switch 2018

switch 2018

SWITCH SWITCH CONTEMPORARY CONTEMPORARYVIDEO VIDEOART ART

JO B QVCMJD DPOUFYU JO B QVCMJD DPOUFYU edited editedby byTriona TrionaRyan, Ryan,Harald HaraldTurek Turek

The Videos in the Windows Fiona Woods, switch 2008, Of every place, a centre The more familiar the place, the less likely we are to think about those choices that we make, operating on a kind of auto-pilot, experiencing ourselves as separate from all that is around us; the ‘subject’ self distinct from the ‘object’ environment through which we pass. While this binary distinction of ‘subject’ self and ‘object’ environment is useful for our survival, it also impoverishes us. We ‘forget’ our continuity with all of existence, ‘forget’ that we are composed of the very same materials that we see around us. We ‘forget’ that what happens around us is also what happens to us. What does it take to switch from forgetting to remembering? What kind of switch can disconnect the circuits of dull habit, trip us from one circuit to another? In its capacity to surprise and confound us, to confuse and perplex us, art can be one such switch.

It can flip our perceptions of where we are, so that where we are is no longer where we were.

Cliodhna Shaffrey, switch 2009, Playfullness This year’s title is playfullness –and presents an occasion to insert a moment of humour, trickery and play into the dreary November evenings when all of winter is stretched out ahead and when the general gloom that has taken its grip, as we slip further into recession’s fold, might seem at its cruelist.

That other worlds are indeed possible might resound as empty shop units are temporarily occupied again and where tiny glimses into other places (near and far) beam out in digitized coded patterns of light as absurd and witty and poignant scenarios staged and framed by artists.

Understanding that the “general public” really doesn’t exist and that there is no ideal generalized spectator1 , as Simon Sheike writes – people will encounter art with their own specific backgrounds, experiences and intentionalities - Ryan and Turek’s idea of ‘setting a town alight’ through a choreographed seqence of video works is conceived in a way that is open to different kinds of experiences, different kinds of engagement, new and other readings.

Diana Champa, switch 2010 Imagine you are walking down the road, your collar turned up against the chill, minding puddles.

Unconsciously you walk into the wind with nothing to guide you but the habit of this ordinary every-day experience. It is a dark autumn evening and the moon is just a sliver. You turn the corner, the same one perhaps you turn every evening whilst taking the dog for a walk or on your way home from work. You pass a shop window and tonight something stops you. You stand, loitering really, and watch the images moving in front of you. For eight days, eight artists from around the globe invite you into their minds and introduce you to their ideas of scale and its relation to measurement, language, proportion or time. Shop windows previously occupied and transparent are activated, serving to display contemporary visual art.

10 years of switch Anette Moloney, switch 2012 switch as an art project works to engage with us as a public audience, as curious citizens more so than as fellow artists. The Tipperary based project has operated and developed with integrity and clear intention over a number of years. This artist-led project, which has been nurtured and encouraged by North Tipperary County Council’s Arts Office, works creatively to make use of a growing reality – that of vacant retail units – in order to generate and maintain open conversations with the people of Nenagh around a range of ideas and issues that we face as a society. By selecting and presenting artist’s projects that are arresting and eye catching this art project offers a chance for passers-by to stop for a moment, to contemplate the world that we live in and the people that we engage with.

Equally the project is installed so creatively, stitched into the fabric of Nenagh, that the public, whether on foot or in passing cars, may choose to briefly glance at the works. The project is far from loud or brash.

It offers the public a glimpse of the world through someone else’s eyes, that of the artist, which is open and available but not dependent on a cultural institution to mediate the work.

As one possible other common thread the works also have resonance with uncertainty, that grasping reality of the times in which we live.

How do we as a society balance out any reminders of previous attachments to material wealth and to the legacy of Capitalism with its voracious addiction to progress?

For one very timely view of possible alternatives and on ways of redressing a sense of social balance we can look to our new First Citizen, Michael D. Higgins, who in his Inauguration Speech in November 2011 spoke with his customary integrity and humanity about his aspirations for social solidarity and inclusive citizenship. He said that we must seek to build together an active, inclusive citizenship; based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity in all its forms. switch offers us a tangible example of how creativity can quietly and respectfully engage with us as citizens, by pointing out to us that vacancy within our towns and cities can be temporarily transformed into moments of velvet richness.

Eleanor Hooker, switch 2013 Movement It is the form that wrenches from the gloom behind the door, the tick undone on the horologist’s bench, what’s hewn from stone on the artists’ oor and lifts the gloom beyond the door. It is the distinct parts of an allegro, the play on stone on the artists’ oor, where actor’s cast their will to harrow.

It is the distinct parts of an allegro that attaches harmony to the air, and like the actor’s skill to harrow, will phrase its themes and let it dare to fasten harmony to the air, add tick to tock on the horologist’s bench, phrase its themes and let it dare to name the form that movement wrenches.

The Videos in the Windows Triona Ryan, switch 2014 In the springtime the evenings tend to stretch. Perhaps we feel this more out of expectation than in calculable measures of time as something within us begins to stir. Here is a quickening. The Winter, wet, windy and wilful is slowly being brought to heed by a different tempo.

Rumour can become reality like when Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, stopped his car while driving through Nenagh and popped into what used to be Harry’s shop on Banba Square and bought some cola bottles!

It doesn’t really matter whether he did or not. What matters is that the story became fact for some people and formed an impression of a place... a happening... a little piece of awesomeness.

Vedder’s ukulele songs are dreamily reminiscent and beat out a gentle rhythm. A rhythmical journeying through time and space. Both a celebration and a call to happiness.

For this year’s switch event we invite the Finnish artist Santtu Koivu into our town and onto our streets.

We ask her to weave unfamiliar rhythms into the fabric of a small Irish town - one with it’s own beat, pulse, intimacies, truths and untruths. We welcome an artist who will bring to Nenagh a new perspective, a new altered and re-animating tempo for a week long session that will not happen again.

Amit Mediratta, switch 2016 I had the great fortune of witnessing switch 2015 while on a visit back to Ireland, and was moved by what it embodied and signified.

I also understand that this is the space that is traditionally reserved for the intellectual incontinence that is ‘artist babble’; instead, I shall attempt an honest introduction to the nature of switch as a whole on the one hand, and indeed the participant this year, Maria Vedder, on the other. switch is something of an aesthetic Trojan horse, assuming the guise of ‘the videos in the windows’ whilst the town of Nenagh conducts its daily business. Passers-by wander through the streets carrying shopping bags or heading to the pub, glancing up on occasion at the moving images that switch hosts in shop windows year after year. Perhaps fitting for switch 2016 is a mention of the work Berlin, which brings a gentleman in a suit and sporting a briefcase to the middle of a street, dancing. Curious passers-by stop and notice his antics, as the split-screen view is complemented by the chugging of the tram. Through importing behaviour that might ordinarily be reserved for alternative spaces to the public arena, the subject acts in such a manner that indicates a transcendence of the rigid barriers between suit and briefcase, and dancing as an expression of spontaneity.

It is a similar collapsing of distinctions that takes place in the exhibition itself, where Nenagh becomes a gallery space for its townspeople, where the images are permitted to dance amidst the commerce and recreation that surrounds, and indeed the passers-by are entitled to both dance and contemplate the dance of the images before continuing on their way, ‘briefcases’ in hand.

10 years of switch Peter McCaughey, switch 2017 You are In Nenagh. And It’s 2017. And its night-time. You are dandering down the street, maybe on your way back from seeing Bladerunner 2049 at the Ormond Cineplex, in Summerhill and Switch. : Change the position, direction, or focus You pause. Hijacked. Switch : An act of changing to or adopting one thing in place of another. Vacant premises have been swopped for mini-cinemas. Again. Your town is once again animated by... Switch : A device for making and breaking the connection in an electric circuit. And maybe this time you connect. Either to one of the eight new films, from this years se-lected artist, Holger Mohaupt or to a half forgotten memory of a previous favourite... The girl on the swing, the slow motion sack race or that older lady, remember?

Mouthing words we could not hear, words that could have enlivened, inspired, empow-ered us, but we were not listening hard enough, we were disconnected from Iris, as we are from each other, and from ourselves.

That work was perfect in its failure.

It connected us to the failure to connect to each other. To speak of the things that need to be heard.

10 YEARS OF SWITCH: 2008-2018 switch 2018, November 5th to 11th, Nenagh town, 5pm till midnight daily.

Over the last 10 years, 80 video-art works have been shown on the streets of the town.

This years event brings you a collection, some treasures. Through happened upon chats and conversations had with Nenagh folk while the event played.

Favourites emerged. The “girl on the swing”, incidently, the very first videowork we switched on in 2008. “Berlin” which played on Market cross in a space that awaited the Jewellers, B Fitzgibbon, “ A song for Dylan” that kept a shop keeper company while the evening darkened and the days business drew to a close. These three are returning this year accompanied by five more works familiar to the town. We have also included a ninth work, a new one because it’s good to see something new. We hope you enjoy the works. We will also be occupying a space this year, in which we will be hosting a pop-up cinema for families. As is the nature of the project we dont know where this is going to be at the time this publication is going to print, but keep an eye out on social media and the changing spaces in the town.

Call in, we will be in. www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org https://www.facebook.com/switch.artproject

Mari Lagerquist To Swing over a Field

To Swing Over a Field A girl is swinging over and into the landscape.

Two movements are accentuated by the film: Firstly, the swinging that constantly moves forward and backwards emphasising the horizon line as she moves in and out of frame. Secondly, the cyclic movement of the two sequences playing one after the other; summer turns into winter and winter fades back into summer in an everlasting loop. In the uncanny and nostalgic image, the girl doesn’t grow old and the seasons remain.

As with my other work, the starting point lies in the mundane, in the small encounters or observations that happen in daily life: it can be a meeting between people or objects, but contained by a specific situation. My interest lies in what happens within this encounter, and what emerges from it. Through the work a shift occurs, a slight shift where one’s perception changes slightly, which is followed by a re-confirmation or re-valuation of the experience.

My background is in photography and video, however, at present, I use any tool disposable. I also have a working practise that tries to balance between the individual and the collective, between my own artwork and working with other groups of artists.

Mari Lagerquist is based in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Chris Finnegan untitled [2006]

Concerning itself with sculpture, my practice explores the limits and edges of that medium.

The material qualities of mundane and everyday objects are exploited towards sculptural results. These results are often temporary and only exist through their documentation.

Video and photography then become sculpture or remain as the sculptural artefact.

The video piece untitled (2006) demonstrates the exploration of video as sculpture. The work documents what can be seen as a series of attempts in setting up a particular sculptural situation, the artist’s body and a chair in equilibrium. Over the course of an hour both failures and successes are shown candidly.

Chris Finnegan is based in London, UK.

Maria Vedder Berlin 21.6.1996

1996, film, 2:32 min, excerpt „ONE TO TWO BACK“

BERLIN 21.6.1996 is a mixture of a dance performance and the documentation of the reality surrounding the dancer.

All the filming took place on 21st June 1996 the longest day in the year and a short time after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A man with a briefcase is walking through Berlin. He is moving on the street in the afternoon where no cars are allowed due to building works. There is heavy noisy traffic all around. He is dancing forwards and backwards, in a circle or even on the spot resulting in the the electronic montage which shows the inability to encounter himself.

The linear continuity of time and space seems to have been removed.

Dance: Torsten Haase Music: Günther Heinz Camera: Klaus Dörries Editor: Nathalie Persillier Camera Assistant: Martin von Bülow

Maria Vedder is based in Berlin, Germany.

Mark Neville After Muybridge

2005, 16mm film, mute, 3mins 11 secs, looped

This work employs a four by three metre backdrop made from wood, string, and cloth, emulating the one used by Muybridge in his well-known photographic series.

Passers-by and shoppers who chanced past the frame, which was erected opposite an alley way at the back of the artist’s studio in Glasgow, were filmed using a high-speed (slow motion) film camera.

A dialogue is established with the original Muybridge series, with both works using state of the art (for their day) motion analysis equipment.

Mark Neville is based in London, UK.

Flatform With nature there are no special effects, only consequences

A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of barycentre. The nature of the lacks of balance is invisible and his ability into standing up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: this video has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition.

With nature there are no special effects, only consequences outlines a declared state of suspense or unstable equilibrium between the abstract and the unexpected, control and chance, inertia and sudden shock. To be more precise the exact point of instant contact between the state of foresight and the extra ordinary.

This work moves along an ideal border-line, the one of meaning, which articulates the difference between possibility and impossibility, between movement and pose (pause). The impossible impends on the possible, at least as much as the possible verifies the impossible.

For Flatform, constructing a territory implies stirring events and creating spaces, concepts and inertia. Causing interactions between objects rather than interventions.

Promoting relationships of position that are movements.

Determining actions rather than depictions.

Flatform is a group of artists founded in 2006 and based in Milan and Berlin. The group works on video and time based installations including mobile installations. Works by Flatform have been featured in several film festivals all over the world. On February 2011 Arte TV has dedicated part of the program Die Nacht/La Nuit to some works by Flatform.

Flatform are based in Berlin, Germany & Milan, Italy.

Ruairi McKenna Gloam

Gloam is a short fiction piece about the end of a working day in a lighting shop. The film takes place at twilight, at the point between day and night, and takes the form of a visual poem about the gloaming hours. The piece evokes a sense of endings and new beginnings, the magic of contradictory forces and the power of transformation.

RuairĂ­ McKenna is a Writer, Director and Producer in Film. He graduated from the National Film School in Dun Laoghaire in 2008 and since then his short fiction work has screened in many film festivals in Ireland and around the world. He is currently exploring the world of documentary film.

Ruairi McKenna is based in Tipperary and Dublin, Ireland.

Santtu Koivu Freestyle Swimming / Vapaauinti

Cloudy sky and a low horizon in the background. A boy’s hands are moving faster and faster. At full speed for as long as he can.

Siivet pelaajan taivas lintu yrittää lentää.

Flyers on lyhyt tarina lentävät Esitykset.

Original: Super 8 Picture Ratio: 4:3 Duration: 1 min, 17 sec Audio: silent Year: 2006

Santtu Koivu is based in Helsinki, Finland.

Martijn Kuijten A Song to Dylan

A song to Dylan displays a projection of an artist that sings a silent song to the streets. A song to the people he meets, who don’t listen anymore. “But lovers & liars are both much the same. We are all playing this ridiculous game”. These days life runs two steps ahead of us and we all just try to keep up.

He tries to find his place in this world with a constant thought, that he just wants to sing.

Martijn Kuijten is based in Gemert, Netherlands.

Caitriona Moloney The Myth of Progress

Caitriona’s art practice is sculptural and is informed by her studies in architecture.She employs a variety of methods and media including performance, casting, film, installation and drawing. Her work is closely connected with public space in both an urban and rural context.

This work emerged from the study of Finnish philosopher Georg Henicks Von Wright, The Myth of Progress (1993) which questions whether our apparent material and technological progress can really be considered progress.

This work also is influenced by the artist Klara Lidens work, of the same title.

This piece was filmed at Ogonnelloe Hand Ball Alley in Co.Clare. This handball alley is an example of a uniquely Irish architecture. Handball alleys such as this one have a rich history as public space, often hosting dances, sporting events and political meetings. Many of these structures which were once valued by rural communities have now been demolished or have fallen into disrepair. This makes them a relevant place to question the nature of progress and what it might mean for rural communities.

Caitriona Moloney is based in Co.Clare, Ireland.

Since 2008, the switch project is a continuing investigation into place, locating art in public space in a contextually focused way. International film and video artworks are back-projected for one week onto the windows of shops and other spaces throughout the town. switch locates itself outside of the big city and applies itself to the rhythm of smaller places.

The film events initiate conversations between artists and audiences, artworks and their sites.

Now in its 10th year, switch is an artist-led project funded & supported by the Tipperary Arts Office.

edited by Triona Ryan & Harald Turek, Š 2018 switch & the artists published by switch 2018, www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org the switch event is co-ordinated by Triona Ryan, Harald Turek & Carol Kennedy

switch pays a special thanks to local shop owners who have supported the project by loaning the premises for the duration. the switch event is funded by

hctiws 8102

5th - 11th November 2018 www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org