NOBODY EVER BRINGS ANYTHING SMALL INTO A BAR
nobody ever brings anything small into a bar
Kunstverein Aughrim
12 June—5 September
This exhibition starts twenty years ago in the slide library of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin. The college's teaching slides, small glass-panelled display devices used as educational tools, assembled in-house by-hand, and meticulously labelled and filed, mostly contained reproductions of artworks in the form of images photographed from the pages of the library’s reference books. Curator Vaari Claffey, interested in the current status of these slides, began a search with collaborator Brian Hand. A rich repository of discarded slide pockets and carousels was discovered. As objects that held no intrinsic value as artworks or even as documentation, the conservation of these teaching slides would not have been prioritised.
Now twenty years old, these slides have started to morph and disintegrate. A set of fashion images from the library and an informal collection held by Enterprise Ireland were of particular interest. Despite the degradation and disintegration of these images, they still hold some recognisable form. A runway, a swathe of fabric, the appearance of a human body, an arm, a shoulder, the poised foot of a spectator, all submerged in the melted cracks of the spoiled slide film emulsion. The images no longer function as straightforward representations. Instead, they occupy an ambiguous space between documentation and abstraction, unexpectedly compromised. They have autonomously created 'effects' that have little to do with authorship. These altered images raise questions about material change and the relationship between photographic records and the passage of time. How have these photographs of fabric, people, and scenes aged, alongside their subjects?
Removed from their original institutional context, released from the archive, and rescued from storage, can these slides gain a new form of agency? Presented in their current condition, altered, rotting, and materially vulnerable, the slides are displayed in various formats within the exhibition. Some of them have been rehoused in a series of tall, thin, staff-like sculptures created by Hand, to preserve and display these transformed, salvaged images. Referring to a 1970s series by Romanian artist André Cadere, titled Round Bar of Wood, these spindly sculptural forms suggest new possibilities for how the slide collection might circulate beyond the archive and continue to hold attention. Encounters are invited.
This exhibition is part of The Clearing, a major new public project by Dublin-based curator and producer Vaari Claffey. It unfolds across an exhibition at Kunstverein Aughrim, a day of performance and sculpture as part of Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival, and a screening programme at The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely.
The exhibition is open from 11am–3pm, Thursday–Sunday and by appointment
The Clearing is supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Vaari Claffey is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Vaari Claffey would like to thank CCI Paris, and Der Windtunnel, Zurich for support in the development of this project. Vaari Claffey & Brian Hand were supported by NCAD Research Seed Funding and NIVAL, Dublin.