Sirius Arts Centre presents Fiona Kelly, Partisan Social Club, Karen Power, and Gregory Sholette

May 7–December 17, 2022

Ireland’s Sirius Arts Centre views art through the prism of society in Cobh, County Cork. It coordinates both collaborative, community-centered projects and narrowly focused, artist-driven projects. Through commissions and residencies, it supports the creation, dissemination, and public interaction with art and information while providing artists with chances for professional growth. It works with all artistic mediums—visual, performing, live, moving image, sound, vocal, written, and born-digital—and schedules a variety of on-site and online exhibitions, performances, events, activities, and publications.

Fiona Kelly: A Temporary Iteration
May 7–August 20, 2022

Ecological and social issues are covered by Fiona Kelly. Her studies of wildness, matter, and geology take into account human exploration of the landscape, which is viewed as both a connection to the natural world and an extractivist strategy for managing natural resources. Her sculptures and prints feature images of numerous locations or are made to resemble particular natural elements. She gathers and repurposes waste materials—byproducts of the built environment—to create her artwork.

Moving image, music, and sculpture are all combined in A Temporary Iteration. Nineteen 3D objects mimic the scalenohedron crystal, which is made of calcite. The main component of the esker, a low-lying ridge made up of stones, gravel, and sand that was deposited during the most recent glacial cycle, is this mineral. The objects’ varied planes serve as projection screens as they are stacked on top of one another and on the ground. Ambient noises captured within a waste processing factory and gathered along the Esker Riada, a significant Irish esker, mingle with footage of dynamic landmasses, organic materials, re-wilded quarry, and pseudo-mountains of raw and unprocessed trash. Between a utopian return to nature and the realities of extractive land use, Kelly’s projected topography depicts the esker’s existing state as well as its ruination from extractivist activities.

Partisan Social Club: Talk to the Land
September 17–December 17, 2022

Partisan Social Club is a developing provisional collective that brings together members through initiatives centered on the commoning movement’s theories, practices, and histories. Through participatory techniques, it creates language-based works; members share their ideas with one another and with outside audiences through exhibitions and other formats.

Talk to the Land is an exhibition that examines landlordism, culture-led reclaiming of cities, and utopian colonies in South-West Ireland as three elements of commoning. William Thompson’s (1778–1833) design for a community estate in Carhoogarriff, County Cork, is discussed by Partisan Social Club. Thompson was an influential thinker from County Cork who promoted economic equality as well as other progressive causes like women’s rights and the cooperative movement. In addition to a brand-new brochure outlining Thompson’s concept, the show includes a specially commissioned film that addresses land-use-related issues.

Karen Power: …on location…, from the “human nature” series
June 29, 2022

Acoustic instruments and sounds influenced by regional elements are Karen Power’s two main sources for her compositions, erasing the traditional boundaries between music and all other audio experiences. She creates aural soundtracks + parts while experimenting with different means of communication with performers, functioning as a listener to her surroundings, whether they are landscapes, animals, people, or architectural places …in place… is a video compilation of six songs from Power’s “human nature” series, each of which was played by a different musician at a location that Power and all of the musicians decided on together, including John Godfrey, Simone Keller, Loré Lixenberg, Jane Rigler, and Samuel Stoll. On June 29 at 5 o’clock (Irish standard time), a Zoom event featuring a prerecorded performance of each of Power’s pieces will give the work its online premiere.

SIRIUS Summer School
Led by Gregory Sholette, co-delivered by Miguel Amado, Carlos Garrido Castellano, and Georgia Perkins.
June 20–24, 2022

SIRIUS Summer School examines the relationship between art and politics. Gregory Sholette conducts the inaugural edition, which addresses the processes and urgencies that have facilitated activism by artists and activist forms of art. Sholette leads participants in exploring the political role of artists today, for instance in Black Lives Matter and Liberate Tate, and over the past several decades. The group unpacks such themes as protest aesthetics, historical and market invisibility, and exploitative creative labor via a body of scholarly work, which ranges from Sholette’s classical notions of artistic “dark matter” and “bare art” to new concepts such as the “unpresent,” as well as perspectives on decolonization and “deviant” curating. The sessions evolve through theoretical and methodological debates in the form of presentations, group readings and discussions, and self-inquiry.

All exhibitions and programs are produced and presented by Sirius Arts Centre and curated by Miguel Amado, director.

Sirius Arts Centre’s operating capacity and programming are made possible with public funds from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council.