PULSE EVENT #2:
SONIA SHIEL & ANNE BOGART
Kunstverein Aughrim presents:
Pulse Event #2: Sonia Shiel & Anne Bogart
Private in-conversation in the artist’s studio, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin
Thursday 27 July 2023
The second Pulse Event takes shape in Shiel’s own studio, amid a selection of works in progress. These include three triptychs, in which figures appear to inhabit an extraordinary natural environment, ordinarily. The Triptychs have emerged from Shiel’s central Terrain work for her exhibition at VISUAL, which was first work-shopped through Pulse Event #1 with Benjamin Hanußek. The Terrain work is a dynamic floor piece made up of composite shape-shifting platforms, housing 7 slatted façades with a series of holes, features, and dressings that together form an enchanted landscape - through which a body may walk. The Terrain is many things at once - a painting, a map, a stage, a nature table, a board game, a music box, a birdsong, and an interactive walk. In its final composition it will orientate the viewer through the surrounding exhibition with audio-visual, haptic elements - apparent opportunities for agency. Adapted to this second generative Pulse Event, The Terrain will be presented in its contracted form, on a 380 x 80cm ‘nature-table’ top. The table will be dressed cumulatively, with interactive features and synchronised foley-sounds, enacted through a series of ‘exercises.’ The objective of this event - an intimate conversation with acclaimed director and co-author of The Viewpoints Book, Anne Bogart - is to explore exercises in ‘serendipity’, ‘nature’ and ‘dislocation’ in a conversation between two disciplines - one traditionally static and experienced in motion, and the other traditionally in motion and and experienced seated.
Anne Bogart is a theater and opera director and former Co-Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Works with SITI include Radio Christmas Carol, Falling & Loving; The Bacchae, Chess Match No. 5; Lost in the Stars; The Theater is a Blank Page; Persians; Steel Hammer; A Rite; Café Variations; Trojan Women (After Euripides); American Document; Antigone; Under Construction; Freshwater; Who Do You Think You Are; Radio Macbeth; Hotel Cassiopeia; Death and the Ploughman; La Dispute; Score; bobrauschenbergamerica; Room; War of the Worlds–the Radio Play; Cabin Pressure; Alice’s Adventures; Culture of Desire; Bob; Going, Going, Gone; Small Lives/Big Dreams; The Medium; Hay Fever; Private Lives; Miss Julie; and Orestes. Recent operas include Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale, Handel’s Alcina, Dvorak’s Dimitrij Verdi’s Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma and Bizet’s Carmen. She is the author of six books: A Director Prepares; The Viewpoints Book; And Then, You Act; Conversations with Anne, What’s the Story and The Art of Resonance.
Sonia Shiel is an artist with whom Kunstverein Aughrim is collaborating across 2023.
*The Pulse Event Series takes its name from Elvia Wilk's analysis of Karen Russell's description of blossoming in The Bad Graft. Russell’s short story describes the relationship between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth as a metaphor for co-dependence between us and nature, and the couple at the centre of her story. Neither the moth nor the tree can survive without each other. Their relationship is consummated in a tremendous blossoming referred to by a local Mojave desert ranger as a “pulse event.” Such a term is associated with bomb test-sites, when a measurable electromagnetic pulse occurs. Invariably – a pulse event is also an immeasurable event of the heart. As a series of workshops, devised by Sonia Shiel in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, Pulse Events generate the opportunity for critique to advance the narrative of Shiel’s current work, and positively agitate the final phase of the project’s development.
Pulse Event #2 is produced by Kunstverein Aughrim, supported by the Arts Council. It takes place in Shiel’s studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and is made possible with thanks to Nyree Yergainharsian and Jocelyn Clark. The event is related to Shiel’s ongoing work for a major exhibition commissioned by VISUAL Carlow opening in September 2023.