Catalyst Arts: Cartography: The City , 2000, cover of newspaper; courtesy Catalyst Arts
	Aisling O'Beirn: Temporary Provisions , 2001, (overview and detail); courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery
	Niamh O'Malley: On a Clear Day (detail) , 2001, household paint on wall and floor; courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery
	Dutton and Peacock: Kayaköy , 2001; courtesy Catalyst Arts

Cartography: The City , a project organized by Catalyst Arts, encompassed a series of public talks held in winter 2000 and the publication of a one off newspaper. Richard West's talk and guided tour of some of what were sites of suffragette activity in 1914 is noteworthy for its consideration of relations of gender and space. Highlighting instances in the city's history of feminist struggle, this agency was placed within its spatial context in the public domain.

Nonetheless, it is the newspaper entitled Cartography: The City that I will concentrate on primarily, since it continues to remain available. This journal encompasses fifteen different contributions from writers, artists and curators and as its title signals, a critique of mapping provides the primary discursive point of departure. Pat Naldi's text High Noon gives a lucid description of the European calendar's imposition of unified time over geographical territories. This allowed for the construction of a universal space through a homogenous mapping practice. Moreover, neo-colonial cartography denies that the forms of knowledge it produces are from the standpoint of western domination. This means that the effects of particular geographical power relations on its subjects are also denied in cartography.

Such a negation is countered by the emphasis on a politics of location in Cartography: The City . Most of its contributors deal with Belfast, critically demonstrating the inextricable links between the politics of representation and of location. If the cartographic representation of space can be considered a contest over knowledge and power, then accordingly political projects, both hegemonic and marginal, strategically construct spaces according to their own imperatives. In a number of instances contributors place their emphasis on proposing alternative textual negotiations of Belfast by privileging vernacular accounts of its spatial structures. Aaron Kelly's New Languages Would Have To Be Invented interpolates models of urbanity in fictional representations of Belfast in what is termed as the 'Troubles Thriller'. In contemporary Berlin, Jochen Becker's Mitte Berlin/Cafe Germania examines right-wing hostility to ethnic and racial difference and coercive neo-liberal control over the settlement of immigrant peoples.

The modernist literary figure of the flâneur, or urban stroller, has a number of theorized relations to the city that can be considered towards a reading of Aisling O'Beirn's installation Temporary Provisions . One is the necessity of the flâneur figures' ability to wander the city freely in an overall condition of peripatetic liberty that has been absent in the fractured cityscape of Belfast. Focusing on the city's surveillance and its military and security presences, Temporary Provisions uses the gallery's network of ceiling pipes as a form of overhead cartographic grid. O'Beirne constructs a ceiling map of Belfast, which marks only the locations of its security and military installations. Pot plants clamped to the grid represent still active installations whilst the locations of those now defunct are marked with video cameras. In the corridor outside the space a monitor displays the footage recorded by the cameras. Insofar as cartography affords the power to represent, here it is strategically deployed to emphasize structures of urban surveillance and control.

As an instrument of representation, perspective grants the illusion of creative transparency in its promise to exactly reproduce external scenes and objects. Perhaps this is what can be understood by Leonardo's declaration that perspective is nothing else than seeing a place as though it is behind a pane of glass. Niamh O'Malley's installation On A Clear Day is a wall painting composed of several pastoral scenes which are juxtaposed to merge into one another. Each of the composite images, which combine to form the whole vista, has a single point of perspective so that the installation has to be negotiated for its vantage points of clarity. Only by standing at a precise point in relation to the image is a part of it retrieved from obliquity, whilst the surrounding idyllic depiction lapses into distortion. On A Clear Day demonstrates the limits of the order of objectivity to which perspective appeals.

In Dutton and Peacock's exhibition of photographs and videos entitled Kayaköy , the act of looking is emphasized. Three of the photoworks are of paintings and are inverted, so that it takes an upside-down turn of the head to confirm that two of them are indeed of identical portrait paintings. The third, with its bleached-out central image, shows only the frame of the painting it depicts. This privileging of the picture frame resonates with Jacques Derrida's discussion of the frame as both fundamental to and absent from aesthetic discourse. Without the frame separating what is inside its parameters from all that is outside of it there could be no object of aesthetics. However, such a discourse of aesthetics cannot adequately theorize the frame. ¹

Five circular and kinetically revolving photographs of assorted objects challenge the physical act of looking in refusing to present a static and hence stable image. With perseverance, the objects are revealed to correspond to possible themes; one image of a cloth-covered trolley with lidded bucket can also be seen to depict partially concealed rolls of paper. Possibly wallpaper, so a reference to decorating then? Or a reminder that the picture frame is not a barrier to the continuous exchange of meaning between the viewer, the image and other texts ? Elsewhere, a text rendered on a wall describes in evocative detail an arboreal clearing, culminating in an account of the sudden appearance in it of a wild pig. Stretching the frame to incorporate words and image, this script ensures that the revolving photograph of empty woodland clearing hung alongside it, becomes imbued with the presence of a porcine absence.

¹ See Bal and Bryson, Semiotics and Art History , The Art Bulletin, 2, LXXIII, 1991.