Recorded on 8 July 2020 during the launch of PhotoIreland Festival 2020

PhotoIreland Festival 2020 Launch
6pm Wednesday 8 July – Irish Time
Bookings closed

The 11th edition of PhotoIreland Festival launches via Zoom at 6pm on Wednesday 8 July, with an introduction by Director Ángel Luis González, followed by a performance by Albanian Berlin-based artist Anna Ehrenstein ‘On Decolonising Lens-based Practices’ from 6.30pm.

To receive the Zoom login details closer to the date, book your ticket now.

Image: Anna Ehrenstein ‘On Decolonising Lens-based Practices’

SITUATION #202 — Mario Santamaría: Explore the Non-Imaginary Museum!
Recorded 6pm Saturday 11 July – Irish Time

The Googlified Image

As part of the current exhibition SITUATIONS/The Right to Look and PhotoIreland Festival 2020: ON/OFF, the curatorial team of Fotomuseum Winterthur in collaboration with PhotoIreland, invited the artists Geraldine Juárez and Mario Santamaría to critically look at the hidden power dynamics behind the Google Arts & Culture Project, as well as the perpetuation and reinforcement of Western capitalist and colonial gazes which continue to shape knowledge formation. What happens if digital curation and art history is left to corporations? At whose advantage and whose expense is the Google Cultural Institute operating?

In his work The Non-Imaginary Museum, as part of his ongoing Trolling Google Art Project, the Spanish artist Mario Santamaría exposes the problematic of copyright infringements that ultimately resulted in blurred images and thus ruptures in Google Arts & Culture’s promise of endless accessibility and freedom of movement through virtual documentation.

After giving an insight into his practice and over seven years of experience in exploring museums online, join Santamaría on his unexpected, virtual journey around iconic cultural landmarks, copyright violations and other incongruities of the platform.

About SITUATIONS

The Fotomuseum Winterthur launched a new exhibition format titled SITUATIONS on 10 April 2015, as a proactive reaction to adapt decisively and more quickly to changes within photographic culture. The role of SITUATIONS is to define Fotomuseum Winterthur’s vision of what photography is becoming, at the same time offering an innovative integration of physical exhibition space and virtual forum. Using tags and clusters as a mode of curatorial classification the aim is to integrate the real and the virtual in relation to exhibition in a new way.

Numbered consecutively, a SITUATION may last a few hours, or two months, and might be photographic imagery, a film, a text, an online interview, a screenshot, a photo-book presentation, a projection, a Skype lecture, a performance etc. It might take place in Winterthur or perhaps in São Paulo or Berlin and be streamed on our website. The idea is to construct a constantly growing archive of SITUATIONS, reframing the idea of exhibition in relation to new technologies and both our local and global audiences.

Find out more about these and enjoy the archive on the Fotomuseum Winterthur website.

Image: Staatliches Museum Schwerin. The Non-Imaginary Museum. Mario Santamaría, 2018.

Screen Walk: Conor McGarrigle
Recorded 6pm Wednesday 15 July – Irish Time

We invite you to join Digital Curators Jon Uriarte (The Photographers’ Gallery London) and Marco de Mutiis (Fotomuseum Winterthur) for a Screen Walk around Irish artist Conor McGarrigle’s practice.

Screen Walks is a series of online streams with artists and researchers, using the screen as their medium. Artists are invited to perform guided explorations of specific online and digital spaces in which their core artistic research and practice takes place. Each video stream is conceived as a format blurring the boundaries between a guided tour and a workshop, offering a behind-the-scenes look at an artist’s practice as well as the chance to discover new, current and forgotten digital spaces.

Conor McGarrigle’s Screen Walk will look at the relationships between algorithms, data and images through the lens of two of his internet projects separated by a decade, the BitTorrent Trilogy and 24hour Social. McGarrigle will expose how internet protocols and video codecs came together in the BitTorrent Trilogy to visualise the hidden sociality of file sharing swarms with images of often striking beauty. Ten years later, for 24hour Social, the artist downloaded a full day of videos, with one video for every second, from the now defunct Vine video sharing social platform. At one level a celebration of individual creativity, shared memes and the weird internet, the project shows how data underpins everything, as social media platforms use the generation and circulation of images to surveil and track their users. 

Find out more about Screen Walks at screenwalks.com

OVER Journal launch
Recorded 6pm Saturday 18 July – Irish Time

Introduction by writer Aidan Kelly Murphy in conversation with artist Heather Agyepong and OVER Journal co-editor Ángel Luis González, followed by a screening of artist Theo Ellison’s latest work.

OVER Journal is a new international publication from PhotoIreland that proposes its readers a more wholesome, honest, and critical observation and enjoyment of lens-based, contemporary practices, with visual culture and critical thinking at its core.

Contributing to this dialogue, we present some of PhotoIreland Festival content within the pages of OVER, including a feature with this year’s open call artists Francesca Catastini, Hiro Tanaka, and Theo Ellison. 

Discover works by the Irish FUTURES Artists 2020 Becks Butler, Garry Loughlin, Mark McGuinness, Shia Conlon, and Vera Ryklova – whose work makes the cover.

The journal presents other three FUTURES artists; it features a new body of work by Teresa Eng, and a review of Eva Kreuger and Yvette Monahan’s practice, as Amelie Rose, current Project Coordinator of FOAM, reflects on their similarities and influences.

Find also works by Heather Agyepong, David Farrell, and a closing note by the Guerrilla Girls.

In addition, contributors to the first issue of the journal investigate the role of criticism, museology, and more, provoking conversations around topics regarding contemporary practices and how these are influenced by our current environments and society. 

The texts of this first issue are penned by Aidan Kelly-Murphy, Alison Nordstrom, Ángel Luis González, Anna Ehrenstein, Benedetta Casagrande, Duncan Wooldridge, Erik Vroons, Gloria Oyarzabal, Jörg Colberg, Julia Gelezova, Natasha Christia, and Yining He.

The journal includes a special interview with Marion Hislen, Photography Delegate of the French Ministry of Culture,  kindly supported by Alliance Française Dublin and the French Embassy in Ireland.

The issue is currently available to order exclusively online at thelibraryproject.ie and overjournal.org and will be available from The Library Project from the day of launch.

Screening: Evolved Display, 4’17” minutes, 2020, by Theo Ellison
The screening was available 7-9pm Saturday 18 July 2020- Irish Time

As part of the online launch of OVER Journal, enjoy an exclusive screening of artist Theo Ellison’s video piece ‘Evolved Display’. The video, with a duration of 4.17 minutes, will be available for two hours only at 2020.photoireland.org/theo-ellison/ from 7pm to 9pm on Saturday 18 July 2020.

Ellison’s practice explores the behavioural underpinnings of art; why we create it and how we consume it. His primary interest lies in peeling back the layers of illusion of the artwork to reveal the mechanics at play beneath. The work attempts to deconstruct and short-circuit these frameworks, though perhaps they can never be fully escaped, eliciting a continual tension between the romanticism of the image and its deconstruction.

Ellison graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2017 and has recently exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Cambridge University, and Quad Gallery, Derby, and was on a residency with the National Trust in 2018. He was selected as participant for the Parallel Platform programme in 2020.

You can read more about Ellison’s work inside the printed issue of OVER Journal. The issue is currently available to order online only at thelibraryproject.ie and overjournal.org , and it will be available from The Library Project from the 18 July.

SITUATION #202 — Geraldine Juárez: The fish don’t see the water
Screen intervention Recorded 6pm Sunday 19 July – Irish Time

The Googlified Image

As part of the current exhibition SITUATIONS/The Right to Look and PhotoIreland Festival 2020: ON/OFF, the curatorial team of Fotomuseum Winterthur in collaboration with PhotoIreland, invited the artists Geraldine Juárez and Mario Santamaría to critically look at the hidden power dynamics behind the Google Arts & Culture Project, as well as the perpetuation and reinforcement of Western capitalist and colonial gazes which continue to shape knowledge formation. What happens if digital curation and art history is left to corporations? At whose advantage and whose expense is the Google Cultural Institute operating?

Mexican and Swedish artist Geraldine Juárez critically assembles the history of the Google Cultural Institute in relation to colonial and imperial practices of prospecting, documenting and exhibiting, which are crucial to render the imaginaries that consolidated power of the West and its institutions. Her screen intervention The fish don’t see the water Juárez contextualises the data-prospecting of art historical collections and its architectures executed by the Google Culture Institute in the form of philanthropy, thus mirroring the very practices from which they emerged. Starting from the premise that exhibition formats equal a process of essayistic compilation, Juárez combines her performance PROSPEKT (2018) with other imaging essays as an artistic approach to institutional criticism, which dislocates potential of digital imaging and undermines the concept of the world-as-a-digital-exhibition.

About SITUATIONS

The Fotomuseum Winterthur launched a new exhibition format titled SITUATIONS on 10 April 2015, as a proactive reaction to adapt decisively and more quickly to changes within photographic culture. The role of SITUATIONS is to define Fotomuseum Winterthur’s vision of what photography is becoming, at the same time offering an innovative integration of physical exhibition space and virtual forum. Using tags and clusters as a mode of curatorial classification the aim is to integrate the real and the virtual in relation to exhibition in a new way.

Numbered consecutively, a SITUATION may last a few hours, or two months, and might be photographic imagery, a film, a text, an online interview, a screenshot, a photo-book presentation, a projection, a Skype lecture, a performance etc. It might take place in Winterthur or perhaps in São Paulo or Berlin and be streamed on our website. The idea is to construct a constantly growing archive of SITUATIONS, reframing the idea of exhibition in relation to new technologies and both our local and global audiences.

Find out more about these and enjoy the archive in the Fotomuseum Winterthur website.

Image: Still from PROSPEKT (2018) Geraldine Juárez.

Featured in OVER Journal

Inside OVER journal, you will find a feature with the three artists selected from this year’s open call: Francesca Catastini, Hiro Tanaka, and Theo Ellison, with an accompanying text reviewing commonalities of the three practices and their context in our society.

Petrus, the work of Francesca Catastini, documents the life and possessions of a neighbour, analysing on a western masculine hyperbole, while also reflecting on the influence of our upbringing, the images absorbed during our education, and the symbolisms we carry on to project meanings.

In his practice, Theo Ellison investigates the relationship between artifice and display. His work is deeply rooted in art history, exploring why and how we create and consume images, the tension between human behaviour and image making, and our obsession with perfection, romanticism and desire. While, through the sensory overload of Hiro Tanaka’s collages from Around 42nd and 7th, we observe fleeting experiences of people as they move through New York’s Times Square.

OVER Journal is currently available to order exclusively online atthelibraryproject.ie and overjournal.org, and it will be available from The Library Project from the 18 July.

Image: Francesca Catastini, from the series Petrus.

Featured in OVER Journal

Inside OVER, you will discover works by the Irish FUTURES Artists 2020: Becks Butler, Garry Loughlin, Mark McGuinness, Shia Conlon, and Vera Ryklova.

The journal presents three FUTURES artists from previous editions; it features a new body of work by Teresa Eng, and a review of Eva Kreuger and Yvette Monahan’s practice, as Amelie Rose, current Project Coordinator of FOAM, reflects on their similarities and influences.

OVER Journal is currently available to order exclusively online at thelibraryproject.ie and overjournal.org, and it will be available from The Library Project from the 18 July.

Image: Garry Loughlin, from the series The Clearing House.

Tokyo International Photography Competition 2020
9 July-16 August
Wednesday-Friday 11-6pm, Saturday-Sunday 12-4pm
The Library Project, 4 Temple Bar Street, D02 YK53, Dublin

The Tokyo International Photography Competition returns for its seventh edition, with the winners travelling showcase making a stop at The Library Project, 9 July-16 August. The TIPC was created to provide an opportunity for photographers to present their artistic visions beyond their country’s borders. Each year, a jury composed of international photography professionals select eight photographers whose work is exhibited as part of an international traveling exhibition. This year, the work will be exhibited in Taiwan, Japan, USA, and Ireland.

Visitors will discover the works of the following TIPC 2020 finalists:

• Hashem Shakeri, An Elegy for the Death of Hamun —Grand Prix Winner
• Gregg Segal, 7 Days of Garbage
• Turjoy Chowdhury, Breathing on the Brink
• Acacia Johnson, Sea Ice Stories
• Ciril Jazbec, The Ice Stupas
• Charlotta María Hauksdóttir, Imprints
• Ryota Kajita, Ice Formation
• Robin Michals, Our Neighborhood

Image: Ciril Jazbec, The Ice Stupas.