First, we began with locating a venue. We were guided to a number of sites but the Scuola San Pasquale was the obvious contender. Not only did it have the proximity to the Aperto but it came with a set of characteristics that would create parameters from which I would choose the artists. It is a simple piece of architecture, two rooms, two stories, built for a confraternity. The lower floor was for religious services, the upper a meeting room. Over the pediment on the entrance door a particularly gruesome skull and cross bones and above the altar a nineteenth century painting depicting the Madonna and Child in the heavens, two Fransicans in adoration and below them three figures in Hell. It is a straight forward didactic image, an icon from a time of faith and belief. The nearest vaporetto stop is called Celestia.

There is an inherent poetry around the space, the two rooms, the above and below, the religious and the secular, the heavens and the earth. Two stanzas that can offer the viewer separate contemplations and a combined meditation.

Siobhán Hapaska engages with the human condition through a range of strategies. From sculpture to sound to photography and robotics, Hapaska has probed for the essential qualities and definitions of our relationship between nature and the man made. Hapaksa is aware that in our polymorphus culture delineations are blurred by the speed of developments. She has presented, in both critical and experiential modes, the sense of loss that this acceleration engenders. Within the materiality of western culture, Hapaska keenly understands the symbiotic dynamism of our individual determination with mechanical and electronic objects. Siobhán Hapaska's work is sited in direct dialogue with the *sureity of the institutionalised relationship with the divine as represented by the San Pasquele altarpiece. The world of that vision has been turned upside down in response to our recent advances. Hapaska too, literally inverts gravity, ceiling becomes forest floor, floor becomes sky embedded with pine needles. The elliptical reference embodied in the use of the Christmas tree adds further poignancy to the loss of the central role of religion as a provider of meaning. And this existence without meaning, with its pervasive melancholy, is keenly signalled through the film that is displayed below the altar. It starts with a view of Earth as shot from the Gemini mission, a photograph that for the first time offered mankind an objective view of our position in space. It finishes with a similar distant frame, a mute electronic plea back into that outer space for some contact, some re-establishment of meaning. The desire for a renewed intercession is not conveyed through the traditional language of formulaic prayer but through a techno-beacon cuffed within the buttocks of an orphaned consciousness. Throughout the first floor the glockenspiel hammers out the theme from Terminator, a movie based upon the failure of symbiosis, a time when the machine no longer relies upon man for existence.

If Siobhán Hapaska addresses the existential isolation of contemporary consciousness caused by its ever increasing determination by technologies, Grace Weir topples another tenent of perceptual security as she extrudes Einstein's Theory of Relativity to undermine any notion of fixity. From that apocryphal moment when Brunelleschi worked out the rules of linear perspective to capture the representation of the Bapistry in Florence, the West has relied on the vanishing point to depict the three dimensional world. Weir challenges this authority by presenting us with a dual screen projection, on one an inward 360 degree circle of a travelling cloud, on the other, the outward looking circle from the same cloud. Here no point occupies a hierarchical position over another, all hold a democratic validity at all times. The vertiginous reverie created by the restless images of Around Now, 2000, receives its intellectual underpinning in Forgetting (the vanishing point), 2000. By literally illustrating a key proposition from Einstein, Weir humorously subverts the tradition of Renaissance perspective. It seems appropriate that the site of scientific thought occupies the secular space above the ecclesiastical ground floor.

There are three contributors to this participation, Siobhán Hapaska, Grace Weir and Scuola San Pasquele's architecture and contents. It is at the same time a historical and an ahistorical proposition. It plays with the obvious binaries of the space in inverted ways. Each artist establishes their individual vision and a particular dialogue with the space while creating resonances that increase the total available allusions.

This project is organised under the auspices of the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and has been supported by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and IONA Technologies. Additional support has been provided by the Office of Public Works, DHL, Language Design, Principle Management and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Administration has been provided by Jenny Haughton of ArtWorking in Dublin and Vittorio Urbani of Nuova Icona in Venice. (896)

Patrick T. Murphy, Director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, is the Irish Commissioner for the Venice Biennale.