In Conversation | Ali Kirby & Daniel Bermingham

24/03/2018, 2–3pm
126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway

Basic Space in association with 126 Artist-Run Gallery is proud to present a conversation between artist Ali Kirby and curator Daniel Bermingham in light of the exhibition, Recalling Familiar Entities currently showing at 126 Artist-Run Gallery.

The conversation will involve a tour of Recalling Familiar Entities and discuss the work of both Ali Kirby and Conor O’Sullivan.

Recalling Familiar Entities will be made up of sculptural materials, forms and imagery, responding to the architectural, the prosaic, and the everyday.

The exhibition will bring together a group of work that will address the performativity of object, formally reducing them to the point where their pragmatic nature is dismissed. The materiality of these works will exist in flux. Materials and forms that were once useful will be reworked into objects that examine how the identity of an object can become blurred and physical language altered.

Exemplifying minimalism’s concern with site, Recalling Familiar Entities looks to the uncanny eeriness of global architecture and the ubiquity of neoliberal fantasy cities. The pedestrian spectacle of LED displays and consumer packaging as unactivated monuments demonstrating the difficult relationship between calculation, function, and identity.

Admission is free and all are welcome; there is no need to book a place.

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Ali Kirby - Ali Kirby creates sculptural assemblages and installations that physically respond to the built environment. Her approach to materials and colour is intuitive, often employing a muted palette, soft textures and hard edges to create the various surfaces and forms normally associated with architecture. These soft-edged fabrics and forms butt up against concrete or wood in an attempt to draw our attention to the relationships between materials, how they connect, support, become damaged or distressed and ultimately reveal their potential for transformation.

Conor O’Sullivan - Working across sculpture, video and installation, Conor O’Sullivan’s work investigates the intersections between art, technology and design. Incorporating found objects that recall familiar entities from the built environment and adjusting their contents and use. O’Sullivan creates hybrid forms that are in the process of becoming, growing, transporting or communicating - generating a sense of anticipation of things happening in the space. These hybrid objects collapse distinctions between usability, aesthetic and form. O’Sullivan’s work appropriates these seemingly mundane objects into assemblages that seem to exist in their own autonomous world, unlinked to any fixed location or time.

Daniel Bermingham - Daniel is a co-director of Basic Space and curator, interested in systems of publicness, community space and pedagogy, particularly in regards intersectional queer and crip audiences, based between Galway/Dublin.