Singularity
visual culture

From their web site:
“The Exhibitionist is a new journal focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

The journal is a publication made by curators for curators and understands itself as a site for critical debate in regards to the practice of exhibition making. The Exhibitionist will be published twice a year and will follow a strict editorial structure that revolves around the analysis and examination of past, present, and future exhibitions and other curatorial ideas. Under the title Curators’ Favorites each issue will present three texts for which three curators will write a personal essay about their favorite exhibition, contemporary or historic. This will be followed by an in-depth look at a historically important exhibition in the section Back in the Day. Assessments will comprise the core of the journal. Here four curators will focus on reviewing one significant contemporary exhibition from different points of view. Typologies opens up the debate around specific exhibition formats. The section Attitudes will feature a text by a member of the editorial board reflecting on the current state of exhibition making while Rear View invites a curator to reflect upon an exhibition s/he has recently curated. Every fourth issue a conversation about past contributions, the content and the form of the journal between some of the past contributors will offer a forum for self-reflexivity.”

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Opening: November 25, 6.30pm. Exhibition continues until January 24 2010.

The Gallery of Photography is proud to present the premiere showing of a new body of work by Jackie Nickerson, one of the foremost photographic artists working today. In ‘Ten Miles Round’, Jackie Nickerson (Winner of the AIB Prize) explores the predominately rural community around her home in coastal Co Louth. In large-scale colour landscapes and portraits, she builds a psychological portrait of her community. The landscapes challenge conventional notions of the picturesque, offering instead a more engaged view of the land. Through Nickerson’s lens, muddy, rutted lanes and straggly hedgerows are imbued with the quiet poetry of the everyday. People and place are united by the distinctive, cloud-filtered, northern light. Infused with a subtle grace, the work is a profound meditation on what it is, and how it feels, to belong.

A full-colour 48-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features 17 exquisitely reproduced images and an essay by Aidan Dunne. It is available in the Gallery Bookshop, price €10. The photographs are all lightjet digital c-prints mounted on dibond and framed. Each piece is available for sale in a limited edition of 3.

Artist’s Talk: Jackie Nickerson will talk about her work, on Wednesday December 2nd at 1.15pm in the Gallery. Admission free, all welcome.

About the artist: In 2008, Jackie Nickerson was nominated by the Gallery of Photography for the AIB Prize, which she won. Much coveted, the AIB Prize is one of the major art awards in Europe and identifies artists of exceptional talent. She won the Curtin O’Donoghue prize in 2009 and has been shortlisted for the John Kobal award and nominated for several prestigious prizes such as the Becks Futures Award and the Prix Pictet. In 2002, Jonathan Cape published FARM, a book of portraits of farm workers taken all over southern Africa and in 2008 SteidlMACK published Faith which captures Catholic religious communities in Ireland. Her work is represented in many important public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Santa Barbara Museum. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

All events and access to the Gallery are free.

For further information, press scans or to interview the artist, contact The Gallery of Photography

Norman Mailer has stated that boxing is a metaphor for life. Investment of time and energy in a tradition like boxing can be explained through the desire to achieve stability in a rapidly changing world. It may also engender a yearning for a more vital existence and a longing for authenticity. In this photographic work, Mandy O’Neill uses the world of the amateur boxer to explore such ideas and to examine aspects of the human condition.

These images were taken over a two-year period at St Saviours Boxing club, Dorset St in Dublin.

Mandy O’Neill is a Visual Artist based in Dublin. She graduated with a BA in Photography from the DIT College of Photography in 2005. She has recently exhibited at ‘RUA RED’ Dublin 2009 and the RHA Dublin 2009.

Alliance Francaise
1, Kildare Street , Dublin 2

Opening Thursday 26 November at 6.30pm
Admission free
27 November 2009 – 6 February 2010

CityArts and the Heritage Council in association with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media and the School of Media, DIT present Archive | Image | History
December 3rd Moved to December 2nd 5.00 – 7.00pm - The Oval Room, The Rotunda, Parnell Sq. W. Dublin 1

Whilst archives and archival practices have been a consistent feature of the historian’s work, visual artists and cultural practitioners have also engaged the archive as site, form and source to appropriate, reconfigure and interrogate it. This forum brings together a number of practitioners and researchers to focus on notions of memory-building and archiving in the context of historical representation, exploring ideas of experience, memory and community, authenticity and authorship, notions of the public and public-ness, and the politics of the archival imagination.

Participants

Walid Raad

The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive. Raad uses photographic slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to various sources or characters such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history, or Souheil Bachar, an ex-hostage. The findings and claims of these figures are inspired by historical circumstances and objects such as the role of the car bomb in the Lebanese wars, and existing captivity narratives.

Anthony Haughey

Remembering to Forget the Past: The Destruction and Recovery of Archives. Haughey has been working on post-conflict situations over the last decade specifically in relation to Northern Ireland and the Balkans where the destruction and recovery of archives has been one of the features and legacies of conflict. A starting point for some of this work is the description by Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, of the firebombing of the National and University Library during the bombardment of Sarajevo when ‘fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand’.

Catherine Morris

The praxis of community remembrancing: projections from lost Irish archives The cultural practices of the Irish Cultural Revival breathed new life into the dying body of the nation. The Revivalists called the past into being through street parades, collecting of folklore, staging and publishing Irish legends and histories, initiating art and museum exhibitions, and by travelling with theatre productions and magic lantern shows. Using archival sources, Morris will investigate how this emergent nationalist culture depicted itself in public space drawing connections between the politics of commemoration and repressed histories.

Chair: Martin McCabe, DIT Fellow, Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media

Henry Jenkins is the director, Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. In this viral-info-snack he discusses the power of media in a 21 century trans-mediated world. A world where converging technologies and cultures give rise to a new media landscape.

A unique experiment uncovering crime in a typical British city

Why did they choose Oxford?
“We selected Oxford because it is as close as we could find to a typical British city. In terms of demographics, and particularly in terms of levels and types of crimes, it is typical of the national picture.”

More at the ‘The Truth About Crime’ BBC web site

From RTE,

“ON TV, ONLINE AND THE RTÉ STILLS LIBRARY, LOOK OF THE IRISH CELEBRATES THE PHOTOS WHICH HAVE SHOWN US WHO WE ARE SINCE 1839.”

‘The Look of the Irish’ is a series of 9 programs dedicated to Photography and representation. This is the list:

Fergus Bourke: In His Own Words

RTÉ One, 11.10pm on Sunday 9 August 2009

Made shortly before his death, this moving portrait of renowned photographer Fergus Bourke was first shown in May 2007. It introduces us to his life and work and the wide array of Irish life captured through his lens, including Dublin street scenes, pioneering photo-journalism, remarkable portrait photographs and classic images of Connemara and the Irish countryside.

Day By Day By Day

RTÉ One, 7.30pm on Monday 10 August 2009

Robert, William, and Alec Day photographed their native Cork for over 100 years, creating a unique and unsurpassed photographic record of the city and its surroundings. This new documentary tells the story of an unusual family and the images they produced, from visiting kings and streetscapes to naked ladies and departing liners.

The Day Before Yesterday

RTÉ One, 8.30pm on Monday 10 August 2009

First broadcast in April 1994, ‘The Day Before Yesterday’ looks back at Ireland in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, as shown through the lens of Jesuit and photographer Fr. Francis Browne. Scripted and narrated by Michael Ryan, over 2,000 photographs from Fr. Browne’s collection of 40,000 are seen onscreen, a fascinating account of the birth and growth of independent Ireland record, of the people and the times.

David Farrell – Elusive Moments

RTÉ One, 11.05pm on Monday 10 August 2009

David Farrell is the only Irish photographer to have won the European Publishers’ Award for Photography, for his hugely successful exhibition Innocent Landscapes, dealing with the searches for the so-called “disappeared” from the conflict in the north of Ireland. Shot in Dublin, Wicklow, Cork, Italy and Paris, Elusive Moments follows two years of his working life, taking photographs, editing and printing his pictures, preparing them for exhibitions, and dealing with the marketplace.

Riviera Cocktail

RTÉ One, 11.25pm on Tuesday 11 August 2009

The Côte D’Azur in the 1950’s was the most glamorous place on the planet, where high society, big business, art, music and literature gathered to play. And Irish photographer Edward Quinn (1920 – 1997) was there to record it, producing exclusive photos of Grace Kelly, Federico Fellini, Pablo Picasso, Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren, Edith Piaf, Max Ernst, Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Miles Davis and so many more.

Sweet Cork Of Thee – Edwardian Cork On Camera

RTÉ One, 7.30pm on Wednesday 12 August 2009

Some 15 years before Tomas MacCurtain and Terence McSwiney defined Cork’s republican credentials, English cinematographers Mitchell and Kenyon observed an altogether more ‘loyal’ Cork than that portrayed in the Rebel Cork story. In this RTÉ Archive Unit documentary, first shown on Christmas Day 2005, Pat Butler casts a wry eye on the Citizens of Cork, as they sport and play and go about their lives on the Banks of the Lee in 1902, spiced with Victorian and Edwardian ballads.

Dark Room

RTÉ One, 11.55pm on Wednesday 12 August 2009

First shown in February 2003, Dark Room looks at the life of the famous Irish photographer, Harry Thuillier, Jnr. Born in Dublin in 1984, his subject matter was noted for its particular darkness, including ancient skulls, limbs decorated with opium pods and flowering nudes. He survived an attack on a Dublin street which left him with only 80% vision in his right eye, and went on to make very distinctive and beautiful work, until his unexpected and mysterious death in Milan in December 1997.

The Man Who Shot Beckett

RTÉ One, 11.05pm on Thursday 13 August 2009

John Minihan is probably the most important Irish photographer alive today, his subjects ranging from Francis Bacon to John Hurt, Princess Diana to William Burroughs, his acclaimed pictures of Athy, and the famous series of photographs he took of Samuel Beckett in London and Paris. This profile of Minihan was first shown as part of RTÉ Beckett 100 in April 2006 and celebrates the friendship between Beckett and the photographer, a friendship that produced some of the most remarkable images of the great writer.

Townlands: Not Fade Away

RTÉ One, 8.30pm on Friday 14 August 2009

In the wet and windy summer of 1913 two young women arrived in Ireland from France. Marguerite Mespoulet and Madelaine Mignon were women on a mission – to document what they regarded as the dying remnants of a great Celtic culture. During May and June 1913 they made a total of 75 colour photographs, stunning images, many with the delicacy of paintings, which together with their travel notebook, form a unique and fascinating record of an Ireland that, even then, was quickly fading away. (First shown in August 2004.)

The official site for ‘The Look of the Irish’ is here:

http://www.rte.ie/lookoftheirish/index.html