Exhibitions and summer school

Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, approaches art through the lens of society. It organizes focused, artist-driven projects and collaborative, community-oriented projects. It facilitates the production and presentation of, and public engagement with, art and knowledge, and offers professional development opportunities to artists through commissions and residencies. It operates across all art forms—visual, performing, live, film, sound, vocal, written, and born-digital—programming a mix of exhibitions, performances, events, activities, and publications both on-site and online.

Fiona Kelly: A Temporary Iteration
May 7–August 20, 2022

Fiona Kelly addresses themes of ecology and society. Her research into wilderness, matter, and geology considers the human exploration of landscape—understood as both a relationship with the natural world and an extractivist approach to natural resources. Her prints and sculptures depict various sites and/or take the form of specific natural elements. She produces her works with discarded materials—by-products of the built environment—that she forages and transforms.

A Temporary Iteration combines sculpture, moving image, and sound. Nineteen 3D pieces replicate the shape of a scalenohedron, a crystal formed from calcite. This mineral is the principal constituent of the esker, a low-lying ridge composed of sand, gravel, and boulders deposited during the last glacial cycle. The objects lie on the floor and on top of one another, their various planes operating as projection screens. Footage of dynamic landmasses, organic matter, a re-wilded quarry, and pseudo-mountains of raw and unprocessed waste interacts with ambient sounds recorded inside a waste processing facility and collected along the Esker Riada, a key Irish esker. Kelly’s imagined topography shows the esker’s ruination from extractivist activity and its current status—somewhere between a utopian return to nature and the realities of extractive land use.

Partisan Social Club: Talk to the Land
September 17–December 17, 2022

Partisan Social Club is an evolving provisional collective that assembles members through projects related to histories, theories, and practices of commoning. It makes language-based works through participatory processes; members publish their ideas to other members and to external audiences through exhibitions and other formats.

Talk to the Land is an exhibition that explores three aspects of commoning: landlordism; how to practice a culture-led reclaiming of cities; and utopian settlements in South-West Ireland. Partisan Social Club engages with William Thompson’s (1778–1833) plan for a communal estate in Carhoogarriff, County Cork. Thompson was a County Cork–based thinker who championed economic equality (among other progressive topics, including women’s rights) and spearheaded the cooperative movement. The exhibition features a commissioned film focusing on questions of land use as well as a new leaflet charting Thompson’s project.

Karen Power: …on location…, from the “human nature” series
June 29, 2022

Karen Power utilizes two primary sources to create her compositions: acoustic instruments and sounds informed by geographical factors, blurring the typical distinctions between music and all other sonic experience. She makes field recordings, acting as a listener to her surroundings, whether they be landscapes, animals, people, or built environments, and produces aural scores + parts, experimenting with alternative methods of communication with performers. …on location… is a video compilation of six compositions from Power’s “human nature” series, each performed by a different musician—John Godfrey, Simone Keller, Loré Lixenberg, Jane Rigler, and Samuel Stoll—in a site that Power and each one of them collaboratively determined. The work is premiering online on June 29 at 5pm (Irish standard time) through a Zoom event featuring a prerecorded performance of each of Power’s compositions.

SIRIUS Summer School
Led by Gregory Sholette, co-delivered by Miguel Amado, Carlos Garrido Castellano, and Georgia Perkins.
June 20–24, 2022

SIRIUS Summer School examines the relationship between art and politics. Gregory Sholette conducts the inaugural edition, which addresses the processes and urgencies that have facilitated activism by artists and activist forms of art. Sholette leads participants in exploring the political role of artists today, for instance in Black Lives Matter and Liberate Tate, and over the past several decades. The group unpacks such themes as protest aesthetics, historical and market invisibility, and exploitative creative labor via a body of scholarly work, which ranges from Sholette’s classical notions of artistic “dark matter” and “bare art” to new concepts such as the “unpresent,” as well as perspectives on decolonization and “deviant” curating. The sessions evolve through theoretical and methodological debates in the form of presentations, group readings and discussions, and self-inquiry.

All exhibitions and programs are produced and presented by Sirius Arts Centre and curated by Miguel Amado, director.

Sirius Arts Centre’s operating capacity and programming are made possible with public funds from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council.