Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (Mia) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam, and recently served as Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Until 2014 she led an art research PhD programme in Belfast. She has published books including: Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique (ed., Valiz 2017), Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl 2011), Joyce in Art (Lilliput 2004), and James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms 2001). She has curated exhibitions at: RHA, Goethe Institut, Dublin; Tolstoy Estate, Russia; MoA, Seoul; GTG, Belfast; LCGA, Limerick; CCI, Paris; M HKA, Antwerp; UvA Amsterdam (Strijd Infinity); and she is Editor-in-Chief of a book series, Research / Art / Writing (Brill, Leiden).
Colin Darke was born in 1957 and grew up in Surrey in the south of England. He moved to London in 1977 to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and relocated to the north of Ireland in 1988, living in Derry for twenty years and in Belfast since 2008. He completed his PhD at the University of Ulster in 2010.
His work has been mostly text-based since around 1990, originally derived from “comms” – republican prisoners’ letters, written in small writing onto cigarette papers for smuggling out of gaol. His wall pieces, consisting of text and images, were made in response to Marx’s writings on base and superstructure.
The largest text piece is Capital (2000-2003), consisting of the three volumes of Marx’s magnum opus written by hand onto 480 two-dimensional readymade objects. As a result of considering the nature of the readymade from a Marxist economic perspective, he made a follow-up piece, The Capital Paintings (2004-2007), which equalised the commodities used in Capital through making an oil painting of each of the 480 objects used.
Later work responded to historical moments, particularly to the Paris Commune of 1871. Many of these works reference Gustave Courbet’s still-life paintings of fruit made during his imprisonment for his part in the Commune, his rotting apples acting as metaphors for the Communards killed in the massacre of Bloody Week.
In recent years he has been making work which refers to the labour theory of value, consisting of timed drawings and paintings and short animations which contain the artist’s specified contributions to the total labour-time consumed in their production.
