Ewa Partum
Installations & Provocations
17 July–14 September 2014
Dennis McNulty
PROTOTYPES
17 July–19 September 2014
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Carnegie Building
Pery Square
Limerick
Co. Limerick
Ewa Partum: Installations & Provocations
Limerick City Gallery of Art presents the first showing of Ewa Partum’s work in Ireland, examining notions of gestural and symbolic public place. Ewa Partum’s art marks a milestone in 20th-century art, with Partum emerging as one of the most outstanding figures in European art, her significance recognised as political change enables a re-examination of artistic geography.
Born in 1945 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Central Poland, Partum showed conceptual works as early as 1965. Her oeuvre shows a broad range of media, including visual poetry, performance art, and the analysis of media such as film, photography or TV. Partum is a strong voice in Polish feminist art, in particular, for the female voice in the public space. She is a highly influential figure of the international mail art movement as the founder of the Adres Gallery in Łódź (1971–1977). Ewa Partum has lived and worked in Berlin since 1983.
Her recent exhibitions include Active Poetry, Tate Modern, The Turbine Hall, (2006); London, Primera generación. Arte e imagen en movimiento 1963–1986, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2006/07; Manifesta7, Rovereto, (2008); Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MoCA, Los Angeles, (2007) and MoMA PS1, New York, (2008); re.act.feminism – Performancekunst der 1960er und 70er Jahre heute, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2009); Gender Check – Rollenbilder in der Kunst Osteuropas, MuMoK – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, and Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, (2010); The Promises of the Past, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Intense Proximity, Paris Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, (2012); A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, Tate Modern, London, (2012); 18th Biennale of Sydney, (2012); Ewa Partum, Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin (2014); WOMAN. The Feminist-Avantgarde of the 1970s, from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 2014.
Her work is collected, among others, by Tate Modern/London; Kontakt, Erste Group/ ERSTE Foundation, Vienna; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Generali Foundation, Vienna; FRAC Lorraine/Metz, France; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw; Wyspa Progress Foundation, Gdańsk; Muzeum Współczesne, Wrocław; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
PROTOTYPES by Dennis McNulty
Limerick City Gallery of Art proudly presents PROTOTYPES, Dennis McNulty’s first solo exhibition at a public institution in Ireland. Housed in the Carnegie Building, the gallery is composed of a series of relatively recent extensions arranged around a century-old central core, former site of the Free Library and Museum. The starting point for the exhibition is the building itself as found object. McNulty inserts new and existing works into the historical and spatial narratives of the building, material and immaterial interventions which hint at structural instabilities in the relationships between language, space and technology.
In the recent extensions to the building—or at their thresholds, McNulty creates gateways or portals, resulting in a series of interstitial spaces which play host to a body of work assembled from technological artefacts, construction materials, abject electronics, song lyrics and algorithms. Potential settings or scenarios are proposed: a future archivist recalls her encounters with telepathic operating systems and memory compositing software; primitive machines grapple with language, their lopsided Turing Tests hinting at sentience; and dark folded objects envelop missing books on the digital technologies that first caused them to dematerialise and may now render them obsolete.
In the original extension to the Free Library and Museum, built as a municipal gallery to exhibit the city’s Permanent Collection, a selection from the collection is made through the application of a simple linguistic rule. The method echoes the predictions of Italian writer Italo Calvino, in his seminal lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (November 1967), on the future automation of image and text: “the machine used in these experiments is an instrument of chance, of the destructuralization of form, of protest against every habitual logical connection.” The resulting selection of over 100 works, untitled or with no title, hangs in the space like the outcome of a search query.
For further information on the artist: www.dennismcnulty.com
PROTOTYPES is curated by Mary Conlon and is generously supported through an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.
