Author Archives: SummerhallTV

Tessa Giblin : Gretchen Bender, Total Recall

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This exhibition shows Gretchen Bender’s seminal Total Recall (1987), bringing again to life her concept of ‘electronic theatre’. We’re also delighted to announce a newly commissioned work in response by Oisín Byrne.

A monumental 24-monitor multi-projection screen installation, Total Recall explores the accelerated image-flow of television and includes a multitude of images that surrounded the context of her work – corporate logos, military hardware, Hollywood film as well as commercials for consumer goods.

Total Recall launches itself on our senses. It hits us in the eyes, the memory, the ears, the body, and our index of meaning – the part of us that recognises a corporate logo, a scene from a film or a title, and then wrenches to mind its associations. Careening across the numerous screens and television box-sets, images and sound are edited to participate in the making of a symphony – the performance and now installation of what Gretchen Bender called ‘electronic theatre’.

Through this single seminal work of art, we can feel the power of an extraordinary artist, who Hal Foster calls an ‘oxymoron: a feminist futurist’. Bender ricochets between cinema samples and graphic symbols, advertisements and her own footage, and zooms in repeatedly to examples of military propaganda and corporate self-representation. The concept of electronic theatre couldn’t be more apt, with its dynamic rhythm, waxing and waning tempo and crescendo of intensity.

Installed in the gallery of Project Arts Centre (also a natural home of theatre and performance), Total Recall has prompted the commissioning of a new work by artist Oisín Byrne. The printed and painted curtain is designed as a graphic entrance to Bender’s theatre – its thick and layered fabric protecting and containing the audio visual environment. Oisín Byrne has drawn from a variety of image sources, including TV static and TV test cards, and worked them into a combination of optical patterns and manual gestures. Static, the image a TV displays before, after or in the absence of a programme or signal, is particularly poignant in an era when television programming and broadcasting is all but over.

The image of static also raises complexity for the care and archiving of Gretchen Bender’s wider body of work, some of which included the live feed of televisual transmission. Developing from previous artworks that also function as exhibition furniture, performance stages, and lecture interventions, Oisín Byrne’s entrance curtain brings an artist of the current generation into dialogue with an artist whose influence continues to grow after her death.

Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987, courtesy the Estate of Gretchen Bender.

Face to Face : John Byrne in conversation with Joyce McMillan

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John Byrne is a Scottish playwright and artist. As well as designing Penguin covers and sets for his own plays, Byrne has designed record covers for the likes of the Beatles, Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty. Many of Byrne’s paintings hang in the Scottish Portrait Gallery, whilst other works of his can be found in major collections elsewhere in Scotland and abroad.

In this video, Byrne is in conversation with theatre critic Joyce McMillan, in the Main Hall at Summerhall.

 

Kwang Young Chun : Aggregations

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Aggregations is the first solo UK exhibition by the internationally renowned Korean artist Kwang Young Chun, and explores the traditions of making and Eastern philosophy with the his painterly interest in American Abstract Expressionism.

Chun creates large scale works using pieces cut from Polystyrene, wrapped in Korean mulberry paper and tied with hand-twisted paper string. Using a mix of natural dyes such as squid ink and tea, Chun creates vivid bursts of colour within these works, from burning reds and oranges, to glacial hues of blue.

Grey Skipwith introduces the work of this artist, with whom he has worked closely with over the last few years.

Aggregations is on at Dovecot Studios, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, until the 26th September 2015.

Cat Boyd : Radical Independence Conference 2014

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Writer and co-founder of the Radical Independence Campaign, Cat Boyd, talks at the Radical Independence Conference, which was held in Glasgow, in November 2014. The event saw an attendance of 3000 people, and talks from a number of speakers such as politicians, writers, journalists and many others involved in the independence movement.

The Radical Independence Campaign is dedicated to working towards creating an alternative vision of independence for Scotland. The campaign has played a key part in supporting the independence referendum, boosting grassroots support from around the country and providing a platform for those wishing to discuss Scotland’s future.

This video was first published on Bella Caledonia.

Michael Pedersen : Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship 2015

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Writer, poet, Neu Reekie founder and all round lyrical whizzkid Michael Pedersen is a recent recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Pedersen will spend a month at the Hôtel Chevillon International Arts Centre at Grez-sur-Loing in France, working on a second collection of poetry and sculpting a feature film script – a collaboration with Scottish Director Robert McKillop.

 

Disinformation : The Analysis of Beauty

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As part of Talbot Rice Gallery’s sonic art festival, Gap in the Air, Joe Banks presents the sound installation ‘The Analysis of Beauty’, based upon William Hogarth’s thesis of the same name. Hogarth was interested in ‘Serpentine Lines’, featuring them in his work and studying them extensively. The ‘S’ shaped lines relate to what we know as sinusoidal waves, the visual form which originates from mathematics and musical acoustics.

Banks, inspired by the work of Hogarth, and having acquired an oscillator and oscilloscope, created an installation that explored the sine waves and created the sound generated from these waves. He has utilised the 16 speakers set up for the festival to fill the Georgian Gallery full of sound.

The Analysis of Beauty will be in the Talbot Rice Gallery until the 29th November 2014. Gap in the Air continues into February next year.

Tina Darb and Marc O’Sullivan : Sean Scully

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Since moving to the United States in 1975 and taking up American citizenship, Dublin-born Sean Scully has become established as one of New York’s leading contemporary artists. East Coast Light, an early work, was exhibited in Cork in 1973 during a touring exhibition. In the years following, Scully has continued to combine abstract motifs with shaped canvases, although he no longer uses his criss-cross ‘plaid’ pattering that characterizes his first works.

His recent paintings eschew the illusionism which results from over-lapping stripes and consequently have a stronger presence as objects in themselves.
Figure/Abstract is on at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, until the 12th September 2015. See more at: http://www.crawfordartgallery.ie/pages/paintings/SeanScully.html#sthash.p7kFvOKb.dpuf

Liz Lochhead : Poems For The Heart

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Scots Makar, Liz Lochhead, talks about the importance of learning poems off by heart, illustrating her point with a snippet of Robert Burns’ poem A Man’s A Man For A’ That.

Although going to Glasgow School of Art, and continuing a career in art tuition, Liz Lochhead always wrote and performed poetry. She was a member of the prestigious writer’s group initiated by Philip Hobsbaum and which included the new talents of Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard and James Kelman.

In her career, Lochhead produced many volumes of poems, as well as monologues and performance pieces. Her works have paved the way for female voices within poetry, and she has been celebrated for her style of performance.

Scottish Poetry Library

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd : Char Nah! Hor

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Artists Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Dragan Cichosz and Jedrzej Cichosz use their flat as their canvas, painting, printing and collaging onto the walls. The walls in some rooms are covered entirely with printed photocopies in the style of the arts and crafts movement (William Morris). Whilst other rooms have action painting that travels from one side of the floor across the ceiling, leaving the rest of the space empty. The exhibition continues the tradition of artists such as the COBRA movement and crafts movement, and will demonstrate a different lifestyle based on DIY, low budget, death metal and pure expression.

Char Nah! Hor was part of the Glasgow Open House Art Festival, which ran from the 1st to the 4th May, exhibiting artworks across Glasgow in a variety of venues, from flats to industrial spaces. Glasgow Open House is an artist-led, not-for-profit organisation that was founded by Glasgow School of Art alumna Amalie Silvani-Jones in 2013. It was formed in order to meet the practical needs of the city’s grassroots art community and takes its lead from Glasgow’s already prevalent ‘Do-It-Yourself’ culture in relation to visual art and music.

 

Polly Toynbee and David Walker : Cameron’s Coup

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Polly Toynbee and David Walker appear at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk about their past critiques of British Parliament, their new work, which dissects David Cameron’s five years in Parliament, and their experience of writing together.

Polly Toynbee is a British journalist who currently works as a columnist for the Guardian. She was formerly BBC social affairs editor, columnist and associate editor of the Independent, co-editor of the Washington Monthly and a reporter and feature writer for the Observer.

David Walker is contributing editor to the Public Leaders Network and former director of public reporting at the Audit Commission.

Alan Foley : Swan Lake, Cork City Ballet

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Cork City Ballet in association with Cork Opera House presents Swan Lake

If you’ve never seen “Swan Lake”, now’s the time! Cork City Ballet is back, and the company’s full length production of this ballet lays claim to a legacy that extends back to its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1895.

Speaking at the recent launch of ‘Swan Lake’, Artistic Director Alan Foley said: “unlike the unalloyed tragedy most people cherish, this version ends with a fairy-tale twist. Yuri Demakov and I have re-produced the original Petipa/Ivanov choreography where the Prince destroys the evil sorcerer Rothbart, and is joyfully reunited with the Swan Queen”.

Cork City Ballet’s production promises to be spectacular, from the opulent costumes (direct from the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg) to the alluring sets, especially the opening scene’s gold-tinged, tree-framed park in the shadow of the great castle and lake.

All the well-loved elements are still in place including the “white acts”, with the famous cygnets dance for four girls; the exquisite white swan pas de deux; and the Act 3 climactic Black Swan pas de deux complete with thirty two fouettes all wrapped up in Tchaikovsky’s glorious score.

Russian Ballet stars Ekaterina Bortyakova and her partner Akzhol Mussakhanov will dance the lead roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried, and they will be accompanied by soloists and a full corps de ballet.

Wednesday 18th – Saturday 21st November

Vernon God Little

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Fresh from the success of The Pillowman, Decadent Theatre Company returns with a show the Young Vic audience voted as one of the top 3 shows of the last twenty five years.

Vernon Little lives in a flea –bitten Texan town, “the barbeque sauce capital of the state”, where his best friend has just massacred sixteen of his classmates. The town wants vengeance and turns its sights on the innocent Vernon who is arrested from the start of the story. As the saying goes – “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” – Vernon hits the road and flees to Mexico pursued by a media circus of outlandish proportions.

DATE AND TIME | MON 21 – SAT 26 SEPT, 8PM
Everyman Theatre, Cork
everymancork.com/2015/09/vernon-god-little/

 

Sophia Lindsay Burns : The Neverending Glen

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Curator of Edinburgh’s St.Margaret’s House, Sophia Lindsay Burns, introduces The Neverending Glen, a new project featuring a carefully curated selection of contemporary artists and collectives in the grounds of Kelburn Estate. A series of site-specific installations, sculptures, performances & workshops features throughout the forest of Kelburn, creating a visual walk from the Walled Garden to a new performance space, the Beech Plateau.

The Neverending Glen was featured as part of the Kelburn Garden Party’s festivities on the 3rd – 5th July 2015. Find out more about it at http://www.kelburngardenparty.com/the-neverending-glen/

Vivienne Roche : Head to Head at Crawford Art Gallery

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From Strachaire Fir by Joseph Higgins (1916) to the bronze head of her nephew Stephen Archer: Tight Head Prop (2014), Vivienne Roche RHA curates an exhibition of sculptures called Head to Head in the historic Sculpture Galleries. The exhibition will run from May until September 2015 and includes a series of heads commissioned by the Arts Council from artists Conor Fallon RHA, Kathy Prendergast and Brian Bourke.

Head to Head is on at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, until the 25th September 2015. Find out more at www.crawfordartgallery.ie

Luc Tuymans : Birds of a Feather

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Luc Tuymans is one of the most influential painters working today. For his first exhibition in Scotland, at the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, this provocative artist will bring together his work with that of the most significant of Scottish Enlightenment portrait painters, Henry Raeburn. Utilising images of yellow and pink canaries, anonymous gatherings of people and Raeburn’s sombre black-robed academics, Birds of a Feather will associate themes of independence, enlightenment and social control.

Within the exhibition the canaries, being one of the most recognisable domesticated birds, evoke a natural world reformed through biological and social engineering. In this light they inculcate Raeburn’s sitters, including William Robertson and John Playfair (Scottish Historian, Minister and University Principal on one hand and Professor of Natural Philosophy on the other) in a world that is observed, analysed and transformed at the same time by those very acts. For Tuymans, looking is never passive. And here the confidence exuded by the male sitters, dressed in their frocks, preened and supported by attributes of their intellectual endeavours, evolves to become a palpable feeling of disquiet. Displayed above the Raeburn portraits, ghostly silkscreen images of crowds gather for some unknown purpose suggestive of broader social movements affecting anonymous ‘masses’. In Birds of a Feather, the individuality and the implicit humanism of Raeburn’s single identities is haunted by this suggestive apparition.

Luc Tuymans maintains an uncompromising attitude towards painting, which he considers to be incapable of conveying real-world subject matters, a stance that has allowed him to form a clear analytical relationship with the medium. Often photographing and re-photographing images and models his work presents a contemporary and distantiated way of looking, examples of this studio research included in Birds of a Feather give a rare insight into his working process. Tuymans’ subjects have included serial killers and the Holocaust, but equally the mundane and incidental. By acknowledging the impossibility of penetrating the real, Tuymans offers sideways glances at familiar things, discharging taboos and offering a different kind of visual resonance. In his own words: “The Object and the image function as transmitters; they have this special quality that is outside language, which mutes the thing to the point where silence becomes like a weight […] Those elements are really fascinating because they are in a sense not there; after all, they are depicted.”

The exhibition will include new paintings and drawings made for Edinburgh. A catalogue with commissioned essays by Will Self and Colin Chinnery will be available in November.

31 October – 19 December 2015

Supported by David Zwirner, New York/London.

Raj Chakraborti : Tariq Ali, George Monbiot and William Dalrymple

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In this edition of Writers Stories from the Edinburgh International Book Festival of 2003 Raj Chakraborti explores Don Delillo’s conceit that terrorists possess the place in our consciousness once occupied by novelists. Chakraborti’s interview with Tariq Ali draws insights into the continuing Western domination. While George Monbiot’s view is that the poorer nations hold the key to a positive and egalitarian future William Dallrymple look further back to the underpinnings of imperialism, to those centuries of a more equal if not reverent engagement with India before the onset of economic subjugation.

Tim Pomeroy : Contemporary Sacred

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Tim Pomeroy, who lives and works on the Isle of Arran, attended Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, 1976–81. His sculpture is very diverse in its subject and style, material and technique. He carves in marble, slate, granite and sandstone from his island home, and his drawings and etchings are part of the overall process. He is interested in the usefulness and beauty of manmade objects, both from Neolithic and bronze age archaeology and from contemporary life.

20th November – 23rd December 2015

Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival

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Sounds from a Safe Harbour is a brand new festival of music, art and conversation, curated by Bryce Dessner of The National. Two years since its inception by Bryce and Cork Opera House CEO, Mary Hickson, Sounds from a Safe Harbour will bring a huge international creative cast to Cork this September to celebrate the port city’s place on the world’s stage.

Alongside Cork’s spectacular harbour environs, themes of waves, water and movement have been the inspiration for the festival, and will be explored through many new commissions and collaborations specially programmed for Sounds from a Safe Harbour.

The festival will activate the City through many art forms including visual arts, conversation, dance, film and music. Collaboration and shared experiences are strong themes in the festival, and audiences are encouraged to immerse themselves and form part of the conversation.

soundsfromasafeharbour.com

Glyn Thompson : A Lady’s Not A Gent’s

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Who did the Urinal? Not Duchamp! say Glyn Thompson and Julian Spalding in their Summerhall Festival exhibition titled ‘A Lady’s Not A Gent’s’.

Thompson and Spalding claim the submission of the urinal (aka ‘Fountain’) to the Independents exhibition of 1917 was made by poet/artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This was a gesture aimed personally at Duchamp and politically at America for entering the WW1 against Germany in 1917. But ‘Duchamp’s urinal’ has for many become a seminal work contributing to the less critical or analytical forms of Conceptual Art as the source of Don Judd’s tautology of ‘what the artist calls art, is art’. Thompson attributes the ‘readymade’ and the assertion of everyday less-traditionally aesthetic objects as art to Breton’s ambition to include Duchamp within Dada.

This exhibition at Summerhall finds Spalding and Thompson on a roll, with a lengthy exchange with Sir Nicholas Serota published this month in The Jackdaw (www.jackdaw.co.uk) building up a body of evidence that not only was the ownership of a Urinal copy (purchased by the Tate for £500,000) wrongly attributed but that Elsa’s conceit in submitting it to the Independents in 1917 has been entirely misunderstood.

The exhibition It is currently located in the long corridor at Summerhall.

Iain Banks : Edinburgh International Book Festival

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Iain Banks is a Scottish author of both mainstream fiction and science fiction, writing under the name Iain M. Banks for his science fiction work.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Robert Morgan talks to Iain Banks about his mainstream and science fiction work, his inspirations for his books and what he thinks of adaptations of his works.

Malu Halasa : Syria Speaks – Arts and Culture from the Frontline

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Writer Malu Halasa talks to Giulia Trentacosti about what she’s doing at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Along with Zaher Omareen & Nawara Mahfoud, Halasa co-edited Syria Speaks : Arts and Culture from the Frontline,which explores the work of writers, photographers, artists, and journalists. The book came about after the three editors wanted to put on a series of exhibitions in response to the Syrian Uprising in 2011.

Malu Halasa is an editor and journalist. She is co-editor of Creating Spaces of Freedom: Culture in Defiance (Saqi Books, 2004), Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images (Saqi Books, 2004), Kaveh Golestan 1950–2003: Recording the Truth in Iran (Hatje Cantz, 2007) and The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie (Chronicle Books, 2008). Former managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library and a founding editor of Tank magazine, she writes for the British press.

 

Riccardo Buscarini and Richard Taylor : In Parting Glass

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Till 9 March 2016 11:00-18:0 Venue: Laboratory Gallery, Summerhall

Choreographer Riccardo Buscarini and visual artist Richard Taylor work together for the first time, transforming the glass cabinets in Summerhall’s Laboratory Gallery into living archives to explore memory, intimacy and exposure. Paired by curator Holly Knox Yeoman, the duo use a magpie approach to draw from their personal experiences and cultural identities to mix ready-made objects, sculpture and sound to partner live and recorded performances.

Buscarini and Taylor are the same age, star sign, sexuality, and have the same forename. These coincidental affinities have inspired them to make further enquiries into how these idiosyncrasies might be extracted in the laboratory, as well as archive, setting.

The exhibition, preceded by an intensive period of collaboration, is bookended by live iterations of the work on display – both at the private view and during a closing event in March 2015. Part dissection of their personalities and part history of their individual routes to Summerhall itself, the results are tactile, immersive and narrative-led.

Summerhall Curated

IMMA : The Garden Gallery

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An introduction to the exhibitions running in the Garden Gallery at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and running into 2016.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) aims in all its activities to create for the public an enjoyable and engaging experience of contemporary art. It achieves this through a dynamic and changing programme of exhibitions and education programmes based in its home at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and working with partners nationally and internationally. As the national institution for contemporary art IMMA is committed to supporting artists’ work, and works with artists and partners to support the development, understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art in Ireland.

IMMA is the home of the national collection of modern and contemporary art and takes responsibility for the care and maintenance of this national resource. We ensure that it is accessible to visitors to IMMA and beyond through exhibitions, collaborations, loans, touring partnerships and digital programmes.

www.imma.ie

Tanya Kiang : The SOLAS Photography Prize 2015

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The Solas Awards Exhibition features the work of nine artists selected as winners by the international jury. This major new award for contemporary photography is a collaboration between Source Magazine and the Gallery of Photography Ireland. Source is a photography magazine based and published in the UK since 1992. The Gallery of Photography is the national centre for photography in Ireland, and was established in 1978. Both entities are publicly-funded, non-profit arts organisations.

Tuesday 1 December 2015 – Sunday 10 January 2016
www.galleryofphotography.ie

Joan Clancy Art Gallery : Christmas Magic

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Don’t miss out on exciting exhibition showcasing Ireland’s leading established artists and the best of emerging Irish artistic talent at Joan Clancy Art Gallery.

Located in the Irish-speaking area of An Rinn (Ring), 10k from Dungarvan, the area is a mecca for holiday-makers and fun seekers, renowned for its art, cuisine, lively pubs and great water sports. Among the must-do things in Dungarvan is a visit to this renowned Gaeltacht Gallery. Enjoy the superb art, as well as the uninterrupted sweeping views of the County Waterford coastline from Joan Clancy Gallery, against the backdrop of the majestic Comeragh and Knockmealdown Mountains.

An Rinn is a place and state of mind. The locals call it “Draíocht na Rinne” the magic spell of An Rinn. Famed for its Irish College, pubs and strong tradition of music and song, where the performing and creative arts are an intrinsic element in the community, An Rinn is also known for its picturesque beaches and piers, along with its oysters, Ring Crystal and seaweed baths.

Christmas Magic Group Show Draíocht na Nollag
December 16 – 23
Daily 11am – 5pm including the weekend

Aidan Butler, Ciara Gormley, Róisín Power Hackett, Damaris Lysaght, Rayleen Clancy, Leah Murphy, Blawnin Clancy, Martina McAteer, Ross Stewart

www.joanclancygallery.com