefacts. Not only do the correspondents convey a general sense of dissatisfaction with traditional modes of presentation, they also consider ways through which it may be possible to see back to the past or circumvent such conventions. In this respect Walsh’s stimulating gallery contributions offered viewers practical experience. He has reordered – or distorted – familiar structures as a means of destabilising our intellectual footing that we might discover previously unseen information and develop new elucidations from it.

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

*This review was first published in Paper Visual Art Dublin Edition 1 last November, 2011.

During a recent artists’ talk at the National College of Art and Design, Niamh O’Malley showed a segment from her recent film titled Island that was shot on Lough Derg.[1] Shown early last year in Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Spain, it will be exhibited at the Model Niland in Sligo this year. The film consists of one continuous shot where the camera moves slowly across the island’s terrain capturing its rhythms and movements.  As the camera pans from left to right, a black, flat screen interrupts the viewing (a mechanism set up by O’Malley on site) creating a blind spot. The whole image must now be imagined.

Niamh O’Malley: Screen (2011), birch, oak, two-way mirror, mirror, glass, coloured glass, graphite, oil paint, 3530 x 700 x 2610 mm (approx); Image courtesy the artist and the Green on Red, Photo: Fionn McCann.

O’Malley’s exhibition Model which took place last October at the Green on Red Galley also draws on image-making and representation.  It is through an investigation of materials that O’Malley heightens a failure to grasp and understand beyond the surface of things.

Screen is a Di Stijl-like structure made of timber, two large mirrors, clear glass, and coloured glass. It is well made and sits in the centre of the gallery space. When viewed from one side, there is a cloud painted in oil on the surface of a large mirror. Beside and slightly behind sits a two-way mirror with a large, circular black form painted in the centre, staining and interrupting the surface – obstructing a full viewing both through the glass and on the reflective surface. Screen, although physically static, is one which animates and transforms, thus also evoking a Minimalist relationship between object and bodily movements. The work, however, is not simply a reduction in form, her chosen materials are transformative, conjuring up a sensation of viewing that extends beyond surface. The glass and mirror surfaces are continually obliterated by the reflection of the viewer’s body, or by the large film projection behind it.

Niamh O’Malley: Model (2011), HD video projected onto black screen, 9 mins; Image courtesy the artist and the Green on Red, Photo: Fionn McCann.

Model is a black-and-white HD video projection onto a large screen of stretched black cotton. Filmed in a life drawing studio in the Royal Hibernian Art Gallery, it is slow moving and at times, still.  A nude male model sits on the table in front of a large window, stretching, adjusting, posing. The camera navigates around the room, at times closing in on details. This is an examination of the surfaces of skin, of absence of form, and of stillness. There are moments too when the video blacks out. The gridded black frame of the window behind the nude in this film acts as a flattening point to measure and draw an image from the body. The subject becomes an object to be deconstructed, analysed, reworded, put back together; in effect, O’Malley builds an image. The relationship between Screen and Model is central to this; both film and structure together offer a plurality of perspectives, which more closely recapture an experience of the world that “is not given but rather emerges over time.”[2]

Niamh O’Malley: Yellow (2011), pencil & gouache on paper with coloured glass, 378 x 439mm; Image courtesy the artist and the Green on Red, Photo: Fionn McCann.

O’Malley’s delicate and neatly contained drawings in this show are framed in black and are hung, equally spaced across the back wall, and three are placed at the main entrance. They are given coy titles such as: Yellow, Grey, Pink, Blue. Each is covered in textured, stained glass which interrupts the viewing, creating a barrier between the viewer and the image. The glass itself creates a fluid effect and seems to animate these pieces where O’Malley re-demonstrates this failure both in seeing and image making.

Previous work and the work on show is made up of a variety of internal associations and extensions. Despite this fluidity, there is a denial of any definitive meaning.  This endless, unfolding of image unveils absences that can never fully be grasped. O’Malley’s subjects – a bridge, an island, a flag, a life-model, a quarry – operate as fragmentary objects which expand and contract. They bring to mind Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting, A London Adventure.” Here the writer – seeking to purchase a lead pencil – wanders through London. The pencil becomes the starting point to explore the world, a mechanism to trigger experience. This comes not from the object itself, but from the bodily experience of moving through the world, and shifting angles of perception:

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure.  It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.[3]

Niamh Dunphy lives and works in Dublin.

Although I know better, this exhibition has inspired in me a fanciful vision of Fiona Marron, circumnavigating Ireland in a little boat; TV and radio receiver pointed at the land, recording news reports and magazine shows. From these she chooses disparate items to weave together uncomfortable narratives, featuring the gross excesses of unfettered capitalism and greed. Every once in a while, she comes ashore, video camera on a tripod, held, resting on her shoulder. Silently, en plein air, she commits to disc, calm, moving images, which evocatively bear testament to her research.

Fiona Marron: Last and First Men, HD rear projected video (installation view), 2011; Image courtesy the artist.

The first time I saw Fiona Marron’s work, There was Truth in What They Said, I was confused. Good confused. I wasn’t sure the abandoned trading floor, revealed in a robotically smooth pan was computer generated or real. Several people I spoke to about it afterwards had the same quandary; fervent disagreements had broken out. It’s a question that is poised to become a key one in the future, as the digital world challenges our perceptions of reality. Within this work, I felt it was a triumphant matching of aesthetic form to context. The set was a closed financial exchange building interior, presented Ozymandias-like from its former power. Absence, abandonment, emptiness as well as varieties of silence feature heavily in Marron’s work. In Plenty of furniture, we see an elevated view of a warehouse, or industrial workshop perhaps? True to its titled promise, there are many tables, chairs etc piled up on view as well as a lone character, barely discernible. Marron often favoured mute silence in her videos, but there is audio here, just: Cagean rustlings seeming to anticipate an event we’ll never know. Sound is used suggestively in another previous work, Fend, which shows two fencers sparring in an empty space that looks as though it should house an open-plan office. Its most interesting moments are when the action forces its way out of the frame, temporarily leaving an adjudicator, dead centre, the lone figure on screen, his hands stoically clasped behind his back, as the foils clatter furiously against one another. In Caveat Emptor, Marron makes a (silent) turn, playing a solicitor representing the sellers of a salubrious property in an affluent Dublin suburb. A lengthy – though statedly abridged – list of legal preconditions is reeled off by the presiding auctioneer, who despite being a professional talker, stumbles over the gobbledygook legalese. More recently, in Construct #1.4 for Construct #1, at Monster Truck Gallery, her video loop of a falling tree was beautifully displayed as part of a successful marriage of sculpture and audio visual.

So to Last and First Men, the second installment of a five-part exhibition sequence Selected Stories in The Joinery, Dublin. The show was a snapshot of juggled ideas, interrelated, but frozen in time, leaving the viewer unsure of source or destination. The exhibition is populated by extraordinary characters, who pushed their names upon the world by the scope of their ambition, and greed. Marron’s main areas of interest abound here, high finance, the mechanics of trade, property and the question of verisimilitude. Entrance to the show was through the Joinery’s garage doors, which had been augmented with clear plastic strip curtains, such as are found across industrial loading bays, hinting at the exhibition’s econocentric concerns. In this room, the first part of the show’s title work consisted of a rear-projected video, shot by Marron in HD, seemed to serve as oblique visual touchstones to the exhibition. Here were ships, boats and their cargo holds; goalposts; hillside cave entrances; floodlights; a justice building; stadia and a lone living object: a horse grazing in front of a viaduct. These mostly panned images are displayed on a high screen, hung from the ceiling. The effect is enhanced uncomfortably by the projectors beam shining directly at you through the material and a subtle rumble piped into the space. In the next room, the viewer was surrounded by Bias Index, which comprises two walls covered with A4 screen-grabs of a 1960, televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. The first of these four on-screen head-to-heads was a famous game changer for political electioneering, when it became apparent that the analysis of body language could be intrinsic to voters’ stances on candidates. So influential and divisive were these debates that most candidates refused to take part for another fourteen years.

Fiona Marron: Bias Index, inkjet print wall installation, 2011; Image courtesy the artist.

The work First and Last Men is continued here, in multiple, overlapping media. One could take a wireless headphone for a walk to (re)contextualise the visual elements. The audio contained snatches of archive news footage about ‘rogue trader’ Nick Leeson and Irish businessman Kevin McHugh. McHugh, who passed away from CJD in 2006, was responsible for Atlantic Dawn, the largest and most controversial fishing trawler in the world. Initially, McHugh was denied fishing rights for the vessel, until the then Fianna Fáil government stepped in to wrangle a deal for him, causing the European Commission to begin two court actions against Ireland. A private deal with the Mauritanian government allowed the ship fishing rights in their waters for nine months of the year, decimating the indigenous fishing industry. Marron puts the size of the Atlantic dawn in perspective by projecting an image of it over printed plans of Croke Park ‘and a half’ its oft-quoted match in terms of length. Leeson mostly speaks for himself, ruminating over his toppling of Barrings Bank and offering critical analysis of a finance industry seemingly unwilling to learn from its past failures. An LED ticker display on the wall, zoomed the figures (the precise significance of which, if any, were a mystery to me) 160,000,000 and 862,000,000 in red, past the viewer. A small TV (with headphones) on the floor replayed a BBC News report on the ‘mega-dairy’ of Cwrt Malle Farm in Wales where 1,800 cows are battery reared, prompting animal welfare concerns. In the rush to construct a slice of American-inspired agri-economic efficiency, the dairy’s sheds were built without planning permission.

Fiona Marron: Last and First Men, view of installation detail, 2011; Image courtesy the artist.

Keeping closely with the series’ fiction themed title, Father of the Futures connects the two loves of its subject, financier Leo Melamed: futures trading and science fiction. The flat-screen, wall-mounted video work comprises archive pictures, mainly of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where Melamed was chairman from 1969-91, and snippets of biographical data on Melamed by an uncredited voiceover. It begins not with an account of his groundbreaking work in introducing computerised futures trading to the derivatives market, but how his moonlighting as a sci-fi writer inspired him to drive his vision of financial trading forward. With reference to his novel, The Tenth Planet, he pondered: “..if I could create a master computer that could run five planets, why can’t we create one damn electronic system that could run orders?” References to his fiction – published and unpublished – crop up again during the five or so minute piece, as it gives a potted chronicling of his moves to unfetter trading from the ‘open outcry’ of the trading floor’s exchange pits to a fully electronic system, such as his: Globex. There are sinister connotations to the complex systems of the futures market, perhaps seeming to the uninitiated like pure vagary, but Melamed is ultimately painted here as a sort of lucid dreamer, seeing himself as a Quixotesque character of determination. Is Melamed real? We are never led to believe we are seeing him in the images flashing up, and a possible significance of the narrator/author’s anonymity crops up – that the absence of source information could cast a shadow of doubt over the apparent documentary.

Fiona Marron: Fathers of the Future, archive digital image reel & audio, installation view, 2011; Image courtesy the artist.

The exhibition takes its name from Olaf Stappleton’s sprawling science fiction novel, charting aeons of humanity from the twentieth century on. Ostensively speculative fiction – its twentieth century ‘author’ is really the conduit for a history of man, telepathically transferred, by our furthest descendants – the eighteenth incarnation of humankind, two billion years in the future. Like the alien race in Melamed’s Tenth Planet, who find a Pioneer space probe* and set out in search of its origin, the exhibition (and title) also brought to mind Kim Deitch’s graphic novel, Shadowland, in which a character on an orbiting space station “watches scenes that were beamed telepathically from Earth…made over a period of ninety years and preserved on laser story chips”. If we were judged by an alien race on the basis of news reports speeding out through space from this planet, we might fare poorly, but one’s evil is another’s evolutionary necessity. Back on Earth, Last and First Men presented itself as an absorbing collection of interrelated stories, of individuals forging changes to society, decorated with Marron’s distinctive visual discourse.

Davey Moor is a curator, photographer and arts manager, based in Dublin. www.daveymoor.com

* Sent from Earth, complete with it’s return address calling card in the form of a plaque (with biological and astronomical information).

This review was first published on Paper’s Dublin Edition 1 in November 2011.

Welcome to the neighbourhood is an invited international residency programme where five selected artists spend two weeks working and living in the local town of Askeaton, Co. Limerick. Now in its sixth year, this residency programme, co-ordinated by Askeaton Contemporary Arts and curated by Michele Horrigan, was developed from an initial desire to provide a centre for contemporary art outside of the urban environment, and to bring contemporary art to wider ‘non-art’ audiences.

Oswaldo Ruiz, video still, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

There is no remit for the artists to create work in relation to the location of Askeaton, however, the participating artists in this latest edition have all chosen to do so, producing work in response to the direct environment, the local community history or the historical architecture of the town. The resulting output is exhibited at the end of the residency period in communal spaces around the town.

Influenced by the history of the Franciscan Friary and the practice of the order, Elaine Byrne’s film documents simple interventions she pursued with the friary’s ruined architecture. By placing green transparent vinyl screens against the window frames, she references the Franciscan monks belief that green was a contemplative colour. Historically, the monks cultivated a well-maintained grass lawn in the courtyard of the cloisters of the Abbey, which was regarded to instill pious reflection. Again this ideology is re-manifested as green fabric attached like curtains to the cloisters arches. Byrne has captured this sensitively on film; the gentle movement of the fabric casts a green hue onto the ground and surrounding stone walls, transforming the space.

Elaine Byrne, Franciscan Friary installation, green vinyl, wood, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Next door, located amidst the wood veneers of a closed down hair salon, Oswaldo Ruiz’s film plays on a flat screen. Ruiz is a Mexican photographer and filmmaker who cites Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Astray” as the influence for this work. The poem is based upon the re-telling of the legend of the medieval King Suibhne who, having threatened Bishop Ronan, was cursed to behave like a bird and roam the Irish countryside as an exile.

In Ruiz’s film, he traverses the uninhabited urban spaces at night, shooting still images of the derelict and abandoned spaces around the town. Illuminated only by the streetlights, the cinematography of each seemingly banal scene is engrossing. Among local advertising notices stuck to the salon door, Ruiz also presents watercolour interpretations of the recounted tale.

Allan Hughes, video still, pillboxes, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Located in the Civic Trust building, Belfast based artist Allan Hughes’ work considers moving image and aural methods of representation. For the residency, Hughes focused on the remaining pillboxes located in and around Askeaton. Pillboxes were strategic defense fortifications located along the Shannon estuary, designed as vantage points to monitor the river Shannon for German u-boats during World War II. Constructed from concrete, these could house up to two volunteers of the Local Defense Force (LDF) and the Local Security Force (LSF) appointed to keep look-out. Hughes interviewed three men from the locality about their experiences in the volunteer forces during the 1940’s. These conversations are replayed as an audio narrative from a speaker on a mount stand. Adjacent to this, a tv monitor shows alternating views of the River Shannon from the interiors of pillboxes, and is spliced with footage of its rough waters.  By recounting the experiences of the volunteers as two separate works, Hughes seems to comment on the fractured nature of historical narratives.

Alan Counihan, a sculptor who traditionally works with stonemasonry, enlisted the support of the local aerobord factory Kingspan to produce a site-specific work in response to the architecture of the ruined friary. Counihan carved a white plinth from aerobord, and installed it in the open courtyard of the friary, with a glass bell on top. The use of the lightweight, commonplace aerobord is a playful contrast to the fragility of the glass bell. The shape of the plinth echoes the formal Roman architecture of the cloisters arches, yet the durability of the sculptural materials negates their functionality in the open space – a possible indication towards the slow decay of the friary itself.

Amanda Gutiérrez, transcribed screenplay, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Chicago-based Mexican artist, Amanda Gutiérrez’s work looks at social, political and personal effects of migratory displacement. For this project she conducted separate conversations with four individuals from different native backgrounds who have settled in Askeaton. They are known only by their first names: Rita (India), Marianne (Denmark), JJ (Limerick), Raymond (England – of Nigerian parents). The conversations are transcribed into a screenplay, printed onto A4 sheets of paper, and pinned to the green felt notice board at the entrance of the local community hall.

Different categories within the screenplay parallel similar experiences of each of the individuals through their emigration, or immigration into the country. Under different headings – Labour, Interaction, Homesickness, Motherland – each participant describes their hometown. Departure describes their reasons for emigrating or immigrating, and Adaptation discusses their final assimilation into their adopted community.

On a small monitor in the corner of the entrance, anonymous hands type the accounts of each character. On the stage of the community hall, footage of the local countryside is projected onto a suspended screen. The screenplay, read by a local Askeaton resident, serves also as an accompaniment to the film.

Alan Counihan: aerobord, glass, installation, Friary, Askeaton, Co.Limerick; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

The different modes of presentation, and the format of a screenplay, converted to video raises questions as to whether the characters are in fact real or fictitious and if the emotions expressed in text and through audio are unique to these four individuals or represent a universal feeling of displaced people. The fact that we are never presented with their visual identities or that their original sentiments have been presented by a third party, mirrors the act of displacement and establishes their loss of identity through immigration.

I was impressed by the well-considered and resolved work featured in this edition of Welcome to the neighbourhood.  This residency provides an alternative model for a community art initiative where social engagement between the local community and the artists is achieved through other methods. The success stems from the artistic freedom given to artists, and through the community’s support and interaction with the artists to facilitate the production of the work, often providing the source material with which to begin a discourse. May it run and run.

Ruth Hogan is an Irish freelance curator based in London.

At around the halfway point of Beyond guilt #1 (2003)[1] , Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir are bargaining with three men in a Tel Aviv nightclub bathroom. A red light in the ceiling shrouds the room and there’s music pulsing in the distance. Following a conversation about the men’s time in the army, Sela asks her interviewee, who is sitting on the toilet, if he would like to trade his necklace for oral sex. The men laugh at the suggestion and Sela bluntly asks again, this time suggesting a variety of sexual favours that she will simultaneously perform on the three. Her offer meets with a bit of arguing amongst the soldiers; the interviewee suggests in explicit detail what he hopes Sela will do, and says that he’ll only give her one jewel for her offer. He then coyly chides her for thinking that “boys are all whores.”

The film was part of Beyond guilt trilogy, an exhibition by Sela and Amir, which took place at 126 Gallery, Galway during May and June. The trilogy consistently follows setups like the nightclub scene: Sela and Amir insert themselves into situations where they are expected to trade sex casually, they then record interviews with their trader.

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir: Beyond Guilt #2, ‘man_34’ and Maayan Amir, video still (2004); photo: Seán O’Sullivan.

After a cut, we see the three men from the bathroom putting their clothes back on and Sela asks, “have you shot your guns? How did it feel? Did it give you trauma?”

For the second film Beyond guilt #2 (2004), the artists contacted a series of men through a dating website and arranged to meet each one in a hotel room for thirty minute intervals. The film opens by flashing through an image of the artists, and on through clips identifying each man by his website username. This montage is set against with a thumping Fischerspooner song, similar in style to the nightclub music of Beyond guilt #1.

Amongst the fifteen men featured in the piece, around five are interviewed at length. In one scene Amir is meeting ‘man_34’ in her hotel room. As she lets him through the door he quickly strips off his clothes, and while doing this he boasts about his wealth, how he doesn’t care about money, and expectedly how impressive his ‘weapon’ is. No doubt he had prepared that euphemism in advance. He gets into the shower and scrubs himself down; Amir is holding the camera. After he has dried off she walks over to the bed and sits on top of him. At this point the scene ends. Later, he reveals to her that he has become wealthy, at least in part, by robbing 10,000 dinar from “some Arabs.”

Beyond guilt #1: Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir, video still, (2003); image held here.

The men are willing to discuss their own lives, but I suspect that this is predicated upon the fact that they were not informed that their admissions would become part of an artwork. I believe that they were given only a general indication that they would be filmed. Indeed, ‘man_34’ interprets the fact that Amir is filming him as a kinky addition to his evening’s entertainment – one that will service his hope of eventually becoming a porn star.

Later on, a longhaired man called ‘truth_master’ arrives to the hotel room. Amir lets him in; he toasts his mother-in-law and begins to unpack sex toys from his bag. Sela sits down on the bed and begins to interview him: “Look,” he says, “I’m someone, as you see like, full of self confidence. It’s not that I’m vain, I just know exactly my worth, and it goes swell on the Internet. Allow me as the opening of a pin and I’ll open up your world.”

‘Truth_master’ asks Sela whether in her adventure of meeting men in hotel rooms if she is afraid of being attacked by thugs. She affirms. Then, out of the camera’s view, he reaches over to her with some implement, and she yelps and recoils in pain – a reaction that he finds quite funny. He boasts a bit more about his experience as an army sergeant saying that it is a suitable position for him because he likes having authority and prefers to hurt, tie and humiliate. Later on, we see him jumping on the bed in his Spiderman boxer shorts.

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir:Beyond guilt #2, ‘why_not’ and Maayan Amir, video still (2004); photo: Seán O’Sullivan.

In October of 2005, Sela and Amir hired a middle-aged prostitute. They took her to a hotel room and asked her to shoot the final film of their trilogy. Beyond guilt #3 (2005) opens against dreamy pop music and sees the camera turned on the two artists – we never see the woman’s face.

The normal direction of the interviews is the same; Sela and Amir still ask the questions, but the setting is quieter. Their interview focuses on the woman’s life in city’s sex trade. She recalls: “When I was seven years old someone tried to rape me. He was an Arab I think, or a young man, I don’t know, I really want to be a man because it’s just… I don’t know.” The woman goes on to say that it’s simpler to have an abortion than it is to uproot a tooth. Then she rests the camera on the table for a while, and the artists slip out of the frame.

In the final scene, Amir is wearing a grey mop top wig and Sela has a pair of silver bunny ears on her head. We finally see the prostitute, who poses for the camera in a tiara and cat mask. The film ends with an extended shot of the three lying on their bed in costume. This lasts for around five of the film’s fourteen minutes, and is accompanied a Joanna Newsom song.

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir: Beyond guilt #3, video still (2005),14 mins; image held here.

Between the three films, the most pressing and difficult question is what the artists are actually intending to say in their work.

Clearly they have a thematic point about the power relations between men and women, particularly in light of the fact that here, the women hold the cameras. And beneath this, we can see the interpersonal politics of a society that perennially conscripts its youth into military service. Indeed this much is covered by the exhibition’s press release.

What is unanswered is the fact that throughout Sela and Amir’s interviews, they pretend not to have an agenda, and they never produce any moral judgment. No matter what the situation. Yet they place themselves into situations that prompt lasting moral questions – situations that, to me, were profoundly upsetting. For instance, in Beyond guilt #2, ‘Why_not’ has Amir blindfolded and tied to a couch, and talks about wanting to hurt her. This should elicit some kind of reaction, but there wasn’t one. Sela and Amir act like a pair of innocents; their exhibition is extreme, and excellently put together. But I do not know what it resolves, and its philosophy is ominous.

Seán O’Sullivan is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

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[1] Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir produced a website in support of the Beyond guilt trilogy, which is located at http://www.beyond-guilt.com/. The site includes short excerpts from each film.

This is a response to Molly O’Dwyer’s performance/installation A Sequel of Events: Vantage Point Series that was part of the group show, To Come So Far For Beauty, curated by Deirdre Morrisey, at Block T, Smithfield, 12 – 17 November, 2010.

Molly O’Dwyer: A Sequence of Events: Vantage Point Series (2010),  video still, Block T; image courtesy of the artist.

It is difficult to pinpoint what makes a space significant to us, as communicating its import to another may seem to be a futile effort. For example, a corner can be more than a corner. It can represent the most basic geometry for seclusion, a private universe for the daydreamer where restrictive physical dimensions fall away – a pocket full of shadows, or the “most sordid of havens.”[1] Similarly, an open vista can be just as closed or private. A turbulent cloudscape may reflect the contemplations or restlessness of the internal subject. It creates the space. As Gaston Bachelard wrote after Noel Arnaud: “I am the space where I am.”

Molly O’Dwyer’s performance installation transgresses over and back between the multi-perspectival cinematic space and the present, physical space of the exhibition. The installation is constructed as one large corner whose exterior juts into the main exhibition space, creating a semi-enclosed area. The two intersecting interior walls are used as the screens for the projections. O’Dwyer uses this simple geometric form as a visual metaphor that alludes to spaces for containment and space for reflection, both real and imagined. Inversely, the installation works as a means of claiming space from the exhibition space for the subject.

The employment of the cinematic medium – to redeploy space, scale and the position of the subject within a multiplicity of angles -  drives this work from a phenomenological engagement into an investigative one, beyond the three-dimensional.[2]

Molly O’Dwyer: A Sequel of Events: Vantage Point Series (2010), installation shot, 2010, Block T; image by Chris Finnegan.

The video documents the journey of the artist/protagonist from the domestic setting, into the suburban public space, and then into the wilderness of the Dublin Mountains. At all times O’Dwyer is accompanied by her threadbare antique chair. O’Dwyer tries tying the chair to her back like a homely shell, but the impracticalities of this arrangement soon become apparent. A forerunning shot reveals the garden beyond the interior space, indicating the internal workings of the subject’s inquisitive mind. The chair legs are tied to a stick that she then lobs onto the side extension’s flat roof, before climbing up the adjacent shed wall and towing up the chair. Choosing different seating arrangements, looking into the garden onto road, then facing the house wall, the subject finally gets off the chair and sits cross-legged facing into her unlikely quadruped companion.

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“Please raise your hands if you are from northern Africa.”

No response on the bus.

“I’m sure there was someone . . . Yes my darling, where are you from? Morocco? Can we please have a round of applause for our friend from northern Africa. We are happy to see you.”

Now a familiar character on the biennial circuit, Thierry Geoffroy (or rather, his alter ego Colonel) gathers data on a pressing matter. Dressed in safari gear, he embarks on a mission into hostile territories to track down an elusive creature. The biennial ‘motto’ has had several suspected sightings at Manifesta 8, but no conclusive evidence to confirm its existence… Using the tools of investigative journalism, Colonel conducts on-the-street reportage with the locals: “Do you know any Algerians?” he asks one woman. “Would you like to meet one?”

Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel: Penetration Space (2010), San Anton Prison, Cartagena; image held here.

The Manifesta Foundation chose the Murcia region of Spain for its 8th edition of the nomadic European Biennial of Contemporary Art. Located at the southern edge of Europe, Manifesta 8 proposed that a dialogue with northern Africa would ensue. Colonel was not alone in his quest to dismantle this thematic approach. Overall, it was largely side-stepped and replaced with a more urgent set of questions: What is the nature of citizenship? What is the function of art? How does the media reflect and construct local and global realities?

Manifesta 8 proposed an innovative model for exhibition making, replacing the individual curatorial statement with a more discursive, collaborative inquiry, to reflect on the current burgeoning return of the group formation within art practice. Three curatorial collectives – Tranzit.org, Chamber of Public Secrets (C.P.S), and Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (A.C.A.F) – carried out independent projects that shared contexts and had obvious points of intersection. Over one hundred artists displayed predominantly newly commissioned artworks across fourteen different venues, outdoor spaces, and media platforms.

Sung Hwan Kim: Manahatas Dance, 2009, Pavilion 1, tranzit.org, Murcia, 2010, photo Ilya Rabinovich; image held here.

The outcome of this collective curatorial model produced complexity which was often challenging to track, but this network of inter-connected relationships allowed for a transparency of evolving relational encounters; conversations, broadcasts, critiques, think-tanks, interviews, along with audience participation. Dialogue was very much on display, functioning both as a methodology and as an archive of process.

Employing institutional critique to question existing models and routine conventions, Tranzit.org formulated a ‘Constitution for Temporary Display.’ Critiquing the biennial “spectacularisation of culture” and the dichotomy between local and global, Tranzit.org worked collaboratively with artists to forge new ways for diverse narratives to co-exist within the ephemeral exhibition space. The dominance of site-specifity provoked a reflection on human histories within a particular location, although some stories were more persuasive than others. Manahatas Dance (2009), a compelling video work by Sung Hwan Kim, drew the audience into a seductive world of memory. The figurative sequences were quirky and melodic, while alluding to the political within eerie apparitions.

For Manifesta 8, A.C.A.F formulated a complex ‘Theory of Enigmatics’ which analyzed the condition of art today. Examining the function of the historical archive, the dissemination of fact and the subjective nature of truth, A.C.A.F aimed to re-address the existing knowledge and vocabulary that we rely on to reflect on human issues.

Jean Marc Superville Sovak: It Can’t Last, No Rush (2010), installation, commissioned by ACAF for Manifesta 8.

Displaying a ‘monument to impermanence,’ Jean Marc Superville Sovak’s It Can’t Last, No Rush (2010) offered a welcome tactile relief to the onslaught of dialogue. A precarious stack of crumbling red bricks each stamped with the word ‘Empire,’ attested to the notion that under the buildings of churches can be found the remains of mosques. This acted as a timely reminder that in the grand scheme of things, empires come and go.

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Petrit Halilaj’s model of his house in Kosova which was rebuilt after the war: They Are Lucky to Be Bourgeois Hens, 2008, mixed media, iron & wood; image held here.

For the 6^th Berlin Biennale, curator Kathrin Rhomberg  presents us with the title What is Waiting Out There suggesting a division between contemporary art and the world outside of contemporary art concerns.[1] Rhomberg presents artists with different positions, frames of reference, and their different relationships with reality from the literal to the abstract. This curatorial aim manifests itself in the works, ranging from the banal to the momentous, from the domestic to those of wars – both known and unknown to us.

Avi Mograbi’s video of Israeli soldiers Details 2 & 3 is illustrative of this, as is Mark Boulos’ aggressive video addressing the local resistance to the invasion of the Niger Delta by Western oil companies in a two-channel video piece titled All That is Solid Melts into Air (2008). The title of the latter is taken from an oft-quoted section of the Communist Manifesto and was also the title of a book by Marshall Berman examining social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”[2]

Mark Boulos: All that is solid melts into air, 2008, 2-channel installation, HDV, colour, sound, 14′ 20″, installation view, photo: Uwe Walter; image courtesy the artist.

The curator’s question we must consider: how does art affect reality? This is best approached in the Biennale by those works where reality is not taken on in a literal sense but where this gap between the art world and reality is nebulous and ever-changing.

In the basement of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Petrit Halilaj’s delicate, well-considered drawings contrasted with his large wooden house structure and his futuristic-looking chicken houses (They Are Lucky to Be Bourgeois Hens, 2008). His drawings were as much about the actual medium as his subject matter of the everyday, the domestic and the familiar.

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir’s uncomfortable Beyond Guilt #1 (2003) – from the video trilogy Beyond Guilt (2003–2005) – blurs the boundary of the artists’ position in the work.  They use sex and the promise of it to communicate with young people in the toilets of nightclubs in Tel Aviv. There is an obvious link here between sex, power and violence. Those who saw the artists’ work in the recent Istanbul Biennale will have seen this at play in a much more voyeuristic and sinister fashion with young men. With the work here, we become part of the piece by being witness to events. This is a reality where sex rules. The artists, in order to be a part of this reality, take on personas and the notion of the artist being a separate entity from their work disappears.

Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir: Beyond Guilt #1, 2003, from the video trilogy Beyond Guilt (2003-2005)DVD, Farbe, Ton/DVD, color, sound, 9′30”; image courtesy the artists.

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