THE FIRST ANTECHAMBER

As an antechamber, the exhibition operates in the space between the dual pillars of story-telling: narrative and image. The signifiers in a work of art here lose their predictability – there are smoke-screens, chance relationships and red-herrings. What can an assemblage of image and story-lines mean within works which have both highly scripted and tenuous inter-relations? The first antechamber proposes that a destabilisation of narrative form might relinquish the viewer from the responsibility of linear comprehension.

Gabriel Lester’s film All Wrong is built entirely from downloaded images and videos, based on a story written with Aaron Schuster. Whether the images illustrate the text or are tagged to the text, or whether the text drives the image or vice versa, becomes increasingly less important as the function and constructs of film and narrative unravel. Charlotte Moth’s Installation for Dolores is a revolving slide collection of photographs combined with a voice-over. Commenting on the images, the voice is at times knowledgeable, silent, or fleetingly engaged. The narrative itself becomes curiously detached from the collected images, leaving the viewer questioning what that relationship might be.

Alexandre Singh’s sprawling installation A Thousand and One Knights of the Roundtable of Knottingham, unpacks the architecture of art – inviting the viewer to combine a narrated text with the materials featured in the story. Props (insulation foam, plaster board and construction adhesive) provide the structure on which a colour-field video is projected, each colour a notional illustration of a specific idea in the wildly fantastical and internally-referential story.

Maria Fusco, who hosted a round-table discussion at Project Arts Centre on March 15, has also curated a series of kissing-couples: books of fiction and theory, entwined and available to be read in the Project foyer.

Official opening at 6PM on Thur 15 MARCH

A Symposium A Banquet is a meeting time for the exchange of lessons, knowledge and to share experiences over a banquet table. Bruce Mau’s ‘Incomplete Manifesto’ describes the ‘in-between’ times as those where the best ideas, or real growth, stem from. A Symposium A Banquet is an attempt to revert to the original meaning of the word ‘symposium’, as a social occasion for the exchange of ideas and shared food and drink by curating an evening of formal and informal knowledge exchanges.

Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.”

Our guests will explore the diversity of presentation and presentation modes, then move upstairs for a gallery banquet, where we hope the exchange of ideas will continue, helping to cross-pollinate the resources with which we work, and the tools we rely on to develop our thought. Lectures are being prepared for the evening by an irrational selection of people who will cumulatively provide lessons from a vast array of knowledge disciplines. Ranging from science to fashion and philosophy to sport, the lectures will also undulate in length depending on the speaker and their topic – anywhere between 5 minutes and 40 minutes. Have you ever desired to know how to tear a phonebook in half? What contribution has String Theory made to the world of mathematics? What is the legacy of Chris Burden’s seminal performance action? What is The Village? Who is making dessert?

Produced by Fiona Hallinan and Tessa Giblin, the evening will be orchestrated to a specific tempo, aiming to facilitate the intake of information while keeping attention riveted.

Dr Stefan Hutzler: Packing bubbles and grains
Packings of bubbles and grains are very common in nature (sand, foam, biological cells, etc.). In his presentation he will discuss in particular the role of order, disorder and particle shape. Dr Stefan Hutzler is a lecturer in the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, where he leads the group “Foams and Complex Systems“. His main research interests are the physics of foams and more recently also the application of statistical physics to problems in finance and sociology.

Thomas “Greg” Corcoran: Back-of-envelope Calculations and Other Guesstimations
A brief talk on how calculation meets description. Mathematicians, engineers and many others often pare otherwise tedious calculations to brief sketches. These mathematical doodles can be performed to support arbitrarily fantastic vistas of the world. Greg is a recent graduate of theoretical physics at Trinity College Dublin. He works as a painter at Lacatedral studios on St. Augustine St. He is working on computer interpretations of line drawing and other projects.

Jorge Satorre: National Balloon
Satorre explains some anecdotes relating to a journey that he made to Los Angeles with the intention to investigate the sequels, traces and interpretations of the famous Shoot performance, made 35 years ago by conceptual artist Chris Burden. During the last three years Jorge Satorre has been interested by the historical revision of referential situations and communicating them through personal experience. Satorre has been using mainly the diverse possibilities of oral communication and drawing, such as an historical document – a tool of recovery for the memory. Born in México in 1979. over the last five years Jorge Satorre has lived and worked in Barcelona. Satorre combines his practice as an artist with that as an editorial illustrator. His work had been presented in a solo show in La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2006 and in the West Cork Arts Centre, 2007. He has been as a residence artist in: IMMA, 2007; HANGAR, Barcelona, 2003-05; FLACC, Genk, Belgium, 2004 and has forthcoming residency at Le Pavillon – Palais de Tokyo, París, 2007-08.

Alex Synge: The Great Phone Book Rip-Off
Accompanied by the sounds of toy musical instruments, Alex Synge will teach us how to tear a phonebook in half using only our bare hands. Alex “Boy Terror” Synge was born under a cloudy autumn sky in early 1980s Dublin. Raised on a strict diet of Lego, crayons and falling off his bike, he quietly made his way through his school days before emerging in the early 21st century as six feet and three inches of pure human being. Whilst maintaining consciousness, Alex enjoys long walks on the beach, trying to figure out what’s going on, and Italian food.

Sergey Cherkis: String Theory
String Theory might prove to be the final step in the ongoing quest to find a unified description of the five forces of Nature. Cherkis briefly outlines the history of the subject describing a number of String Theories. At first, these String Theories were thought to be distinct; now, however, they all appear to be various facets of the one all encompassing M theory. Growing up in Moscow in time of change, Sergey Cherkis graduated from Upsala College, NJ and then Caltech, CA. He conducted research at UCLA and IAS, Princeton, and is now working and teaching Theoretical Physics at Trinity College Dublin.

Davie Philip: Building Sustainable Community
Davie Philip will introduce us to the concept and realisation of The Village – an eco-village situated within Cloughjordan. Davie Philip is currently the Education Manager at the Cultivate Centre for sustainable living and learning in Dublin. He was a founding member of Sustainable Projects Ireland LTD the company behind the sustainable community project in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary.

Jesse Jones: If I wasn’t an artist I would be…
Throughout the Symposium and timed in relation to the speakers, Jesse Jones will be cutting the hair of any interested members of the audience. During these sessions, she will ask the question of herself and her client – “What would you have been if you weren’t a ….?” Jesse Jones is a Dublin based artist. She is a BA graduate from NCAD (2002) and MA graduate in visual arts practice from the Institute of Art & Design T Dun Laoghaire in 2005. Jones’s practice focuses on the embedded political and social history within everyday life.

Toby Dennett: Dessert for Europe
Toby Dennett will perform a very special surprise lesson at the conclusion of the banquet – inspired by the spectacle of the Eurovision awards last night. To learn and to enjoy the fruits of labour. Toby Dennett is the Director of Visual Artists Ireland, and a non-professional chef.

Organisers:

Tessa Giblin is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre.

Fiona Hallinan, sometimes Fink, is currently studying towards a Masters in Multimedia TCD. Previously she studied art history and classical civilization. She draws, writes, designs and makes a show called It’s an Audio Detour, an mp3 led walking tour where people listen to directions on headphones that lead them around a city. Last year she made a show called Learning is fun at the Trinity arts festival where people taught things in bedrooms on campus and then came together after for a pot of gumbo.

A Symposium A Banquet has been influenced by a variety of sources. There was the meeting with Peter from Pinc (pinc.nl), Plato’s Symposium, there was Vaari who introduced us to Pecha-Kucha, the Mobile Academy’s ‘Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge‘ and Learning is Fun at Trinity Arts Festival last year. That’s what we were thinking – what is it to learn – to teach in order to learn – to hunger for stimulation beyond your expertise – to wonder – to muse – but where we end up is still to be seen.