Six Memos presents Species of Space 2

Friday 25 November 2011, 10.30am – 5.30pm
Limerick City Gallery of Art, The Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick
Saturday 26 November 2011, 12-3pm
Ormston House, 9-10 Patrick Street, Limerick

In partnership with LCGA and eva International, Six Memos is pleased to announce the curatorial seminar, Species of Space 2 on Friday 25 November, 10.30am-5.30pm and Fugitive Dialogues on Saturday 26 November, 12-3pm.  This two-day event marks the return of LCGA and eva International to the newly redeveloped Carnegie Building and the launch of Ormston House on Patrick Street under the Creative Limerick initiative.

Species of Space 2 will take place at the Carnegie Building with a panel of distinguished curators presenting case studies on their experiences of negotiating space: Katerina Gregos on The Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale – Challenging curatorial orthodoxy in the Biennial Context; Alfredo Cramerotti On Translating, Expanding, Compressing and Misusing Space; Vaari Claffey on Gracelands – Substance Abuse; Simon Rees on EAST by SOUTHWEST; And Annie Fletcher on Be(com)ing Dutch.

The following day, Fugitive Dialogues will take place at Ormston House with James Merrigan and Michaële Cutaya from 12-2pm. Fugitive Papers/Dialogues is an artistic research project to explore ideas about art, writing, criticality and public(s) in Ireland at this time. The project is determinedly experimental and involves opening a temporary critical space within which to organise opinion and reflection on art and art-writing, as a public activity. Discussion is followed by afternoon tea with the artists of the current exhibition, Monkey Wrench, at Ormston House: Sonia Shiel, Kevin Cosgrove and Keef Winter.

The seminar is organised and facilitated by Mary Conlon (Shinnors Scholar, LCGA, 2009-2011; Curator of the Six Memos project; Director of Ormston House; Member of the Board of Directors of eva International; PhD candidate at Limerick School of Art and Design).

Admission is free.  Booking is recommended mary@ormstonhouse.com or artgalleryeducation@limerickcity.ie.
Kindly supported by Culture Ireland.

About the speakers:

Vaari Claffey is an Independent curator based in Dublin.  She is the founding Director and Curator of Gracelands.  This project is a series of live outdoor visual arts events, which take place over the course of one day and night and encompasses commissioned sculpture, performance and film. Gracelands has run annually in Dromahair, Leitrim since 2008 and a Dublin iteration is planned for 2012.
In 2010, Claffey curated Temporarily Shelved with Rana Ozturk under the aegis of Sinopale, the International Sinop Beinnale. Future curatorial projects include an exhibition at Project Arts Centre Gallery, Dublin in April 2012. Vaari Claffey is also curator/producer of the exhibition/filmwork: This is going to take more than one night, for which she invited four artists: Isabel Nolan, Bea McMahon, Alice Rekab and Sarah Pierce to produce new work for an innovative context. Funded by the Arts Council’s New Work Award, the film was directed by Neasa Hardiman. She is now developing another film project, Some Structures, with architects Dominic Stevens and Tom de Paor, and artist Ronan McCrea.  This latest work, funded by an Arts Council Touring Award,  Some Structures will tour throughout Ireland and internationally in 2011-2012. Vaari Claffey teaches at NCAD and IADT, Dublin and is an associate researcher at GradCAM. She is currently organising a seminar on alternative exhibition practices and venues within Ireland with Francis Halsall (NCAD). This emerges from a recent seminar titled What Do You Stand For?  held in March 2011. The next presentation will take place in early 2012.

Title of case study: Gracelands – Substance Abuse
Gracelands is a visual arts exhibition/event that has taken place on a single day every year since 2008.  Situated outdoors, it incorporates film/video, performance and sculpture.  Mimicking a music or literary Festival, it presents a sequence of works which unfold both over time, and across the site. The event has had four iterations, The Mimetic (2008), Folly (2009), I’m Spartacus (2010) and Substance Abuse (2011).
Artists are invited and supported to realise new sculptural works for the specific conditions of Gracelands.  The works, occasionally very large, are often very temporary and many of them operate quite differently as day turns into night.  Some of these have had ‘functional’ relationships to the event and have included the construction of lighting for the pathway leading to the main site as well as ‘hospitable’ elements involving food and drink.  A number of artists have had long-term and repeated engagements, in various forms, with the Gracelands project.
Gracelands is produced in association with The Model, Sligo. It is supported by The Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealionn, Leitrim County Council and The Goethe Institut. Gracelands is located at the Mimetic House, Dromahair Co. Leitrim and takes place with the support of Grace Weir and Joe Walker, who live and work there.
http://www.gracelands.eu

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator and artist based in the UK.  His cultural practice explores the relationship between reality and representation across a variety of media and collaborations such as TV, radio, publishing, internet, media festivals, writing and  exhibition curating.  Cramerotti has recently taken up the post of Director at Mostyn, the largest publicly funded contemporary art gallery in Wales.  Prior to this he was co-curator of Manifesta 8, European Biennial of Contemporary Art (2009-2011) and Senior Curator, QUAD Derby (2008-2011).  Cramerotti is Editor of the Critical Photography book series by Intellect Books, and his own recent publications include the book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009) and Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (2010).

Title of case study: On Translating, Expanding, Compressing and Misusing Space
Species of Space 2 reminds me of the work I have done to integrate media space as venues for Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in the Region of Murcia, in 2010. And it reminds me that this sort of discussion is part of the integral, expanded idea about Aesthetic Journalism, a body of research I’m developing since 2003, and that recently has expanded to include Critical Photography, Hyperimage, Fictocriticism, Expanded Symposia etc.; all approaches (whatever you want to call them) that are manifesting themselves in the cultural field.
I will present a couple of cases in relation to these approaches, and then open up for discussion about risks and benefits involved in opening up such spaces as agents of translation rather than representation.

Annie Fletcher is Curator of Exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations and projects with Jo Baer, Jutta Koether, Cerith Wynn Evans, Deimantas Narkevicius, Minerva Cuevas and the long term project, ‘Be(com)ing Dutch’ with Charles Esche during 2006 – 2009. She is a tutor at De Appel in Amsterdam. From 2005 – 2010 she was the co-founder and a Director with Frederique Bergholtz of the rolling platform ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ (www.ificantdance.org) which initiated investigative programmes of performances, art projects and an extensive discursive programme realized in collaboration with various partner institutions in the Netherlands and internationally. As a writer she has most recently contributed to various magazines including ‘Afterall’ and ‘Metropolis M’’. She is on the editorial board of ‘A Prior’ magazine.

Title of case study: Be(com)ing Dutch
Be(com)ing Dutch was a large scale project that was developed by Charles Esche (Director of the Van Abbemuseum) and Annie Fletcher (Curator of the Van Abbemuseum) and took place over a period of a couple of years. Be(com)ing Dutch has attempted to look at the meaning of and context for a global visual culture in Eindhoven in the twenty-first century. It did this through the eyes of artists and production of artwork, but also through an extended preparation of potential viewers through discussions, workshops and a large-scale meeting called ‘Eindhoven Caucus’.  The main goal of Be(com)ing Dutch was to put the question of national identity up for question, since the twenty first century appears to have been and still is a battle between globalism and localism. Questions like ‘Can we become a nationality or is it imposed by birth?’, ‘How do visual signifiers acknowledge our belonging’ and ‘As a global medium, what picture do artists offer of the nation states and what critiques or alternatives do they suggest?’ were discussed by artists, experts and museum visitors during debates, symposiums and art projects.  The overall concept behind Be(com)ing Dutch was to move the agenda of multiculturalism on from notions of toleration and difference towards building a shared but agonistic democracy on the cultural level through the use of one of the few remaining public sphere institutions left to us: the museum.

Katerina Gregos (born in Athens, Greece, living and working in Brussels, Belgium) is an art historian, curator and writer. She is currently curator of the Danish Pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennial (2011) and on the curatorial team of Manifesta 9 (2012). This year she also curated the 4. Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen (Germany) together with Solvej Ovesen. She has also curated several international large-scale biennials and exhibitions including Contour 2009 – The 4th Biennial for Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2009) and  E V+A, Limerick (2006). From 1997 to 2002 she was director and curator of the Deste Foundation, Athens, and during 2006 and 2007 she was the artistic director of Argos – Centre for Art & Media in Brussels. In 2012 she will be curating “Newtopia: The State of Human Rights”, timed to coincide with the opening of the Kazerne Dossin Museum and Documentation Centre of the Holocaust and of Human Rights, Mechelen, Belgium

Title of case study: The Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale: Challenging curatorial orthodoxy in the Biennial Context
Freedom of speech is one of the key issues in the current public debate and one that is becoming increasingly contested, given the steady erosion of civil liberties in many countries today. Denmark has always been at the forefront of the public debate on issues in relation to freedom of speech, but it has also suffered the so-called “trauma of free speech”.  This makes the Danish Pavilion an appropriate vehicle from which to visualise and discuss these issues. Freedom of speech is highly relevant in relation to much of what is happening in the world politically today; from press intimidation and censorship, to restrictions on the internet, as well as debates on the limits of freedom of speech, increased surveillance and forms of control. The issue of freedom of speech is highly complex, often subjective – even relative – and invariably debatable. The boundaries surrounding it cannot easily be delineated.  The exhibition Speech Matters aims to provoke a considered debate and to complicate the issue of freedom of speech, highlighting the intricacies, ambiguities and grey areas inherent to the subject, and emphasizing the fact that freedom of speech cannot be exercised or applied in any programmatic or strictly proscribed manner. Finally, the exhibition also touches on the essence of visual artistic practice, which fundamentally entails conditions of freedom of expression. Eighteen artists from ten countries were been invited to participate. The majority produced new work for the exhibition.

Simon Rees is currently preparing ENVISIONING BUILDINGS: reflecting architecture in contemporary art photography for the Museum Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna, which opens on December 6. In spring-2011 he lead the third instalment of the project “curatedby_” deployed at 21 galleries throughout Vienna. Titled EAST by SOUTHWEST and that explored new notions of what constitutes ‘Eastern European’ cultural space. And at the start of the year he was the lead curator of the 15th Tallinn Triennial: FOR LOVE NOT MONEY that opened the visual arts programme of “Tallinn – Culture Capital of Europe 2011”.
From 2005–2010 Rees was chief curator and editor at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius in Lithuania. In his role he was convener of the CAC CAFE TALKS the celebrated monthly international lecture series, which brought major figures from culture to Vilnius and the co-editor of the quarterly bi-lingual (Lithuanian/English) magazine CAC INTERVIU. In that period he curated the opening exhibition of the national programme of “Vilnius – Culture Capital of Europe 2009” titled CODE SHARE: 5 continents, 10 biennales, 20 artists; produced the seven city touring exhibition of French and Lithuanian art You are my mirror (2008); and commissioned the jury-prize winning Lithuanian Pavilion with artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas at the Venice Biennale (2007).
Rees lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Title of case study: EAST by SOUTHWEST
The title of curated by_vienna 2011 describes a geographical conundrum — to be solved using the compass of contemporary art. This geographical aspect reflects Vienna’s status, at different moments in European history, as an advocate for culture and contemporary art from an expanded Eastern European space. The project hones on regional geography at a time, and in a world, largely governed by global mechanisms and ways of thinking.
The project’s intention was to investigate a wider understanding of Europe and its transformations since the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain have returned to the heart of continental cultural and political life and since Turkey has been engaged in multilateral discourse.
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Limerick City Gallery of Art is part of Limerick City Council, funded by the Arts Council and supported by Fás, Fáilte Ireland, Shannon Development and the Heritage Council.

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