Details
29 August - 26 November 2023
Upper Gallery: Korakrit Arunanondchai: No history in a room filled with funny names 5
Tall Gallery - Louise Wallace: Midnight Feast
Sunken Gallery - Sharon Kelly: Red-to-Red
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Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic with Tosh Basco.
The first exhibition in Ireland by Korakrit Arunanondchai, a video and multimedia artist originally from Bangkok who now splits his time between New York and Bangkok.
The artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s interdisciplinary works explore dualities such as life and death, past and present, dream and reality, reflection and rapture, man and machine, individualism, and interconnectedness, combining geopolitical movements and personal experiences of love and loss.
In a narrative vein, he will fill the Upper Gallery with a hybrid form of documentary, film, and installation called No History in a room filled with people with funny names 5. This new exhibition serves as a reconfiguration of Korakrit
Arunanondchai’s continuous conversations and collaborations with two
artists, Alex Gvojic and Tosh Basco.
Opening with the myth of "Ghost Cinema", a tradition in North East Thailand that grew out of remnants from the occupation of the US military during the Cold War. Korakrit Arunanondchai weaves together a story about possession and the dependency between the caretaker and the care receiver. The filmic installation is charged with the idea of community, and questions what holds it together – among humans and non-humans.
The video was mostly shot in Chiang Rai and Udon Thani. In the town of Mae Sai, Chiang Rai, a youth soccer team got trapped in a cave, and their plight became a moment of reframing Thailand and presenting it to the world, as well as back to itself, creating new stories with roles for the helpless, the benevolent, the caregiver and the care-receiver. Spirit mediums, monks, and ghosts of Thailand were there, shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists, the American military, and the international tech-capitalist. In Udon Thani, with the mythical story of the ghosts hiring humans to run an outdoor film screening, the audiences in communion with the ghost, enact a system of rituals through the medium of light projected onto a screen.
Louise Wallace: Midnight Feast
Louise Wallace produces work that is deliberately provocative, utilising a palette of lush colour to create images that draw on abstraction and Surrealism to transform the suburban into scenes that hover between the familiar and the uncanny.
Midnight Feast is a body of work which looks at desire, excess and the feminine. Wallace explores a landscape made of body parts, fruit and animated shrubs, populated by monstrous bird feeders, bizarre garden ornaments and spectral visions. The paintings are a series of nocturnes, loosely based on the gardens of Lenadoon and Glengoland housing estates in West Belfast.
Wallace has distorted these night scenes in a playful, provocative manner to subvert traditional Irish landscape painting and the problematic conflation of the feminine and the land. Midnight Feast depicts a contemporary Northern Imaginary – a reading of place and identity that encompasses laughter, fluidity and non-sense. The exhibition’s title suggests excessive or forbidden behaviour – in the world of adults, a midnight feast could be Bacchanalian.
The exhibition positions painting as a field of enquiry rather than a medium-specific condition. A febrile sense of colour is instrumental to holding relationships across media and into the gallery space. Wallace’s painting practice is reimagined across drawing, collage and three-dimensional objects.
The wall piece, Fabulous Birds is an exploration of colour and form using found and fabricated objects, the whole operating as a three-dimensional collage. The bird-like forms also relate to the gardens and bird feeders in the paintings. The works on paper plot a trippy landscape, full of reclining odalisques and dancing trees.
Wallace’s practice is improvisational; one move generates the next whether the medium is painting, drawing or assemblages. The exhibition installation is an extension of Wallace’s studio where she displays a range of objects and manipulates them to extend the compositional space of painting.
Sharon Kelly: Red-to-Red
The work in this exhibition has been developed over the period of the artist's ACNI Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Kelly originally commenced the residency in January 2020, but this was interrupted by the pandemic. She returned January - March 2023 to complete the Fellowship.
Kelly has taken markers from her observances and encounters from her time in Rome and created work, externally affirmative and universally connective in nature.
Kelly often concentrates on focused bodies of work developed over time in a symbiotic process combining observation, awareness of the body and drawing on experience, feeling and intuition.
Her sensibility to the body and in particular the fragmented body, the torso and broken gesture featured strongly in works created in response to her original residency period and in the intervening three years. With its generative force emanating from personal encounters with severe illness and its aftermath, her work also embraced ideas of liminality and transformation.
In this current work, the colour red has developed as multi-charged, with multi-layered resonances; the residue of a staunched wound; the symbol of blood, the universal force and flow of life; the symbol of bloodshed, sacrifice, often seen in religious depictions.
A marker for warning or impending danger. Red is the colour symbolising authority, or status; generals in the days of the Roman Empire had their bodies painted red to celebrate victory. Red was also the colour of protective amulets. Red may indicate energy, vibrancy - the longest-lasting and most dominant of the colours of the Etruscan fresco wall-paintings. These red figurative images, fragmented over time, depict life, death, and the transitional space.
About the Artists
About the Artists
Korakrit Arunanondchai
Korakrit Arunanondchai (born in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1986) lives and works in New York and Bangkok. Raised in Thailand, he moved to study in the USA at the Rhode Island School of Design (2009) and Columbia University (2012). His most recent solo exhibitions have been at the Moderna Museet, Stochholm, (2022/23) the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zürich (2022), Kunsthall Trondheim (2021), Serralves Museum in Porto (2020), the Secession in Vienna (2019), and Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel (2018).
Arunanondchai’s work has also been presented as part of numerous group exhibitions, and at biennales and festivals, including Mountain/Time at Aspen Art Museum (2022), the Gwangju Biennale (2021), the Yokohama Triennale (2020), and the Venice and Whitney Biennales (2019).
Louise Wallace
Louise Wallace (b. 1970, Belfast) is a painter, writer and educator. She was shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize (2022) and longlisted for the John Moore’s Painting Prize (2020). She is the recipient of several bursaries and Arts Council awards, most recently receiving SIAP funding (2022). She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally including the SoHo20 gallery (New York), Siemens Art Space (Beijing), RUA Red (Dublin) and the Fenderesky gallery (Belfast). Her work is in several private and public collections including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Ulster University and the Boyle Civic Collection, Sligo. Wallace co-curated and exhibited in ‘Penumbra’, a survey of contemporary Irish female painting at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery (2020). Her essay ‘Who Killed Marthe Bonnard? Madness, Morbidity and Pierre Bonnard’s “The Bath”’ was published in the Journal of Contemporary Painting (2018) and she was an invited speaker on the work of painter Mary Swanzy at IMMA, Dublin (2018). She is co-curator of the retrospective ‘Catherine McWilliams 1961 – 2021’ at the F.E. McWilliam gallery (2023) and the author of ‘Hope is Something Rooted – the work of Catherine McWilliams’ in the Irish Arts Review, Spring 2023. Paintings from her latest Midnight Feast series are included in the British Council journal ‘Difficult Conversations’ (2023). Wallace completed her PhD in 2005 at Belfast School of Art where she currently works as a lecturer in painting.
Sharon Kelly
Sharon Kelly lives and works between her studio in QSS, Belfast and South Armagh. She gained a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of Ulster in 1989. Kelly’s practice takes the intersections between art, life, health and sport, and explores ideas of the synergy between mind and body. Her work encompasses a variety of media including drawing, installation, sculpture and moving image. She has collaborated with poets, writers, dancers and choreographers and in 2017 created set designs for Landscapes of Loss a multimedia dance production, for Maiden Voyage Dance.
In 2022 she was the recipient of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA and in 2020 she commenced the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Fellowship at The British School at Rome, which she finally completed early 2023. She has been the recipient of numerous Visual Arts Awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, most recently the Artists International Development Fund to participate in a printmaking residency at Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium later in 2023; The Rowel Friers Perpetual Trophy, Royal Ulster Academy of Art; The Drawing Prize 132nd Royal Academy Exhibition, 2013; The Bass Ireland Award 2001; British Council Award 1999; EV+A Open Award, Adjudicator, Jan Hoet, Belgium 1994; First Prize, ‘Siolru’, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin 1994; Alice Berger-Hammerschlag Trust Travel Award 1991; The Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation, Canada 1990.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in public and private collections in Northern Ireland and further afield.
