PULSE EVENT #3:
SONIA SHIEL & ELVIA WILK
Kunstverein Aughrim presents:
Pulse Event #3: Sonia Shiel & Elvia Wilk
Discursive event as part of Autumn Preview with Sonia Shiel
Tuesday 1 August 2023
Pulse Event #3 takes place in the frame of our Autumn Preview with Sonia Sheil, a woodland walking event that concludes with a conversation with writer Elvia Wilk, in the space of Shiel’s newly launching exhibition Supernatural Bureau. Beginning with a reading from her collection of essays, Death by Landscape, Wilk will discuss the meaning of fan-nonfiction, and ideas around our relationship to narrative and the natural world. Wilk will be joining us remotely (via Zoom).
Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, n+1, The Paris Review online, Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, Frieze, WIRED, and The White Review. She received a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant for short-form art writing and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute. She teaches widely and is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal.
Sonia Shiel is an artist with whom Kunstverein Aughrim is collaborating across 2023.
*The Pulse Event Series takes its name from 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 #3 is produced by Kunstverein Aughrim in the frame of Autumn Preview with Sonia Sheil, supported by the Arts Council. The event is related to Shiel’s ongoing work for a major exhibition commissioned by VISUAL Carlow, opening in September 2023.