Broadstone Studios Archive 1997-2015

Image: Varvara Shavrova, Windows on the Hutong Fishtank, lightbox with sound 2009, courtesy of the artist

Varvara Shavrova

OPEN HOUSE DUBLIN opens a “WINDOW ON TWO CITIES”

Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 October 2014

open saturday 11am – 5pm, sunday 12 – 5pm

Broadstone Studios

22 Harcourt Terrace

Dublin 2

As part of the Open House Dublin weekend, which runs from October 17-19 2014, the Irish Architecture Foundation is delighted to present international artist Varvara Shavrova’s ‘Window on Two Cities’ as a highlight of the weekend’s Open House Plus programme, which gives us an opportunity to present an alternative view of cities as created by artists, curators and social commentators.

Varvara Shavrova is a Russian artist who spent five years living and working in Beijing. This city, as complex as it is compelling, is the subject matter of most of her photography and filmed work. Now living and working in Ireland she has continued her interest in capturing life in cities, with a new body of work based on Dublin. In a gesture of friendship, predicated by industry and commerce, the two cities were twinned in 2012.

As unlikely twins, Beijing and Dublin are very different but they are connected by the fact that they are two cities in flux. Shavrova treats her subject matter in a similar stylistic way. She has transformed her photographs into three dimensions by creating light boxes, intensified by the sound installed directly next to them. The scenes in the case of Beijing is of a culture that is vanishing and in Dublin, it is of a culture becoming more and more present. Her approach is very considered and intimate. She is a voyeur, an anthropologist and a creative interpreter of ordinary life.

The installation, created especially for Open House, occupies multiple spaces in Broadstone Studios, built in 1879, it was a former retirement home for “Aged Governesses” and “Unmarried Ladies’ and situated on a terrace that is often cited as the only Regency terrace to exist in the country. In the principle reception room, Shavrova places her light boxes in a deceivingly casual way, occupying the room like former inhabitants; leaning, sitting and lying down. Shavrova has put much thought into the nature and physical attributes of the space. She uses the architectural features, the stairwell, the hall and the gaudy interior decoration, to generate the quiet theatre that plays out in her city portraits. Open House Dublin visitors will be treated to an experiential act that combines both art and architecture in content and manifestation.

Windows on Two Cities

The artist will be present on Saturday 18 October from 11.00am – 5.00pm and Sunday 19 October from 12.00pm – 5.00pm.

Notes on the Artist:

Varvara Shavrova was born in Russia and studied at the Polygraphic Institute in Moscow. She left her hometown in 1989 and since then lived in the UK and Ireland. Shavrova spent 5 and a half years living and working in Beijing, and moved to Dublin, 4 years ago, where she is currently living, and sharing her studio time between Broadstone Studios in central Dublin and her own studio space in the village of Ballycastle in Co.Mayo, in the West of Ireland. Shavrova’s most recent project includes a film and a video and photography installation involving live performance with Peking Opera actors, currently on exhibition in the Venice Architecture Biennale.

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Full OPEN HOUSE DUBLIN 2014 programme can be viewed at www.openhousedublin.com

FREE OPEN HOUSE DUBLIN MAPS will be available primarily in City Hall, Connolly Station and in Dublin City Libraries from Oct 1 but can also be found in various public locations around the city.

The October edition of TOTALLY DUBLIN will feature a special insert and map on Open House Dublin 2014: Totally Dublin is distributed FREE in over 400 locations in Dublin city centre and suburbs, including cafes, restaurants, bars and cultural spaces.

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FOLLOW THE IAF ON FACEBOOK / TWITTER FOR UPDATES.

For further information, contact

Annette Nugent :: annette@annettenugent.ie :: +353.86.6820971

Phoebe Brady :: openhouse@architecturefoundation.ie :: +353.1.4254083

www.varvarashavrova.com

http://openhousedublin.com/index.php/tour/windows-on-two-cities

Krobath I WIEN

Shimmering

Curated by Rike Frank

Eric Bell & Kristoffer Frick | Gerry Bibby | Ernst Caramelle | Isa Genzken | Julian Göthe | Jirí Kovanda | Dorit Margreiter | Sarah Pierce | Kirsten Pieroth

in the context of:

Curated by_vienna 2014: The Century of the Bed

03.10.2014 – 08.11.2014

Opening: 02.10.2014

curated by_vienna 2014: The Century of the Bed
Based on a concept by renowned architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, international curators present exhibitions in 20 of Vienna’s leading contemporary art galleries. curated by_vienna 2014 will be held from October 2 to  November 8.

The show will include works, installations, displays and performances by Eric Bell and Kristoffer Frick, Gerry Bibby, Ernst Caramelle, Isa Genzken, Julian Göthe, Jiří Kovanda, Dorit Margreiter, Sarah Pierce, and Kirsten Pieroth.

An essential characteristic of the bed, one might say, is its ambivalent shifting between personal and collective architecture. More than any other piece of furniture, and beyond its manifest form, it marks out a space that oscillates between the mediality of a societal stage and the notion of an inviolable refuge.

When, over the courseof The Century of the Bed, these relationships become shifted, with the bed’s architecture increasingly taken over and structured by a logic that focusses in particular on the regulation of the self, then the following questions arise: How to deal with this predominance, even within art, of looking at the bed (rather than from the bed)? How to transpose the motif in a way that addresses these conflicting qualities?

The exhibition sets a number of works in relation to one another that use various strategies to both reflect on and counteract these conceptual and experiential shifts—between presence and absence, corporeality and disembodiment, mobility and immobility, withdrawal and involvement—as elements of an architecture. Here the focus lies on the web of relations between these poles and on observing the ways one form always speaks through another.

In “Mein Schlafzimmer in Prag” (My Bedroom in Prague, 1993), for example, Dorit Margreiter refers to Adolf Loos’s “Schlafzimmer für meine Frau” (Bedroom for My Wife, 1903). Contrary to his view that interior spaces could only be experienced directly, this room was selected by Loos as one of a few works to circulate publicaly as a photographic reproduction. Margreiter relates this paradox to the requirement that her Prague guest apartment be transformed into publicly accessible exhibition space during her stay. To fufil this demand – to become public –, she installed a teleportation booth in the entryway to the apartment. Appearing in this booth was the photograph of a person — a silhouette taken against the light — whose presence thematizes import and export relations, as well as subjectivity and the role of the viewer.

Rike Frank is a curator who lives in Berlin and teaches exhibition studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.

With thans to the artists and the following institutions and galleries: Generali Foundation Collection—and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Köln; Galleria Franco Noero, Torino; Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Wien; Silberkuppe, Berlin.

Performances during the opening:

Gerry Bibby, U.M.R.2: The Shape of Things Become, 2012-2014

Sarah Pierce, A real piece of work, 2014

For further information:

http://themetropolitancomplex.com

www.galeriekrobath.at

http://curatedby.at/en/home-2014.html

SELECT

Triskel Arts Centre

Tobin St.

Cork City

13 Sept. – 4 Oct. 2014

An exhibition by six selected RHA artists with each in turn selecting one artist whose work/practice they admire to also participate in the exhibition.

Michael Cullen, RHA -Peter Burns

Martin Gale, RHA – Margaret Corcoran

Eilis O’Connell, RHA – Bernadette Cotter

Michael Quane, RHA – Sarah O’Flaherty

Vivienne Roche, RHA – Bren Smyth

Donald Teskey, RHA – Gabhann Dunne

SELECT comprises six selected RHA artists who in turn each selected one artist each, whose work / practice they admire, to show with them. The six RHA artists are painters Michael Cullen, Martin Gale and Donald Teskey together with three of Ireland’s foremost sculptor’s, who all happen to be from Cork, – Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche and Michael Quane. The artists that they chose are Peter Burns, Margaret Corcoran, Gabhann Dunne, Bernadette Cotter, Bren Smyth and Sarah O’Flaherty, respectively. It makes for an intriguing exhibition, not least because of the various career stages of the participating artists, from the recently graduated to the firmly established

The exhibition / programme will be launched by Simon Coveney, T.D., Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Minister for Defense 6pm, Friday 12th September, 2014.

For further information:

www.gabhanndunne.ie

http://triskelartscentre.ie/events/2814/select/

Image: Ann Murphy, Lumen 2014 Porcelain; Silver-plated copper wire, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist

Fugue State

Christine Lebeck and Ann Murphy

19 September to 8 November 2014

Mermaid Arts Centre

Main St. Bray, Co. Wicklow

Fugue state is a psychiatric term for a state of dissociation and disorientation, in which a person temporarily loses the sense of who and where they are, a kind of rupture in the sense of continuity and identity. In the daily transition from sleeping to waking, we may likewise briefly experience the undoing of our sense of self, before we gradually reassemble the fragments of our identity and recover ourselves.

The artists in this two-person exhibition are both concerned with investigating such states of mind and such moments in time. Christine captures those moments of transformation, when the play of light renders the domestic space suddenly unfamiliar, or the familiar abstract. She is interested in the inter-play between interior and exterior, light and shadow, and those in-between areas where light and shadow blend, known as the penumbra, the indistinct outer-region of a shadow.

Light is incorporated as a crucial element in Ann’s fragile sculptural installations, which seem to be absorbed into the space, the play of light both revealing and concealing as it changes throughout the day. The delicacy and transparency of the materials – silk paper, porcelain and silver wire – contributes to the illusion that they are hovering between emerging and dissolving, between unity and fragmentation, becoming and un-becoming.

The two person exhibition will be opened by Gerry Watson, Board Member of the Graphic Studio, Dublin, at 6pm on Thursday 18 September, 2014. All are welcome.

Special thanks to the Embassy of France, Christopher Pingeon and Doireann Ní Bhriain. Mermaid Arts Centre’s exhibition programme is supported by Craft Picture Framing, Dublin Road, Bray, Co Wicklow.

For further information:

www.annmurphyartist.com

www.mermaidartscentre.ie/exhibitions/details/fugue-state1

“Make yourself ready, my spirit”. The exhibition title is derived from Johann Sebastian Bachs` first cantata he composed in Leipzig. Also inspired by the city our international awardees will show their works made during their residency stay. Darren Munce an Australian painter who also teaches painting in Melbourne, artist Cameron Gill and Irish artist Colin Crotty will be showing new body of work. Sadia Sadia as director, editor as well as producer will present a two channel video installation and premiere her recent 30-channel sound project. Los Angeles based artist Piper Mavis will present two new video works.

For Further information:

http://colincrotty.com

www.liap.eu/en/content/section/1/26/

Image: An answer about visible light 2014, ©Isabel Nolan, Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York.

Isabel Nolan

An answer about the sky

Sean Kelly Gallery

475 Tenth Avenue
New York NY 10018

September 13 – October 18, 2014

An answer about the sky will include new hand-made sculptures, paintings, a text piece and Nolan’s newest large-scale textile work, The emptied room: A rug for the 20th Century. The works are exemplary of the artist’s restless investigation of the omnipresent aesthetic compulsion to find order, to generate a material record of place and time and thus secure an understanding of the world.

The exhibition title is from the Strugatsky Brothers’ novel Definitely Maybe (1974), referring to a thwarted effort to find the answer to one question and receiving information on an entirely different matter. Nolan sees this as a metaphor for productive artistic research:

“Artworks thrive in a space of necessary failures and missed objectives. They are willful and stubbornly refuse to be fully instrumentalised or to ever be wholly in control of their own meaning or ends. I thought I was making a show that considered disintegration and failure. In the process, I learned more about the treachery of beauty than disintegration. For instance, I wanted to make a rug prompted by the meditative, virtually monochrome painting Convolvulus by Paul Nash. Made in 1930, the painting alludes to the demise of civilizations and of nature’s vitality and indifference to culture. Yet somehow I conceived a sumptuous rug rich in colour and an almost obscenely lovely vision of a deliquescent, defunct architectural space.”

The fracturing of representational form and structure into poetic abstraction is common to many of the featured works in the show. The hand-tufted wool rug occupies both the wall and floor. The architectural imagery of the upper section seems to melt, dripping to the lower half where pattern solidifies into an irregular floor-scape. The sculptures are presented on solid stone plinths but have a quality of cultivated uncertainty. In their oscillation between representation and abstraction the paintings also conjure a sense of unease or shifting perspectives.

In the text work, A Sun So Hot, a central theme of the show is elucidated. Nolan writes, “It is wise to beware beauty. It is treacherous. It aids in reconciling us to living in an irrational, thrilling, difficult and dull world and quite often beauty makes bearable and thinkable that which is quite rightly very difficult to bear or think.”

An answer about the sky is an exhibition precipitated by the seductive narratives of brilliant failures and the way in which art contrives to make the world more beautiful. Nolan again, “I asked a question about disintegration and the answer I got was art.”

Nolan’s exhibition at Sean Kelly coincides with the artist’s solo exhibition, The weakened eye of day, on view at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through September 21, 2014. The museum exhibition will then travel to the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and Mercer Union, Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions by Nolan include: Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France (2012); and the Return Gallery, Goethe Institute, Dublin (2012). Other solo shows include: Project Arts Centre (2005), Dublin: the Studio, Glasgow International (2006); and Artspace, New Zealand (2008). She represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition, Ireland at Venice 2005. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at institutions internationally, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as well as international biennials including The Yugoslav Biennial for Young Artists, Vrasc, Serbia-Montenegro, and Mediation Biennale, Poznan, Poland.

Further information available at:

www.isabelnolan.com

www.skny.com

Image: Gerard Byrne, extract "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not" 2010, courtesy of Lisson Gallery London, Nordenhake Gallery Stockholm and Green on Red Gallery Dublin

Gerard Byrne

A late evening in the future

Frac des Pays de la Loire

Boulevard Ampère
44470 Carquefou
France

5 July – 21 September 2014

In the frame of Songe d’une nuit d’été (Midsummer night’s dream) a contemporary art & heritage trail in the loire valley – from march to november 2014

Gerard Byrne has spent his career revisiting our cultural history: his carefully-documented film productions show public figures of the twentieth century – artists, writers, businessmen – discussing social and political issues of their day.  Byrne looks to the media world of his youth (whether publications, television or advertising) for the raw material of his dialogues and conversations. As such, 1984 and Beyond (2005-07) refers to 1960s’ America and its vision of the future, through a discussion organized by Playboy in 1963, and which brings together some of the leading figures in science fiction such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. In the midst of these turbulent times, this butch band foresees with complete confidence the end of communism, intergalactic space travel, a society of plenty and complete sexual freedom. Evoking a future yet to happen from a bygone age, the scene is as fascinating as it is disturbing.

Byrne’s twentieth century is full of men, and these men speak mainly about art and sex (women), between revolutionary aspirations and moral conservatism. A thing is a hole in a thing it is not calls upon, through some chequered episodes in its history, some of the major players of Minimalism and the American modern art scene: Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Franck Stella discover, discuss and implement a new vision of the artwork, a pure spatial object.  In A Man and a Woman make love (2012), a group of phallocentric surrealists – including André Breton and Raymond Queneau – descant learnedly on pleasure and the mysteries of the female orgasm. Staged on a sitcom set very much in the style of the Belle Epoque, this dialogue published in 1928 in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) appears all the more shocking. Between these two issues we glimpse the question of objectivity of forms and of the subjugation of women and nations, a common desire for control, and a form of complicity, which leave their mark on our cultural history.

 
Deliberately theatrical, Gerard Byrne’s films constantly blur the boundaries between document and fiction, between History and histories. At the FRAC Pays de la Loire, the artist has chosen to bring them back into play in a setting that draws as much on the language of minimalist sculpture and romantic ruin as on the theatre stage. The large gallery, immersed in shadow, is dotted with monumental slabs propped up against one another and with viewing devices. The slabs and screens come alive and switch off; the films are fragmented according to the switching whims of the software controlling the whole installation, and the movements of roaming visitors. Somewhere within the gallery space stands enthroned the reconstruction of the white tree created by Giacometti for a set of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Also borrowed from Beckett is the exhibition’s title: A late evening in the future is the first stage direction in Krapp’s Last Tape, which sees Krapp, a failed writer reduced to vagrancy, soliloquize while listening once again to an old tape spool, a kind of record of “blessed, blissful days” cut short by a distressing break-up. Like the example of Beckett’s set, Gerard Byrne’s exhibition seeks to be an enigmatic twilight zone devoted to recollection, subject to a random and discretionary order. It is therefore for the roaming visitor to reconstruct meaning out of the modernist narratives cleverly deconstructed by the artist.

Text: Julien Zerbone

www.gerardbyrne.com

www.fracdespaysdelaloire.com/en/program/2014/au-frac/gerard-byrne