Galway Arts Centre
47 Dominick St Lower, Galway
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sat 10-5pm | Sun 12-6pm
Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha
Sarah Browne
P. Staff
Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha
Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha is an artist, singer and researcher based in Dublin. Through the mediums of sound, text, painting, performance and radio broadcast her practice interrogates the enactment of colonial ideologies and state institutions upon the body. This research is informed by archival investigation, queer and post-colonial theory and performance studies. Her most recent research has been focused on a critical analysis on the performance of keening in Ireland. This resulted in her master's dissertation titled Gairm Caointeoireacht / Keening’s Convocation: A Queering of the Temporalised Body. Her practice has been intently focused on these three strands of research: interrogating methods of revealing the minor figure in Irish history; the somatic knowledge of the voice in relation to colonial violence and ecclesiastical policing, and the impact of sound recording technology on Irish oral traditions. Recent work includes the audio piece Now You’re Talking! (2021), the performance and text Echo's Disarticulation (2022), and the radio piece An áit nach siúlann an t-uisce (2022) for the experimental music festival Alternating Current by Dublin Digital Radio. The early stages of this research regularly informs her monthly radio show ‘Lowlands / Ísealchríoch’ on Dublin Digital Radio.
bless every foot that walks its portals through, 2023
An audio and painting installation which responds to the history and site of Ballinasloe District Asylum (Saint Brigid’s Hospital). Taking its title from a prayer to Saint Brigid, the work explores notions of healing and solitude in the context of political trauma. The audio essay and paintings explore the nature of mental well being and fortitude in the context of imperial rule and the subsequent Free State policy of mass incarceration during the 20th century.
Sarah Browne
Sarah Browne is an artist concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, and frequent interdisciplinary collaboration.
Echo’s Bones, 2022
Echo’s Bones (2022) is a collaborative film-making project by Sarah Browne with autistic young people in North County Dublin, Ireland. The project borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in that landscape of Fingal, where now an old asylum building meets the coastline. Beckett’s plays are populated with people who might move with difficulty, mutter over each other, talk into the dark or not speak at all. As a project, Echo’s Bones questions why such neurodivergent or disabled styles of communication may be treated poorly in everyday situations, but valued as artistically exciting in others. Autism in the project is not a deficit, a disorder, or a problem to be fixed. It is a condition of sensitivity and divergence from what’s socially and cinematically measured as ‘normal’. As a condition, it is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, and art, and world could be like.
The presentation at TULCA includes the film (26:14 minutes, open captions) and extracts of the ‘sensory score’ used in its creation.
Echo’s Bones by Sarah Browne is commissioned by Fingal County Council through Infrastructure 2017-2021, and funded by the Per Cent for Art Scheme.
P. Staff
P. Staff is an English-born artist who works in Los Angeles and London, studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009) and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Staff is in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LUMA Arles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf.
Weedkiller, 2017
A video work that focuses on the intersection of gender, illness and contamination. Inspired by the artist-writer Catherine Lord´s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004), an account of her experience of cancer. At the centre of the video is a monologue, adapted from Lord’s book, in which an actress reflects upon the devastating effects of chemotherapy. In the latter part of the video, the artist Jamie Crew delivers a lip-synched performance of a version of To Be in Love (1999) by Masters at Work. Each performer in Weed Killer is trans. By examining cancer and trans experience, Staff explores how biomedical technologies have fundamentally transformed the social construction of our bodies.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland
Access: On the first floor of Galway Art Centre, which can only be accessed through two flights of stairs. There is a single accessible parking space on Dominick Street located across the road from Galway Arts Centre outside Rouge Café. The time film is captioned. Seating is provided.
Images: Ros Kavanagh
Video: Jonathan Sammon