CURATING
Introduction
Curatorial Projects 2000 – 2007
Bibliomania, 2000 Acollection of international artists’, art historians’, curators’, filmmakers’, psychoanalysts’ and writers’ book selections that reflect their individual interests and practice. The exhibitions, the website and the publications present the participants’ practice through the multiple sources that inform or contextualise it rather than the more traditional route of presenting their physical work. Curated by Paul O’Neill.
Bungalow Blitz, 2001-06 Curated by Aoife Mac Namara, this project began with two quite different starting points: Jack Fitzsimons’s 1971 book of Irish house patterns, Bungalow Bliss, and Mies van der Rohe’s 1947 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The juxtaposition of Mies’s lean, mean, minimalist hang with the aesthetically inelegant, often cluttered designs produced out of Bungalow Bliss, around which the series of exhibitions, papers, photo-essays, video, sculpture, paintings and book produced out of this research are organised, have sought to imagine an encounter between Mies the auteur and Jack the amateur. Both speculative and provisional, it is also productive, facilitating questions around architectural, artistic and curatorial authorship and the taxonomy of the retrospective as well as those focused on the shaping of post-colonial identity in an Ireland, where land, property and housing continue to dominate the cultural and political landscape.
Coalesce, 2005 A complex installation comprising a series of 4 exhibitions/ projects overlaid onto one another ranging from interventions, to meeting spaces, to publications, to ‘retro-happening nightclub’ events with video screenings and DJ sets on the opening launch night of the exhibition, curated by Paul O’Neill
General Idea/Selectged Retrospective, 2006 The first Irish exhibition of the seminal artist’s group General Idea (1969 – 1994), established by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, curated by Paul O’Neill.
Golden, 2005-07 An ongoing practice-led research project by susan pui san lok, comprising a series of interrelated works across video, sound, installation, net and live media, curated events, and publications. Golden aims to explore possibilities for a critical aesthetics and poetics of place, nostalgia, aspiration and translation in diaspora, within an interdisciplinary creative practice. Key questions include ‘nostalgia’ as a vehicle for negotiating ‘place’ in migration, against the ‘nostalgic’ as a mode of representation; spatial, oral and aural ‘leisure’ practices as processes of inscribing, translating and performing identity, memory, and territory; and their tactical, critical representation.
i, tourist? 2005-06 Produced by Paul Antick, itourist? is a multi-media project that uses billboard art, writing and the internet to pose a series of questions about the relationship between the Holocaust, Jewish identities and mass tourism in the 21st century.
La La Land, 2005 An exhibition without a theme, a series of contradictions, a show about being out of it…curated by Paul O’Neill
Mingle-Mangled: A Critical Curating Party, 2005 A curated discursive event in a nightclub environment, featuring a number of international artists, curators and DJs including Craig Richards (Fabric and Tyrant, UK), artist David Blamey (UK and FR), artist, curator and lecturer Mick Wilson (IRL), electronic musician Juergen Simpson (IRL) curators Paul O’Neill (UK), Annie Fletcher (NL), Charles Esche (NL), and Art/not art (IRL). All invited participants both DJ’d and lectured in the nightclub on the same night in the same space.
Otherworlds, 2003-04 A landmark exhibition curated by Jon Bird, of work by Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, artists from two different generations, who share a history in feminism and an experience of the New York art world. Working in an essentially figurative style and sharing a visual language rooted in the female body, Spero and Smith’s art addresses issues of the feminine across cultures and mythologies.
’Sadness and Gladness’ – the Film Sponsorsip of Glasgow Corporation 1922-1978, 2007, the Lighthouse in Glasgow, March 2007 Between 1920 and 1978 Glasgow Corporation sponsored over 50 films. From the earliest, Glasgow’s Housing Problem and its Solution, commissioned from Pathé in 1922 to the last Glasgow’s Progress, whose final images were taken by Ogam Films in 1978, they provide a remarkable view of the life, times and people of an ever-changing city. Co-curated by Elisabeth Lebas.
Spaces Buildings Make, 2005-ongoing An AHRC funded interdisciplinary research project concerned with understanding how practice-based research in the visual, performing and electronic arts can open up new approaches to understanding how, and in what ways, knowledge about architecture and the built environment can be generated and accessed.
The Suburban Landscape: 200 Years of Gardens and Gardening, 2007-08, an exhibition at MoDA. Guest-curated by Elisabeth Lebas, this exhibition explores the history of the suburban landscape over the last two hundred years. It considers the significance of gardens and gardening in the making of what has become the most ‘English’ of landscape environments.
Researchers within the School of Arts & Education who have explored individual and collaborative curatorial practice include: