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Arise! ye starvelings…
Preview: Friday September 12th, 6 - 8pm,

Declan Clarke, Stephen Gunning, Nicolas Milhé, Diango Hernández
Curated by Mary Cremin

continues September 13th – October 11th, 2008

Arise! ye starvelings…

Declan Clarke, Stephen Gunning, Nicolas Milhé, Diango Hernández
Curated by Mary Cremin

Preview: Friday September 12th, 6 - 8pm,
continues September 13th – October 11th, 2008

Arise! ye starvelings… is the opening line of the rallying song
the Internationale, the anthem used as an expression of allegiance
to revolutionary ideals. The appropriation and re-contextualising
of revolutionary and political imagery and ideas is a tactic used
by artists to comment on the present geopolitical climate,
creating a link between the past and the present. The combination
of politics and art together investigate the undercurrents of
globalization, and the fault lines opening up in the present.
Each of the artists has an aesthetic framework while at the same
time containing a political dimension. Their practices traverse
the political through the adopting of historical symbols and
language associated with revolutionary sentiments. The potentiality
of their practices is to unfold the global obliquely, adapting
that which is suppressed to developed imagery and discourse.

Declan Clarke's video work Red Moon engages with our encoded history,
which he traces through historical events and the iconography of
monuments and architecture. The degradation of the Soviet Union as
a super power and its demise as a site of revolutionary thought is
reflected in the city's contemporary landscape through its fading
monuments and structures. Nicolas Milhé's Sans Titre (projection
mercator) subverts the standard map. Devoid of any geographical
landscape, the artist reflects on the contentious issues of territory
and geography, allowing for alternative reading of both our history
and our future. Diango Hernández's Blender features a normal household
appliance, but for Hernández it has a strong symbolic meaning: the
blender mixes, pulverizes and 'uniformizes'. The blender is displayed
on a naked brick 'stage', a deconstructed wall, the unity is gone,
and the connection is unstable and vulnerable. The checked shirt is
a code to the Cubans: employees of the Department of the Interior or
the secret police wore checked shirts. It was a kind of uniform. Now
they just lie next to the objects, they are 'off-duty', the working
day is over. Stephen Gunning's dual projection Killing time Amsterdam
Penitentiary documents the inmates of a high-rise prison. Foucault
spoke about prisons as the Panopticon, the ultimate realization of
a modern disciplinary institution. Its structure allowed for constant
observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant
possibility of observation. He compared this carceral system to our
schools, factories and institutions. Gunning's piece is disconcerting
as the viewer can take on the position of power, observing the
behaviour of the inmates.

These works seek to reconnect culture to its political base, representing
a strand of resistance in the absence of social revolution. They call
into question established notions of society and how the present
transforms its past.

'In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away
from a conformism that is about to overpower it' – Walter Benjamin

Listings Information:

Preview: Friday September 12th, 6 - 8pm
Dates: September 13th – October 11th, 2008
Venue: Pallas Contemporary Projects - 111 Grangegorman Road Lower, Dublin 7
Days: Thursday - Saturday
Time: 12 - 6pm