Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day
“News Animations”/”No Words For You, Springfield”
28 March – 3 May 2008
Rosa Barba & David Maljkovic
Handed Over
Until March 15
Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day
“News Animations”/”No Words For You, Springfield”
28 March – 3 May 2008
Performance Forti/Day on 25 March at 6pm.
Opening 27 March at 6pm, preceded by public dialogue with the artists at 5pm.
Jeremiah Day is interested in resistance movements, as well as the flux of knowledge, stories and identity through the migration of people and histories. Day has been researching the movement of the people of the Blasket Islands off the Dingle Peninsula (Ireland), to the town of Springfield near Boston (USA) culminating in a complete evacuation of the Islands in the 1950s.
What we know of the poetic tradition of the Blasket Islands comes to us largely through the efforts of the English linguist George Thompson. In the story-telling of the Blaskets, Thompson felt he’d found a link with the pre-Socratic tradition of Greek epic poetry, where spiritual, personal, political and practical subjects were integrated, and thus the boundary between art and life could be said not to exist at all.
Springfield has been largely in decline for fifty years now, a classic post-industrial American city. Can we imagine that any of the story-telling traditions of the Blaskets have lived on, there? And though the Blaskets are long deserted, what of the now developed Ireland around them? What does progress mean, from the lens of the Blasket tradition?
“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” – Martin Heidegger
Jeremiah Day
Day will show a new series of photo-works, meditating on the city of Springfield as the end point of the Blasket story-telling tradition. He has also invited legendary dancer Simone Forti to present for the first time in the visual arts context her practice of “News Animations” – a body of work Forti has developed since the early 1980s, improvising movement and speech from the content of the daily news. A member of the pioneering Judson Church Group, Forti’s work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York and recently at the Serpentine Gallery in London; this exhibition will be the first presentation of her “News Animations” video.
Whilst in Dublin, Forti and Day will work together to create a new collaborative work. If Jeremiah Day’s practice oscillates between the creation of text and image, Simone Forti bisects his axis with her interest in text and movement. The resulting collaboration will be premiered in Project’s Gallery at 6pm on 25 March, and will be documented and presented as part of the exhibition.
Rosa Barba & David Maljkovic
Handed Over
Until March 15
Fiction exists in the space between two different places of perception.
Rosa Barba and David Maljkovic have staged the creation of a fiction. Between Stockholm and Zagreb they have sent a series of images and texts which occur independently of each other, both by email and by posting a Super 8 camera back and forth. This ‘script-writing’ is as much about the process towards building a narrative or fiction as it is about the formation of a plot. Without a beginning or end, the fiction is suspended between two authors. Some images are their own, some are derived from their autonomous research, some are created together and some are simply taken – or more precisely handed-over. Project’s Gallery premieres the result of this process on 16mm film, installed in a built environment conceived by Barba and Maljkovic. A sound bulb in the foyer also features a soundtrack by Jan St Werner, hanging above Rosa Barba’s collection of Printed Cinema.
Handed Over has been supported by the Goethe Institute and the Embassy of Croatia in Dublin.
Exhibitions curated by Tessa Giblin.
Please contact Publicist, Aisling McGrane for further information and images: aisling@project.ie.
Project Arts Centre is funded by the Arts Council – An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.
Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street
Dublin, Ireland
