The Site-ations programme is a series of artist exchanges and exhibitions, accompanied by conferences and an education programme, to take place in six countries across Europe in 2005/ 2006. The overall theme is 'Sense in place', aiming to engage with artists and audiences in European art centres outside the mainstream, evoking a peripheral politics and attempting to set up some kind of alternative to the kind of biennial culture we have been hearing so much about lately.¹

The exhibition in Sligo is the first in the series and eight artists participated: Maciej Kurak and Tomasz Domanski from Poland; Xavi Munos and Mabi Revuelta from Spain; Erling T.V. Klingenberg and Olga Bergmann from Iceland; Helen Ann Jones from Wales, and Aigars Bikse from Latvia. 'Contested spaces', 'Mapping memory', 'Margins and inclusion' were the contexts within which invited artists were asked to respond.

Maciej Kurak: , Crying game, 2005, documentary video still; courtesy Artist Exchange

Attending an artist's talk in the gallery, my first encounter was with a man sitting on the floor, head between his legs, with a broken stereo beside him. A handwritten sign propped at his feet read "HELP ME I NEED SOME MONEY." What a relief when I realised it was actually a body cast with a very convincing wig and I had no obligation to address either a performance artist in a gallery imitating a beggar or a real person on the streets in the same situation. However Maciej Kurak had actually placed this 'man' out on the streets of Sligo, in various locations, and videoed the results. With a soundtrack of 'Walk on By', this sharply observed piece made for uncomfortable, shameful viewing. Except for a little girl who gave him some coppers outside a bank, or the occasional brief glance, this figure of despair was ignored by almost all. I recognised my own reaction in these people, who included men of the cloth and a passing nun, before he was eventually taken away by the gardaí. The artist described the piece as "referring to the condition of the nomad in twentyfirst century Europe, the invisible transient population of our towns in cities," which recalled the many signs I have seen taped up in the area in Slavic (I think) languages. This was a standout work. It was a shame that the video documentation was so poorly shown on a monitor in the gallery's foyer space, making it far too easy for the viewer to walk on by yet again. Perhaps this was a deliberate choice but it felt like a decision more based on PR and unwillingness to offend.

Erling T.V Klingenberg: Reserved for Erling T.V, Klingenberg, 2005, installation, mixed media, interior installation view; photo/ courtesy the artist

Erling T.V. Klingenberg also generated a degree of controversy. His elaborately staged work was composed of a number of elements, most conspicuously a navyblue Hiace outside the gallery that a huge boulder had fallen on from the sky. This had crushed the van's contents - crates of the artist's work - resulting in the allocated space inthe gallery being left vacant. The only exceptions were a few white plinths with labels reading Reserved for Erling T.V. Klingenberg and one crate containing a damaged plaster sculpture and a functioning smoke machine. The number plate on the Hiace read "IRELAND," with the second letter scratched out. A very witty take on myth and authenticity, and the bleeding of the artworld into the culture /tourist industry, it was an alternative megalithic monument to cute hoorism. This piece both celebrated and denied artistic spectacle, not to mention becoming something of a talking point in the town, acquiring the status of myth in its own right (several people witnessed outside the gallery looking curiously up into the sky). Interestingly this event occurred on the same night another vehicle crashed into the Yeats statue in Sligo...

Unfortunately, the van had to be removed, supposedly on the grounds of safety. With an added dollop of irony, this slyly pointed up the 'contested space' of the project's curatorial theme being the actual gallery itself. Documentation of the project was installed both in the 'empty' room with the plinths - which kind of made that aspect of the piece redundant since the room was obviously no longer empty - and in the gallery foyer, with the letter from the gallery to the artist. (This rendered the documentation in the gallery space supersuperfluous). All that remained of the Hiace were a pair of rear view mirrors... a nice touch.

Olga Bergmann: Field studies, installation view, 2005; photo / courtesy the artist

Klingenberg's other work was a video titled Create, where the artist repeats this word vocally, to the image of a moving bodily orifice... let's just say the work explores ideas and myths of 'male creation' in every sense and leave its identification unnamed... Olga Bergmann's work displayed a very particular aesthetic set of concerns. Two 'visitor centres' were constructed and installed in a woodland and a cattle field. These modest huts became centres for observation of the animals in the area, drawing on a rich tradition of observatory imagemaking, from landscape painting to scientific drawing, plein air sketching to video surveillance. Elements of the huts were reinstalled in the gallery space, alongside the photographs, drawings and videos that were the result of these Field studies. The 'bovine art pavilion' was a particularly charming work, where opera (Il Trovatore) plays, and the cows explore the interior and exterior of the structure, scratching against it, licking the walls (adorned with paintings of cows) or pissing outside. This work humorously and sensitively explored a number of seeming oppositions such as people / animals, 'nature' / 'culture', function / decoration, and the wild and the domestic. The play between inside and out was quietly pointed at within the gallery setting itself, with a window framing a view of a tree, the visitors passing around the installation in the space not unlike the way the cows did (obviously no urinating in the gallery). I did check for surveillance cameras, wondering if as a gallerygoer I was being surveyed in another controlled environment, a field study within a field study...

The challenge with this kind of project is always how to balance the artist's own voice, authority and concerns with a receptiveness to the place (audience and issues) where the work is made. The 'Sense in place' brief recognises this necessity to extend the work beyond stereotypical representations of a place, to seek out the local and the particular. Such projects are always hit-and-miss. Misses are usually the result of references to the new location that are err either on the side of the obvious or the obscure. Certain works in the show fell prey to this.

Aigars Bikse: Resistance of Kilmactigue, 2005, image from performance at Kilmactigue, introduction by curator Anna Macleod, digital photograph, 100 x 75cm; courtesy Site-Ations

In general, it was the works that took on the challenge of the climate outside the gallery that were successful. Aigars Bikse's work practically negated the gallery setting altogether, by staging a performance in a field. Documentation was presented in the gallery/café space but the work was essentially absent, really only experienced by the witnesses to the performance.

At their best, this sort of initiative offers the artist the opportunity to develop a project in a new, exciting location, while building on their existing body of work in a way that makes sense both for them and the audience. The artists discussed above made works that seemed to achieve this. This kind of project owe something to the idea of the artist as an ethnographer,² whose outsider eye can make incisions and observations otherwise invisible or overfamiliar to the person who lives in the actual place of the visitation. Such ambitions are challenging indeed and difficult to live up to.

1 See, for example, the edition of Printed project produced as part of Ireland's 2005 representation in the Venice Biennale, edited by Alan Phelan.

2 Hal Foster, 'The artist as ethnographer', in The Return of the real, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996, pp.171–203. See also Miwon Kwon, One Place after another: sitespecific art and locational identity, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004


Sarah Browne is an artist currently working in northwest Ireland; in 2006 she will participate in the Icelandic Site-ations event. www.site-ations.org/senseinplace

Sligo: Site-actions International 2005/ 2006, Sense in place, Ireland, Model Arts and Nilan Gallery, August -September 2005