Tag Archives for The Market Studios

The Hearth

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Installation images courtesy Hazeline Photography (Hazel Fitzpatrick).

The Hearth, is an audio-visual installation work made specifically for the exhibition Stories to Wake Up With, curated by Moran Been-noon.

This show is a part of the Act series, an ongoing digital art project designed by Moran to encourage criticism of contemporary politics. The exhibit, originally entitled Re Act is an expansion of this concept, and is part of a curatorial residency at The Market Studios in Dublin, Ireland.

The original Act project included the development of five digital ‘tools’ or ‘guides’, which were then applied to political content to create artwork. Artists were invited to use the tools created for the Act series for production/inspiration/objects of critique to generate artwork, with no limitation on creative language or genre.

The video and audio were presented as three separate channels.  Visitors entering the space first encountered audio Channel 1, a male Irish voice reading the current Irish Constitution.  Moving further into the room audio Channel 2 comes to the fore and the projection of a fire in a hearth on an electric heater gathers visitors closer to Channel 2.  The installation is set up in a vaguely domestic arrangement of hearth-rug and coffee table.  Channel 2 is a multi-vocal reading of excerpts from Brehon Law, factual information about Irish Asylum policy and Law and excerpts from Merriman’s poem the Midnight Court.  Multinational friends contributed their accents to this piece.  Customs and practices around hospitality,  kinship and connected ness to the natural world are the focus of the work.

This is a sample of the audio to give a sense of the piece:  The Hearth excerpt, 7mins 30sec

Listen on headphones for best experience, as Channels 1 & 2 are presented separately in R & L earphones.

Thanks to curator Moran Been-noon for the impetus and support to develop this piece and to – Diana Caramaschi; Matthew Darragh; Ewa Miernik; Ndumiso Mhlanga (D-Snipe) and Dave Murphy and Martin Narrendorp (Ras Tinny) and Moran for lending their wonderful voices to the audio.

Divination Tea

Divination Tea

The Market Studios, Cnr Mary’s Lane & Halston St, Dublin 7

5.30pm, Saturday, 17th  September, 2011

as part of the group show Essomenia curated by Cora Cummins & Saoirse Higgins

I would like to invite you all to partake in a Divination Tea.

I am experiencing a period in my life where imagining ‘the future’ is a difficult thing.  Contributing to this exhibition which examines our obsession with the future feels curiously ironic.  I feel as though I am in suspended animation, I seek solace in the i Ching. I resort to the very Irish and British habit of taking some tea when faced with adversity or a problem in the hopes of finding an answer in contemplative space. I am interested in employing modest means to open up big questions.

I have lots of questions, do you? In particular I am perplexed about how we might enact public life differently.

Whether or not you are available to come to Tea I’d like to invite you to contribute your own personal question about our common future [i]

Your questions will become the focus within the Divination Tea, which will involve, reading tea leaves together, consulting the iChing and some bibliomancy [ii] involving your favourite books (perhaps a book you keep returning to, it can be factual, fictional or philosophical).

The liner concept of Messianic Time has failed us along with the modernist notion of progress.  A better life is deferred and we are led to believe that our world, is ‘the least bad of possible worlds’ [iii].  I’d like to raise questions and answers in relation to a different concept of the future, where we imagine the future we want is already present [iv].  To take a collective leap of faith into a future we want rather than one that seems inevitable or dependant on ‘expert Others’.

How will we inhabit the future together?

I look forward to chatting with you all. Please register interest in attending and send your question/s about our common future by email in advance, to open the discussion at our Divination event.

E: monica.flynn@gmail.com
[i] Our way of life, e.g. Aristotle describes happiness (eudaimonia) as a virtueous life (one of areté) which involves self-sufficiency, not in the individual sense, but within the context of a community.  Eudaimonia for Aristotle involves reason and action taking place over a lifetime as “one swallow does not make a spring”.

[ii] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bibliomancy means from biblio- “books” and -mancy “divination by means of”) “divination by books, or by verses of the Bible.  Sometimes this term is used synonymously with stichomancy (from sticho- “row, line, verse”) “divination by lines of verse in books taken at hazard”, which was first recorded ca. 1693 (Urquhart’s Rabelais).  Bibliomancy compares with rhapsodomancy (from rhapsode “poem, song, ode”) “divination by reading a random passage from a poem”. A historical precedent was the ancient Roman practice of sortes ‘sortilege, divination by drawing lots”, which specialized into sortes Homerica, sortes Virgilianae and sortes Sanctorum, using the texts of Homer, Virgil, and the Bible.

[iii] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, London (2009) referring to Badiou’s futur antérieur suggests that events seem inevitable only retrospectively, we can act for alternative outcomes without full knowledge, as in an act of faith.

[iv] Ibid, Pg28