Autumn 2019

Sandra Johnston: Wait it Out
August 30–October 19, 2019 

Opening: August 29, 6:30-8pm preceded by a conversation between Sandra Johnston, artists Susan MacWilliam and Richard Ashrowan.

Live performance by Sandra Johnston on August 30 at 5pm.

With newly commissioned video installations, this solo exhibition negotiates personal and historical narratives in relation to the reverberation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The work reflects on the indeterminate early days of the peace process and the climate of unease which motivated Johnston to relocate to Dublin in 1997. The central installation, That Apart, is an edit of a five-day consecutive filming process (in the gallery at Project and at IMMA) with Scottish moving-image artist Richard Ashrowan. The recorded series of singular actions and gestures were extracted from various performance improvisations that have occurred in live contexts across her 27 years of practice. Hosted in Project’s black box, Overprint is a constellation of videos that includes edited documentation of one of Johnston’s street performances from Belfast during the 2000s. Alongside this, two alternating projections of UTV news clips chart the rise and decline of The Peace People, a movement that began in 1976 as a protest against the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland.

Wait it Out was commissioned and produced by Project Arts Centre, Dublin with support from the Irish Museum of Modern Art Production Residency and the Arts Department, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Sandra Johnston is a visual artist from Northern Ireland who has been active internationally since 1992, working predominantly in the areas of site-responsive performance and installation. Her actions have often involved exploring the aftermath of trauma through developing acts of commemoration as forms of testimony and empathetic encounter.

Anna Daučíková
November 22, 2019–January 18, 2020

Opening and artist talk: November 21, 5:30-8pm

Since the 1970s Anna Daučíková has worked in a broad spectrum of media from glass, painting and drawing, to photography, conceptual photo-collage, performance, and video. Her first solo exhibition in Ireland will feature a selection of recent and older moving image and photographic works including her video work Thirty-three Situations (2015–2017) which she describes as “something between a police dossier, a medical history, and a sort of stigmatic script of the individual situations” and which draws extensively from her private life experience in Soviet Russia. Informed by historical and political aspects of feminism, Anna Daučíková’s practice addresses issues around the conflicting aspects of normativity, the technologies of power, queer subjectivity and the politics of privacy. The majority of the selected works testify to a nuanced observation of everyday phenomena and dissident life and an analytical reflection on a long-time clandestine queer existence shaped by various historical/political/social contexts and experiences.

Following her graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in 1978, Anna Daučíková emigrated to Moscow (then the USSR) where she lived and worked for over a decade. In this period, she developed an extensive painting practice, as well as an interest in photography which was triggered by her encounters with feminist thinking. Returning to Bratislava (Slovakia) in 1991, Daučíková co-founded the influential feminist journal Aspekt and her practice shifted towards video art and performance events, then widely organised across the Slovak art scene. The engagement of the artist’s body and bodily actions became the main concern in this video work, and in presenting a queer aesthetic. Alongside her artistic work, Daučíková has been a co-founder and activist for several women NGOs, and a spokesperson for LGBT rights in Slovakia.

Both exhibitions are curated by Lívia Páldi.

In between exhibitions, we return again to the Project archives, continuing our exploration in the framework of Active Archive – Slow Institution with special guests.

Project Arts Centre is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.