Episode 3 | Taking Selfies, Taking Notes and Taking a Journey around the Dublin Art Scene
In this ongoing series, avid exhibition goer Sveta Antonova gives us her thoughts on what’s happening right now, documented with selfies. This week, Sveta visited exhibitions in Dublin and took a trip to the Spire.
SPACE(s) | Group Show | NCAD Yellow Box
This week I spent some hours in the little yellow container behind NCAD’s blue entry gates – always worth a visit – reading SPACE(s).
This exhibition asked all kind of students to either contribute with some furniture for a reading room or some zines.
This open-call resulted in an impressive variety of little booklets – that’s why I spent so much time in there. Reading and looking through those art-zines was as if looking into somebody’s head. Hand printed, cut-outs, photography, writing, illustrations, graphic design, zines, zines zines and a sound piece in an installation of experimental furniture.
My favourite zine was ‘Do you know what I mean?’ – a booklet about sayings and their meaning in different languages. Illustrated and explained. Apart from that, the issue was exploring the difficulties of irregularities in the English language: Why one goose and many geese? Why a foot and two feet? I don’t know if this is fun for native speakers, but I definitely could relate to all the sayings and bits of odd language.
Though the exhibition is over, there is a new show on at the Yellow Box every week. They are mostly experimental installations and explorations of what is possible, as I said in the beginning: always worth a look.
The exhibition ran from 16 – 18 March.
DUPA End of Year Exhibition | Group Show | Steambox Gallery
DUPA‘s annual exhibition was this week, and as every Polish person at the opening explained to me, yes, ‘dupa’ is what you call your butt. Aside from this joke, which I heard about ten times during the opening, DUPA is the photography society of Trinity College Dublin. Seventeen of their members put this show together
I don’t know much about the society and their members, but what I can tell from the show it seemed that they are more photographers as in the sense of nature and landscape as well as journalistic photography and not artists as photographers – with some exceptions.
Nearly all pictures were presented in either brown or black wooden frames, all approximately the same size – which I found a bit strange. Did 17 photographers independently decide to print out all their work the same size and get it framed at the same place? Disregarding the presentation, you could see that those photographers definitely have skills, presenting detailed landscapes, sharp portraits and colourful night-life scenes. It takes a lot of practice and time to be able to take such atmospheric and detailed photographs, I was definitely impressed by Katie O’Neill’s staged Greco-Roman elements.
Jonas Peisker presented a series of pictures with a genuine love of graphic elements in architectural spaces whereas Bill Woodland hypnotised the viewers with his American illuminated advertisings.
The exhibition ran from 18 – 20 March.
Vertikaler Erdkilometer | Walter De Maria | The Spire of Dublin
The ‘Vertikaler Erdkilometer’ (Vertical Earth Kilometre) is a public art work by American artist Walter de Maria which got realised in Kassel (Germany) for the 6th documenta in 1977. What you see is a small circle in the ground. This circle is a solid, one kilometre long brass bar going 1000 metres down from where you stand and look down at it.
An extremely expensive, invisible and metaphoric piece of work. Imaginary and unbelievably strong at the same time. For me, the ‘Earth Kilometre’ is a place I visit every time I am in Kassel to not forget how strong art can be, just because of its gesture and not its visibility.
The first week I moved to Dublin, I went to O’Connell Street and smiled. The Spire looks exactly how I imagine the ‘Vertical Earth Kilometre’ looks like – just the other way around. The child in me instantly thought that this is what happens when you put a huge rod inside the earth: It comes out on the other side! I know Germany is not exactly the other side of the planet, nevertheless this is a story I will tell my kids!
Of course, by now I know the history of O’Connell Street and the Spire as well as Nelson’s Pillar and appreciate how the Spire is the opposite of Germany’s art work: visible, direct, powerful and shiny. However, the connection between Kassel and Dublin will stay in my head forever.
Due to the artwork’s nature, I could not fit my fringe into this picture, sorry about that. But why am I telling you this?
