MAAP 2020 COMMA by Munster Technological University

COM,MA

SOFT RUPTURE

COM,MA MA:AP 2020

A comma marks a soft pause within a sentence, The pause gives space for inhaling and exhaling, When breathing today has become such a conscious action, That carries a sense of danger.

A comma is not a stop, But an opportunity for internal and external reflection, A comma is not a silence, But a time to act and to raise our voices through our creative endeavours.

A comma is an invitation, Space to process conventional existence, A comma offers perspective to survey past, present and future, It helps to distinguish reality from noise, truth from illusion.

A comma is a soft rupture...

COM,MA has become the bridge linking our artworks throughout this year’s journey, showing the equilibrium within fields, it is not a time for inaction, it is time for re-calibrating and shaping what is yet to come, the pause is vital to this process of change. Due to the nature of the limitations imposed by the current pandemic, we, as individuals and as a group, familiarised ourselves and adapted to the momentary multiple interruptions.

The heterogeneity of the works and the exhibition identity convey artistic perception of the here and now, imaginable futures to come and exposes our concerns. As artists, our role is to agitate concepts, promote change, stimulate ideas and thoughts, generate curiosity, and raise questions. Using the idiosyncratic methodologies developed through creative practice, this MA:AP group engages with political, social and ecological challenges. The consolidation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds with institutional and capitalist critique, has culminated in new knowledge production.

AN EXCEPTIONAL YEAR

UNDER EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

EVE OLNEY

I imagine it will take many years to objectively distance ourselves from the time of Covid-19 in terms of understanding the psychological impacts of the imposed changes within modes of capitalist production and, in turn, how that has affected our own individual embodied sensibilities. However, there does seem to be a shared consensus regarding a shifting perception towards our relationship with the temporal and spatial. Time feels different. Time is not so much collectively measured and experienced within taxonomies of seasons, months, weeks, but instead between imposed governmental levels of social isolation. Time has also almost usurped weather as our favoured brief conversational exchange. How are we spending our time? How are we coping during this time?

The MA:AP exhibition, COM,MA, is symptomatic of this current anomaly in time. It serves as a collectively conceived break, or ‘time out’, from a normative sense of linear time carried along the spectrum of social reproduction. As a collective body of work COM,MA presents us with an elucidation of experience of present social conditions; a deliberate pause that opens up a new aesthetic field of deep reflection on the here and now. For me, the work collectively addresses two questions that are in perpetual renegotiation within art/cultural theory and practice. Firstly, the artwork’s contemporaneous relationship with the current social imaginary. Secondly, it concerns itself with how the artist situates their own subject position within ideological modes of social reproduction.

At the intersection between these two is of course arts ability, in the first place, to probe and evoke a ‘deep introspection’ of the social. Art practice is, in this respect, uniquely positioned in its ability of composing aesthetics that can communicate way beyond the confines of language and, therefore, can conceive an imaginary beyond ideologically-held understandings of power. Art practice can offer unique vantage points, outside of what we already know about ourselves and society. Catarina Araújo’s film and sculptural work carries the thematic of the body’s relationship with trauma, where the artist casts the body’s performative registers of trauma across other mediums as a means of externalising that which is immanently hidden within the everyday. Padraic Barrett ’s photographic work also employs the body as a performative medium; this time as a ‘messenger’ communicating the embodied fallout of a competitive market-driven advancement of technology and the shaping of the body by capitalist social conditions. Seán Daly’s installation refers specifically to perceptions of alterity due to social restrictions and lack of movement caused by the pandemic. Ubiquitous materials, such as soil, sand and stone, are critically reshaped to evoke a shifting ‘sense of place’ within a personalised reconceptualisation of ‘home’.

Other artworks featured in COM,MA , could be understood as direct responses to current social conditions within a global crisis of governance. Work from Aoife Claffey, Kate McElroy, Inguna Mainule and Joseph Fogarty lean upon a local understanding between the observer and the objects, where this dialogical interplay evokes a subjective sensorial experience that extends into broader complicities regarding our own role and agency within the social. At times it is deceptively playful, as with Claffey’s ‘immersive environments for sensory stimulation’, that expose fractures of ‘chaos’ and ‘fragility’. This work infers a casual dispensing of products and people within a blindly assumed regulation of global capitalism. McElroy conjures a commitment to a type of non-space that can be read as those peripheral overlooked spaces where the ‘discarded’ detritus of capitalism quietly accumulates. This is indicated amongst installations of photographs, broken panes of glass and discarded materials as the work wavers between notions of significance and insignificance. Fogarty focuses on the phenomenon of a ‘self-perpetuating consumerism’ within ‘neo-liberalist economies’ where waste — here registered within the material properties of the work being Styrofoam, plaster and steel — is the residue of unfulfilled expectations and empty value systems. Mainule’s social critique of ‘soft power’ through her obscure, yet recognisable, soft sculptural works plays upon the reasoned logics we apply to our perceived ‘structure of reality’. Her sculptures assume logical formations that on closer inspection betray a system carefully constructed in order to deceive and to conceal ulterior agencies at play.

This exhibition also provides a strong indication of where artists might position themselves as social actors and creators within the current imaginary. The works presented in this show all tend to assume positions of a shared culpability in terms of how they relate to broader material environments. Ida Mitrani’s work, exemplifies ‘an ethics of accountability’1 within a broad, holistic social ecological interrelationship between people and plants. Her work draws attention to our conditioned perception or ‘blindness’ towards what is of value to humans and what can be overlooked. Deirdre Breen’s work also raises questions of value in terms of objects’ commodity status. This work is strongly indicative of where art intervenes in the object’s life, through a reversal of market-driven values, as it is reconfigured within a new narrative of aesthetic significance within the artwork.

Each artist presents work with starkly contrasting material choices and exhibit unique methodological approaches to their subjects. Yet, another common thread between each work might be identified as the reframing of ‘waste’, or overlooked materials, recast as productive forces within the different artforms. What curator Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as, ‘the point where the exform emerges’. Within each of these works the discarded materials are aesthetically transformed into active agents that the observer must engage with. These serve as sites of complicity within ‘the process of exclusion and inclusion’ and ‘constitute an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political’2.

COM,MA presents a visually striking collection of perspectives, styles, approaches that situates art practice as a central component of ‘knowledge making’. Within this multifarious exhibition, complex schemes of social relations find multiple aesthetic realisations in a way that communicates the complexity of our inter-relationship with those social structures that govern us. The aesthetics produced and performed within these contexts are understood as ‘a sensation experienced’ by the observer through a strong implication of an alterity; an alternative waiting on the periphery, an entire reconfiguration of the social in the making.

1. Stalpaert, C. ‘On Ecology, Protest, and Artistic Activism in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000)’, in Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts (Ed.s) Mateusz Borowski, Mateusz Chaberski, Malgorzata Sugiera, [transcript] Theatre Studies, Vol 127, 2019, p. p232

2. Bourriaud, N., The Exform, London: New York, Verso, 2016, p.x.

CATARINA ARAÚJO

PADRAIC BARRETT

DEIRDRE BREEN

AOIFE CLAFFEY

SEÁN DALY

JOSEPH FOGARTY

INGUNA MAINULE

KATE McELROY

IDA MITRANI

CATARINA ARAÚJO

My art practice explores personal trauma, repressed memories, and behavioural patterns. The work develops an introspective connection between the body and past experiences that are accumulated beyond the mind and incorporated into bodily sensations, reactions and the perception of things.

Through engagement with film, printmaking and sculpture, I present fragments of a performative body in a frantic and intimate way, to extrapolate what is hidden within and what has been lost to oblivion. The obsessive repetition of the triangular form is drawn by an intrinsic desire to uncover new structures and to achieve equilibrium within them.

The work aims to stimulate dialogue and present art practice as an appropriate way to address psychological trauma through non-verbal selfexpression and sensory knowledge.

Catarina Araújo

Araújo Quântica - Two1 2020 paper sculpture and glue

Catarina

Catarina Araújo left to right:

Quântica - Two2 ; Quântica - Three2

2020

paper sculpture and glue; film

Catarina Araújo left to right: Quântica - One1; Quântica - Three2

2020 photo intaglio; film

Catarina Araújo left to right:

Quântica – Four ; Quântica - One2 ; Quântica - Three1 2020 film; photo intaglio; film

Catarina Araújo Quântica - One+Two+Three+Four=Ten 2020 paper sculpture, glue and nails

PADRAIC BARRETT

My work is a response to the imperceptible forces of surveillance capitalism and its role in the gradual deterioration of the human condition. By placing the naked male figure in a suspended and simulated space in time I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia.

I have merged performance, film and installation to focus on the impact of a bewildering and constantly changing political theatre. The inscriptive capitalist ideals that are scripted onto the body, as well as the various ways in which strategies of power are stage-crafted, signify a ceaseless search for the threshold between reflection and transformation.

Explorations of technological dispositifs and cognitive processes are probed to convey oppositional forces through a transcendent narrative that initiates a dialogue between sacrifice and rebirth, virtual and natural, the weighted and the invisible. Identification with shamanistic ritual gives me the scope to take on the role of the performer as avatar and facilitates an investigation into the possibility of rebalancing the place of human beings within the natural world.

Padraic Barrett

The Engineering of Consent 2020

film projection on circuit boards (dimensions variable)

Padraic Barrett

Padraic Barrett

The Engineering of Consent 2020 film projection on circuit boards (dimensions variable)

The Engineering of Consent 2020

film projection on circuit boards (dimensions variable)

Padraic Barrett

Padraic Barrett

The Engineering of Consent 2020 film projection on circuit boards (dimensions variable)

Padraic Barrett

The Engineering of Consent 2020

film projection on circuit boards (dimensions variable)

DEIRDRE BREEN

My practice raises questions about our place as embodied humans in the world and the ways we produce, reproduce and consume our material environment. I am exploring the presupposed meanings that we ascribe to matter, and the underlying perceptual structures that support these meanings.

The work interrogates the idea of an assumed hierarchy of materials, looking at what is disposable and what is venerable, questioning the value of the mundane. In dialogue with disposable culture and commodity fetishism, the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary. Colours reference trends and conventions of contemporary visual culture.

The work suggests a vitality inherent in objects we consider inanimate; industrial and domestic materials are manipulated and redeployed to subvert our associations to their familiar qualities, confronting our understanding of our material reality. A gestural language emanates from the artworks; forms demonstrate object attributes and emulate personality but lack obvious functionality, existing for their illusionary qualities rather than a perceived use. A lively aesthetic speculates on the agentive power of ‘things’ so that a material imagination might unfold.

Deirdre Breen

Bulge 2020

jesmonite

Deirdre Breen

Clung (detail)

2020

Deirdre Breen

8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

Deirdre Breen

Sprout 2020

jesmonite; 8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

Deirdre Breen

left to right: Sprout ; Bulge 2020

jesmonite; 8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite installation view

Deirdre Breen

Clung 2020

8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

AOIFE CLAFFEY

In today’s world, rapid developments in transportation, communication and media are seen as progressive. However, they also exacerbate the fracturing and destabilisation of society. Societal structures appear to dissolve through the acceleration of technologies. My work examines this through Irish transportation sites and systems. Using associated materials and media, I explore increasingly tenuous relationships between humans and objects. Objects are redeployed and their status reduced to arouse pure sensory stimulation or hallucination on identity.

Using translucent layers of imagery and sound, I create immersive environments that transform unexpectedly each time the work is encountered. By manipulating these properties, I aim to provide an ambiguous space for the viewer to recall the peripheral, a space that’s in the midst of a constant, perpetual transformation; a non-space.

During the process of making, I often allow activity to go beyond my control. Physiological and psychological tensions between chaos and order are encouraged both during the making, and within the work, to evoke uncanny effects or altered cognitive states. Using projection, found objects, motors and surround sound as agents for political and social change, my practice aims to critique these systems. Focusing on the reality of turbulently existing on the cusp of global selfinduced crisis, my work encompasses notions of unpredictability, fragility and movement.

Aoife Claffey