Events
Performing Acculturation
30 April 2021
Panellists Cairo Clarke, Dr. Sarah Durcan and Sara Greavu in conversation with Sara Muthi to discuss themes of digital representation with ‘Foreignments’ as its backdrop. Performing Acculturation takes place on Friday 30th April 2021 at 5.30pm, tickets available here
‘Foreignments’, an interactive webapp commissioned in partnership with The Lab Gallery, DCC, deals intimately with the process of acculturation, highlighting the laborious and viciously nonlinear, ‘tentacular’ nature of acculturation.
The process of acculturation includes the cyclical practice of coming to terms with the exhaustive nature of acculturating . The constant stream of bodily energy required to maintain this process can be minimised and heightened in different situations, but never ceased, forcing the acculturating agent to re-evaluate the way the self ought to perform in an ever-fluctuating context.
The Lab Gallery presents Performing Acculturation, a webinar dealing with topics of autoethnography and the gaze of the physical performance of otherness through moving image. This event to bring a panel of three distinct voices; Cairo Clarke, Dr. Sarah Durcan and Sara Greavu, chaired by Sara Muthi with ‘Foreignements’ as its backdrop.
Cairo Clarke is a curator, and writer whose work is informed by slowness. Her work centers forms of knowledge production and dissemination that slip between the cracks, are formed on unstable ground and take on multiple temporalities. Supporting strands of theorising taking place in autonomous spaces and holding space for the mess. Cairo has worked closely with artists to develop and share instances of work across film, performance, printed matter and events as well as sharing self-led curatorial projects. In 2019 she launched SITE, a publication and curatorial project exploring alternative encounters with artist practice and the dissemination of research. Cairo is the 2020/21 Curatorial Fellow at LUX.
Sarah Durcan is an artist and writer. She is Programme Leader of the MFA Fine Art programme, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and a contributor to Extended Temporalities (2016), Moving Image Review & Art Journal and Screening the Past. She holds a PhD in Film and Screen Media from Birkbeck, University of London (2018) and recently curated ‘The Memory-Image’ screening in collaboration with aemi at the IFI (2019).
Sara Greavu is the incoming Curator of Visual Arts in Project Arts Centre. She has a particular interest in how art can recognise existing social structures, propose alternative histories and genealogies, and prefigure different social relations. Previous curatorial and development roles include Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry, VOID, and Outburst Arts, Belfast; in addition to working independently. Institutional and independent projects have included artists such as Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry and Phil Collins, and new commissions by Aideen Doran, and Eimear Walshe, among others. In 2019, in partnership with artist Andrea Francke, she developed Knowledge is Made Here, an alternative pedagogical practice, produced with queer, trans and non-binary young people. It’s not for you we did it, a research project with artist Ciara Phillips, deals with
intertwined political and cultural initiatives in Derry in the 1980s and is part of the 39th EVA International 2020-21.
‘Foreignments’ launched in partnership with the Lab Gallery in February 2021, the work was made by artist Moran Been-noon and commissioned by curator Sara Muthi, assisted by Rose Merriman. The work and associated events were kindly funded by Fingal County Council and Dublin City Council.