DIAGONAL ACTS
Diagonal Acts
Exhibition at Kunstverein Aughrim
1 March – 31 May 2025
Diagonal Acts is an ambitious new multi-platform project by Marie Farrington spanning 2025. Beginning at the entrance of Kunstverein Aughrim in Spring 2025, the project continues with public workshops at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, and culminates in exhibitions at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon and Commonage Projects, London.
Diagonal Acts arises from research into geological and archaeological imaginations of gaps, openings and thresholds, exploring the boundaries of the body in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives. The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre/Archaeology’ (Shanks/Pearson, 2001) exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage.
Through intrinsically contingent material interventions and participatory gestures, Diagonal Acts excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and borders reworked, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.
The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access. From an olivine access ramp to a digital archiving repository, possibilities for encounter are crafted and considered across platforms.
The exhibition Diagonal Acts at Kunstverein Aughrim is on view throughout Spring 2025, closing on 31 May. Our Spring Preview with Marie Farrington takes place on Saturday 29 March 2025. Join our mailing list for updates and further information.
Kunstverein Aughrim may be visited during our opening hours 10am–5pm, Thursday–Sunday by appointment. Please email office@kunstverein.ie to schedule your visit. For more information on visiting please see our contact and access pages.
About the artist:
Marie Farrington is an artist whose practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her work makes formal reference to field sampling, built heritage and histories of display. Exhibitions include Imprints & Breadcrumbs, CCA Odapark, Venray, 2025 (forthcoming); Strata, CCA Derry-Londonderry, 2024; The Unseen Eyebeam Crossed, puntWG Amsterdam, 2024; Glossaries for Forwardness, Museum Building, Trinity College, Dublin 2023; Hammerheads, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co. Meath, 2023; FAULTS+FOLDS, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin 2022; The Wave, Collecteurs: The Museum of Private Collections, (online), 2022; and A Vague Anxiety, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2019. She recently delivered two permanent public commissions: Guiding Light, a Percent for Art Commission at Ardgillan Community College, Balbriggan in 2024 and Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea, a public commission for Skerries Art Trail, Dublin coast in 2023. Farrington holds a Three Year Membership at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios, Dublin. She is a part-time lecturer at the National College of Art and Design. She has held residencies at Atelier WG, Amsterdam in 2024; SEA Foundation, Tilburg, 2023; Dublin City Council’s Residential Studios, Albert Cottages, 2023; Fire Station Artists’ Studios, 2018-2022. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Arts Council of Ireland; The Centre for the Environment, Trinity College Dublin; and the Office of Public Works.
https://www.mariefarrington.com/
Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Marie Farrington is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and by Wicklow County Arts Office through the annual Strategic Project Award Scheme.