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CIRCA 112 article
The multitude: Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale
As the publicity blurb for the forthcoming Venice Biennale announces, the fifty-first International Art Exhibition will explore the state of contemporary art "from two points of view." Two curators will oversee two separate sections, one in the Giardini, the other in the Arsenale, and each space will feature work by significant figures from both the past and the present. Both curators, Maria de Corral and Rosa Martínez, are Spanish, and for both it is the second time round at Venice, since each has taken her turn at curating the Biennale's Spanish Pavilion. De Corral's contribution on this occasion will be The Experience of Art, an exhibition which she describes as "a field open to distinct practices," her primary objective being to make possible a process "defined in terms of the relationships between different subjects, forms, ideas and spaces."1 However vague such an agenda may seem, this interest in revealing relationships of various kinds, in making connections between multiple practices and ideas, is at least complementary to the stress on combination and contradiction that is set to characterize the contribution of Rosa Martínez. Martínez's Always a Little Further will bring together a range of work sensitive to the dualities of modernity, offering dramatic encounters with what she has termed "the zones of light and dark in our convulsed world."2 The condition of contemporary life, Martínez argues, is one of paradox - "we still believe in the need for reason, enlightenment and utopia," she writes, "even if we have become their most ferocious critics" - and, as a consequence, there are always at least two forces simultaneously shaping her thoughts: "passion and melancholy, trust and desperation, pleasure and guilt combine to define the critical approach to the world in which we live."
Such evidence of what Fredric Jameson has termed "stereoscopic thinking"3 is, of course, particularly appropriate given the 'double vision' that has been facilitated by the appointment of two curators. And given this tendency towards multiplicity of perspectives, it is fitting that for the first time ever not only will there be the now customary Republic of Ireland Pavilion, but there will also be an exhibition of current art from Northern Ireland. The state of contemporary art on this island, then, is also to be seen from two points of view. Moreover, the strategies adopted by the commissioners from Ireland, North and South - Hugh Mulholland and Sarah Glennie, respectively - are in each case informed by a desire to open up 'national' representation to multiple perspectives. Most fundamentally, this is clear in terms of the actual number of artists involved: from the Republic, Sarah Glennie has made six selections, choosing artists currently working in Ireland, not all of whom are Irish; not to be outdone, Hugh Mulholland has made fourteen selections from Northern Ireland, promoting practitioners who, as Mulholland's statement indicates, "are part of a wider conversation, one that is both local and international."4 However, extending such conversations, opening up multiple possibilities of participation and engagement at different times and in different contexts, has also been an obvious consideration, each curator having made efforts to ensure that diverse audiences are addressed: quite independently, both Glennie and Mulholland have planned two-part programmes which, unthinkably, take into account a world beyond the vernissage. In the case of the Northern representation there will first of all be an exhibition entitled The Nature of Things running throughout the Biennale period and featuring eight of the selected artists; later, in mid-October, the remaining artists will present A Long Weekend of live events and interventions over several days, during which time Northern Ireland will also hold its official celebrations - for which the musician and DJ David Holmes has been drafted in as an additional recruit (following his work on Ocean's 12, Holmes now finds himself providing the soundtrack for Mulholland's 14). As for the Republic, the artists will not only show work at the Scuola di San Pasquale in Venice but will also regroup later in the year for an exhibition at the stunning new Glucksman Gallery in Cork. At this stage Glennie will hand over the curatorial reins in order to ensure that further perspectives can be offered. For related reasons, Glennie has also invited the Sculptors' Society of Ireland to produce a special edition of the journal Printed Project as a supplement to the Venice selections; this publication, to be edited by the artist Alan Phelan, will bring together a range of commentaries on the Biennale experience (and related subjects), adding still more points of view to an already impressively 'multiple' representation.
Perhaps the overriding agenda for Sarah Glennie, however, has been to acknowledge multiplicity by providing what she terms a 'snapshot' of contemporary art in Ireland at this point in time, presenting a view of quickly changing circumstances rather than aiming to construct a comprehensive survey or an authoritative argument. The snapshot is a telling metaphor in this regard, for though it might in one obvious sense be suggestive of a static scene, an image frozen in time, it may also be understood in a manner more appropriate to this Venice representation. Jean Fisher has written that in a 'snapshot' "objects may be unfocused, cut and sliding out of the picture; the appearance is of a fragment from a larger view, an indicator of the passage of time"; and, moreover, cinematic narrative is generated out of successive 'snapshots', each distinct frame demanding the next "in order to bring what is outside the visual field into view, and to complete a movement that constantly remains unresolved."5 Such comments seem to me not only relevant to Glennie's curatorial agenda, but the references to multiple fragments, unresolved narratives and the passage of time also relate to tendencies in the work of the artists set to 'represent' Ireland.
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Ronan McCrea: Sequences, scenarios and locations (after Hänsel and Gretel) version 2, 2004, slide installation, photo / courtesy: the artist
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Most particularly, perhaps, we might think of Ronan McCrea here, whose practice involves a meditation on "fragments from a larger view." The current focus of McCrea's energies is an ongoing series, Scenarios, sequences and locations, a body of work employing multiple visual fragments to suggest multi-layered and open-ended narrative possibilities. This developing work takes the form of a multi-projector slide show in which sequences of photographic images are used to construct story-lines involving a young girl who, in an echo of the fairy tale Hänsel and Gretel, drops small pieces of paper as she journeys through various city spaces. Given firstly that the girl is the artist's daughter and secondly that in two of the sequences (set in Dublin and Venice) the paper cuttings are from drawings or photographs of the artist's late father in a post-mortem state, McCrea's work can be understood, in part, as a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with the inevitable 'inadequacies' of representation and memory. The use of slide projectors is in this sense interesting, referring to conventions of official archiving in order to establish an anxious relation to the authority of 'public' histories. Recently McCrea has taken a new set of slides in Berlin, where his daughter has left as a trail a series of found images from a German family album; the dispersal of fragments from such a distant family history should, in the context of the expanded Venice installation, make for a compelling contrast to the narratives based on McCrea's personal archive.
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Joe and Pat Walker: Nightfall , 2004, film still, 16mm film; courtesy the artists
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The urban re-enactment of the Hansel and Gretel story in these works recalls Walter Benjamin's often - cited reference to losing oneself in a city "as one loses oneself in a forest,"6 and the uncertainties and primal fears associated with the latter certainly have a bearing on Nightfall, the film by brothers Joe and Pat Walker which will share with McCrea's installation the upper floor of the Scuola. Nightfall (first shown at the RHA in 2004) is the Walkers' first foray into film-making following a noted series of sculptural works concerned with the sublime as the 'unpresentable', their ongoing point of reference being the Romantic visions of Caspar David Friedrich. In Nightfall such fascinations are again apparent, though by employing a properly cinematic visual rhetoric, the Walkers have achieved their most profound evocation of sublime limitlessness to date. The film has the appropriately awesome natural setting of Lake Königsee in Bavaria and, as in McCrea's work, the narrative centres on a lone protagonist's movement through landscape - though here it is not an accumulating collection of fragments which maintains narrative momentum but instead repetitions, echoes and contrasts. Most significant, in this respect, is the repetition of the central figure himself who, as day becomes night, finds himself pursued, or echoed, by a doppelgänger. 'Doubles', of course, make perfect sense in the context of this Biennale and the structural importance of the movement from day to night in Nightfall seems to echo Rosa Martínez's interest in "the zones of light and dark in our convulsed world." Perhaps if there is a 'convulsion' in the world of the Walkers' film it is close to the 'convulsive beauty' understood by André Breton as a crucial cognate of the 'marvellous'; for although Romanticism is the Walkers' preferred subject, I am drawn to the 'uncanny' characteristics of their film that might also be associated with surrealism. Surrealist notions such as 'convulsive beauty' and the 'marvellous' are, as Hal Foster has written, "anxious crossings of contrary states...hysterical confusings of different identities"7 and such ideas might be relevant not only to the depiction of space and character in Nightfall, but also to the "contrary states" to be encountered in the work of Stephen Brandes.
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Stephen Brandes: Vital organ , 2003, ink on paper; courtesy the artsist and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
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As with other artists selected by Glennie, Brandes has pursued curatorial projects in addition to practicing as an artist. A notable venture in this regard was the acclaimed group exhibition Superbia, set in a suburban house in Dublin, in which various artworks played with, or against, the familiar forms of domestic space. Superbia's direct engagement with the notion of 'home' involved an unheimlich defamiliarising of suburban harmony - identifying the uncanny as something both horrifying and homely. This relates to Brandes's broader practice insofar as his works have often presented multiple ways of understanding, or reaching, or even leaving, home. Ways of Escape, his 2004 exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, was important in this regard, presenting a wealth of paintings and drawings which frequently alluded to homes or homelands, real and imagined. As with much of Brandes's recent practice, these works were inspired by drawings the artist made while following the route taken by his grandmother early in the twentieth century as she fled from her native Romania - a journey of great hardship which literally involved "anxious crossings of contrary states." In Brandes's work, however, this history of an escape from home is not sentimentalised but becomes a point of narrative and imaginative departure, subject to the vagaries of memory and to endless transformation and reinvention.
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Isabel Nolan: No one else (after F. Kunath) , pencil and watercolour on paper, 14.5 x 21 cm; courtesy the artist
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For the surrealist writer Louis Aragon the 'marvellous' was "an eruption of contradiction into the real"8 and not only is there something of this in Brandes's combination of the fantastical and the familiar (his large-scale works, two of which will be shown in Venice, map extraordinary territories onto mundane discarded linoleum) but we might also relate this definition to the 'marvellous' intimacies of Isabel Nolan's practice. All that is most recognizable and familiar tends to be the foundation of Nolan's work, though it is the ultimate inscrutability of known things that we, and the artist, would seem to be left with. In her various paintings, drawings, texts and videos, Nolan's closest companions and her immediate, everyday world become the subjects of an 'uncertain' process of representation which, in the cautious and discreet peculiarity of the resulting images, prompts reflection on the manner in which we make sense of our own surrounding 'reality'. At times, such representation is combined with obviously puzzling abstract forms, and this establishing of relationships between disparate elements (as with the combinations and variations of media) creates a level of resistance to interpretation or explanation. In her recent exhibition at Project, Everything I Said Let Me Explain, this troubled relation to meaning and meaninglessness was most apparent in an animated film that anxiously contemplated 'contrary states' of reality. This animation, which will be shown in Venice along with a number of works on paper, imagines a close friend of the artist being confronted by a strange 'presence' while in a state somewhere between sleep and waking. It is a remarkable evocation of an impenetrable private world, the enigmatic scenes bringing to mind a description by the critic James Wood of the "true privacies"9 of characters in Chekhov's stories: "watching a Chekhov character," Wood suggests, " is like watching a lover wake up in bed, half-awake and half-dreaming, saying something odd and private which means nothing to us because it refers to the preceding dream."10
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Mark Garry: Element 1 and 2: one thought , 2004, plant, thread, beads, vinyl and pins, dimensions variable, installation shot, Kerlin Gallery; courtesy the artist
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Wood's admiration for Chekhov is, in part, based on what he calls this writer's "intimate fantastic"11 fictional world - a phrase which hints at the likely atmosphere of the space in Venice which will feature Isabel Nolan, Stephen Brandes and Mark Garry. In each of these artists' practices, personal stories, intimate moments or subjective experiences often become radically estranged or connected to the unknown and the out-of-the-ordinary. A connection between these varieties of intimacy is also, then, 'connectedness' itself: these artists share a (diversely applied) commitment to constructing multiple associative networks and to making unlikely conceptual, emotional or spatial links. This is, of course, most literally the case with Garry, whose delicate site-specific installations connect points in space through the use of meticulously assembled arrangements of multi-coloured thread. Also incorporated into the installations are other craft materials such as pins and beading, the utilitarian function of which is as important as their decorative effect. An additional feature is the positioning of other, somewhat more curious, objects at odd co-ordinates: these have included leaves, origami birds and even potted plants, elements which directly signal links to the natural world - specific references to nature, therefore, are placed in the context of a fragile system of relations.
Garry's works of this kind have been by turns elaborate and gracefully restrained. But in general this is, of course, an understated aesthetic and the subtle effects of the spectrums of thread are dependant primarily on the relation of perception to position: from one point of view, the angular lines are barely visible; from another, they offer a fleeting, psychedelic dazzle. In his new work for Venice, this possibility of heightened sensation is increased through the introduction of an aural component - simple tunes played on antique music boxes - which should add to the sense of spatial intervention as well as further multiplying the connective conceptual possibilities.
Garry's, 'associative networks' begin, then, from formal strategies and metonymic suggestion. For The Metropolitan Complex, however, it is social and personal networks that are vital. Sarah Pierce, the artist and curator who initiates the diverse Metropolitan Complex projects, has, since arriving in Dublin from the U.S. some years ago, devoted considerable energy to involving both individuals and institutions in an ongoing, flexible process of exchange and critique, establishing open systems that might facilitate new forms of practice, organization or thought (emphasising a kind of Deleuzian 'diversity of becoming', perhaps). For Venice, Pierce has chosen to place herself at a slight angle to the official selection by, first of all, collaborating with some unlikely ambassadors for cultural production in Ireland, and also by securing a space for The Metropolitan Complex which is neither fully inside nor entirely outside the National Pavilion. This space is the formerly off-limits garden of the Scuola, a site which is noteworthy in that Venice has few green spaces and, as a result, Pierce will be able to establish a 'time-out' environment from the frenetic pace of the Biennale. Crucial to this temporary oasis, however, will be an engagement with the 'Forgotten Zine Library', an archive of punk fanzines from the 1990s ('archives' have been a regular feature of Pierce's practice), a collection that has become the fulcrum of the current Metropolitan Complex project. This subcultural library has been compiled over several years by various Dublin-based punk aficionados, its home shifting from place to place, 'curatorial' responsibilities transferring from person to person. Now, Pierce has chosen four hundred examples of these underground documents of dissent to become improbable 'national' representatives at the art world's major global event.
Pierce's project, then, involves yet more of the multiple perspectives, 'fragments' and proliferating connectivities that appear to characterize Ireland's presence at the 2005 Biennale, and, as has been indicated, her work complicates the way in which an official selection of artists will be read as national representation. For the artists from Northern Ireland, this issue is arguably even more important, given international assumptions and stereotypes regarding attitudes to national identity in Northern Ireland - though, it should be noted that the Northern Ireland representation is not a 'national' Pavilion as such, but rather, like the Scottish and Welsh selections, it is billed as a 'collateral event'. Even so, Hugh Mulholland's laudable desire to launch an expansive and ambitiously inclusive programme is important, his selection highlighting practices that are at once sensitive to the specificities of local conditions and histories, while also being undeniably outward-looking.
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William McKeown: Hope drawing - the morning #18 , watercolour on paper, 57 x 50 cm; courtesy Tonic Design
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Of all the artists included in The Nature of Things, William McKeown is perhaps most overtly concerned with the possibilities of looking outwards. McKeown's paintings superficially recall the language of post-painterly abstraction, but they are in a sense its opposite, maintaining a connection with looking out into the lived world, offering views, feelings, based on a particular understanding of nature. Since his 2002 exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, McKeown has often shown such works inside specially constructed spaces: austere structures within which the paintings become essential windows onto "the otherness of elsewhere."12 The belief, promoted by these paintings, in nature as feeling, and the argument made for an empathetic, inclusive notion of beauty, bring to mind lines from Raymond Carver's The phenomenon: "when I look out / the window again, there's a sudden swoop of feeling. / Once more I'm arrested with the beauty of this place. / I was lying if I ever said anything to the contrary."13
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Darren Murray: Japanese temple garden , 2001, oil on canvas, 152cm x 214 cm; courtesy Tonic Design
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McKeown's unapologetic painterly advocation of a revitalized notion of beauty is a position held in opposition to those contemporary processes through which the categories of 'beauty' and 'nature' are corrupted or commodified. In the paintings of Darren Murray, those processes are more evidently the subject of ongoing interrogation: whereas McKeown uses open skies to signal an ever-possible, fully-realisable freedom, Murray concerns himself with the construction of freedom as 'leisure' - as an always compromised opportunity to 'get away from it all'. Murray's vibrantly coloured landscapes, therefore, play on multiple representations of desired destinations: an evocation of a Hawaiian resort, perhaps, or Japanese gardens, or even the 'wilderness parks' of the United States. This is, however, more than pastiche; there is a restless relation to art history here, an 'anxious crossing' between contrary forms, a merging of abstraction and representation, east and west, Hokusai and Barnett Newman. The Newman reference is perhaps worth stressing as a tension exists in Murray's paintings between expressive individuality and designed, reproducible surfaces. And however indirectly, this is also relevant to the work of Ian Charlesworth, whose practice pairs a very particular form of reproduced content with an interest in the notion of the artist as existential creator. Murray's ultra-vivid scenes are, it should be said, about as far from Charlesworth's 'imagery' as one could imagine: while one displays dream holidays, the other, repeatedly, dwells on pub toilet graffiti. Charlesworth's practice involves reproducing the process of using cigarette lighters to burn marks or names onto the ceilings of such spaces: in Belfast, he has observed, lone individuals privately express political, and so also social, affiliations, while spending time in a cubicle. Charlesworth's key choice in replicating this process is his use of the normally threatening letters UVF, which he burns onto stark white surfaces, constructing interconnecting patterns which are often intricate to the point of abstraction. These patterns therefore combine local signifying practices with allusions to late-modernist avant-gardism - and as such Charlesworth's work has an uneasy relation not only to those troubling vernacular expressions of social allegiance, but also to 'elite' aesthetic practices historically associated with the separation of the artist from society.
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Ian Charlesworth: Some of my friends are... , 2002, carbon and resin on perspex; courtesy Tonic Design
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| Mary McIntyre: Vantage point 2 , 2005, inkjet print, 89 x 74cm; courtesy Tonic Design |
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Charlesworth's 'burn marks' are, then, evidence of a practice at once embedded in the visual and spatial culture of Belfast and alert to broader historical conditions of artistic production. In The Nature of Things Belfast will be a focus for a number of artists, though also in the context of broader 'conversations'. In the case of Mary McIntyre's recent photographs, Belfast is only an implied presence, the places pictured being marginal territories, areas where urban meets rural - the roadway turning towards countryside in Threshold, for instance, or a remote Nightbuilding protected by a barbed-wire fence. These nocturnal scenes are lit only by whatever illumination is available through human involvement in the landscape (a streetlight at the edge of suburbia, for instance), but the effect is nevertheless spectral - 'empty' space becoming evocative of some otherworldly danger. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler writes of how the "forgotten margins" of lived space hide "all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness."14 This sense of "space as threat, as harbinger of the unseen" is relevant to (if not delimited by) the specific spaces staked out in these photographs - if there is an implication of the precariousness of the social order, this has an obvious resonance in contemporary Belfast.
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Seamus Harahan: Holylands , 2003, video still; courtesy Tonic Design
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The representation of Belfast in Seamus Harahan's film Holylands also involves 'all that is seen and unseen', though in this case, from the window of the artist's home in the 'Holylands' district. Filmed over eighteen months, it is a collection of everyday fragments, comprising the ultra-mundane, the absurd and the potentially threatening. Harahan's film, however (as with McIntyre's photographs), not only examines social space but also foregrounds the viewing of such spaces, responses to these urban dramas being dependent on conventions and contexts of spectatorship. As such, references to surveillance are irresistible, given that that the daily goings-on in this neighbourhood are the subject of relentless recording by an unseen presence. As gallery viewers are granted access to this clandestine observation, there is the suggestion that such a point of view cannot be a neutral one and, more particularly, that in Belfast, 'surveillance' becomes internalized.
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Katrina Moorehead: The sort of smack that leaves a bruise , 2005, pencil and watercolour on paper, 56 x 76 cm; courtesy Tonic Design
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It is worth noting that Harahan's film also makes use of an eclectic soundtrack to further open these quotidian scenes to multiple readings. One such accompanying track (if memory serves) is Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City, which recontextualises the imagery beyond the 'local row' of Belfast's politics - if this is 'Holy Land', in other words, it is also a globalised 'Atlantic City'. This reference, however random, suggests a point of comparison with Katrina Moorehead's practice since, remarkably, home for her is both the United States and Northern Ireland. Moorehead's division of time between bases in Texas and Co. Antrim exemplifies the "local and international conversations" praised by Hugh Mulholland, and in her current work the influence of ongoing transatlantic negotiation is strongly evident: her subject being the infamous 'gull-wing' doors of the US designed, Belfast-made, DeLorean sports car. Using model-making materials, the artist recreates these distinctive doors, constructing a 'retro-type' version of this iconic feature of a failed technological and economic dream. The local 'dream' offered by DeLorean, of course, was that of equal employment for Catholic and Protestant workers, and so despite the decadence associated with a bizarre 1980s sports car, Moorehead's strange historical fragments might prompt some degree of 'nostalgia for the future' - a singularly appropriate idea given that the 'DeLorean' is most famous for its role as a time machine in Back to the Future.
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Michael Hogg: Motion , 2004, installation shot; courtesy Tonic Design
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'Time machines' of a quite different kind appear to interest Michael Hogg who, like Moorehead, has based sculptural objects on historically specific mechanisms. The machines constructed by Hogg are, however, some distance from the luxuries of late capitalism - his inspiration being drawn from scientific inquiry. One recent body of work, for instance, is based on the eighteenth-century model of planetary motion, the orrery, which was constructed so as to also properly represent the passage of time. Hogg's sculptural re-interpretations of such inventions necessitate concentrated attention, an almost undetectable pace of movement being integral to their operation. This observation of barely discernable shifts over an extended period has, of course, obvious allegorical significance in the context of Northern Ireland, but for Mulholland, no doubt, such work might also prompt 'looking outwards' to the nature of things beyond - such "precarious objects"15 (to borrow Katrina Moorehead's term for her own work) need not be entirely reduced to metaphors for 'precarious' politics.
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Sandra Johnston: Even as we speak , 2005, performance still; courtesy Tonic Design
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Peter Richards: Saturday by numbers , 2004, pinhole document of live event; courtesy Tonic Design
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Alistair Wilson: Turning back the tide , studio installation; courtesy Tonic Design
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A loose connection might be identified between the process of patient viewing entailed by Hogg's practice and the intensive observation of places and people valued by Sandra Johnston. Johnston will present a video work in the exhibition (central to which is a centuries-old text detailing military tactics in Derry, which at first appears to denote more recent trauma) but she has also developed work for A Long Weekend in the autumn. Vital to her 'public' practice is extensive, if unobtrusive, 'surveillance' of local environments and lifestyles; she gathers details, hoping to learn about distinctive attitudes in a locality so as to intensify communication and interaction with audiences. Johnston's "site reactive performance actions"16 are thus attentive to context and community and in this she is not alone: over the Long Weekend several artists will engage with specific sites and constituencies in Venice (taking into account private and public histories, contemplating spatial phenomena and social practices) while others will also seize on the opportunity of participating in the Biennale to import idiosyncratic aspects of Belfast's cultural life. The project to be undertaken by Peter Richards will be in the former category and will involve yet more extended observation of place; the artist's proposal being to use a camera obscura to capture scenes associated with classical paintings of the city. For Enlightenment thinkers this technology often served as a model for vision's relation to rational thought, demonstrating the division between interior and exterior worlds. Richards' project will offer a problematic take on vision, subjectivity and space, merging the artist's perspective with other points of view, present and past. The amalgamation of 'private' and 'public' in these views of Venice also, therefore, involves 'anxious crossings' between understandings of nature and culture, and in another of the site-specific works this is a defining consideration. Alistair Wilson's project will respond to the natural and cultural peculiarities of Venice, creating a sound work for a cloister and garden area of a building which has a tendency to flood during days of acqua alta - the high tides that suggest an always imminent return of 'the nature of things.' Wilson's installation will play culture against nature by using equipment reminiscent of that used to measure environmental conditions, but which in this instance emits sounds suggestive of elemental forces.
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Aisling O’Beirn: Stories for Venetians and tourists , 2005; courtesy Tonic Design
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A force of another kind has determined Aisling O'Beirn's engagement with the specifics of Venice - her experience of the city being influenced by the overwhelming might of the tourist industry. In response to the guided sight-seeing of mass tourism - and to the transient, spectacular experience of the Biennale - O'Beirn will use humble means to probe notions of the local, asking how cultural forms and narratives translate. Her approach will be to introduce stories from Belfast into the fabric of Venice, printing narrative fragments onto the cappuccino cups in a café popular with Venetians and onto bags of pigeon feed bought by the hordes of tourists in Piazza San Marco. This enabling of informal encounters between disparate localities will also be important to the contribution of the Belfast collective Factotum, who will produce a special edition of their much-loved (though often ignorantly condemned) magazine The Vacuum. The Venice edition of this iconoclastic newspaper will be appropriately themed around the idea of cultural fairs and 'Great Exhibitions', making available a range of alternative perspectives on cultural display - as such a feature on the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show might be more likely to appear than a discussion of international contemporary art exhibitions.
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Factotum: cover of The Vacuum (‘Sex’ issue); courtesy Tonic Design
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Nicholas Keogh and Patrick Bloomer: Bin disco , Belfast, 2003; courtesy Tonic Design
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Just as in Belfast, The Vacuum will be distributed freely throughout the city, allowing diverse audiences to study its curious content in unlikely places (it should be added, of course, that this edition will be translated into Italian). Nevertheless, still more curious encounters are possible over the Long Weekend, as the population of Venice will be introduced to yet another public work that integrates odd bits and pieces of Belfast life. This final element of Northern Ireland's contribution is the extraordinary Bin boat dreamt up by Nicholas Keogh and Patrick Bloomer - a 'party' boat made for the canals of Venice, which, unfathomably, incorporates into its design a Belfast 'wheelie bin'. If, to return to Louis Aragon, the 'marvellous' is an "eruption of contradiction into the real," then, perhaps, the prospect of this bin boat's presence at the Biennale can indeed be described - along with many of the other projects discussed here - according to such a designation. Though, to borrow once again from Hal Foster, this instance of the surreal will undoubtedly involve 'anxious crossings' of one kind or another.
Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Artists representing Northern Ireland: Peter Richards, Seamus Harahan, Nicholas Keogh, Richard West (Factotum), Sandra Johnston, Paddy Bloomer, Alistair Wilson, Ian Charlesworth, Mary McIntyre, Darren Murray, Stephen Hackett (Factotum), Aisling O'Beirn, Michael Hogg, William McKeown, Katrina Moorhead.
Artists representing the Republic of Ireland: Stephen Brandes, Mark Garry, Ronan McCrea, Sarah Pierce, Isabel Nolan, Joe Walker, Pat Walker.
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