Screening - Vorres Museum, Paiania, Greece

16/06/2023 20:00 - 21:00 screening of Perdikaki, 2019, (38min)

At the Vorres Museum, 1 Parodos Diadochou Konstantinou, Paiania, Attica, Greece

As part of a 3 day event for EMPACT – Empathy and Sustainability: The Art of Thinking like a Mountain at the Vorres Museum:

“Creative sustainability” on the 16th, 17th, 18th of June @ the Museum. Three days of talks, projections, interactive seminars and workshops on empathy, sustainability, resilience in artistic production, ecosystems, architecture @ the Vorres Museum in the framework of the innovative project “EMPACT – Empathy and Sustainability: The Art of Thinking like a Mountain”, co-funded by the EU Creative Europe Program.

Throughout the three days, local participants will be trained and get to know case studies and pioneering initiatives combining art and ecological practices within the scope of creative sustainability.

This event addresses both the theoretical and practical aspects of sustainability. Real examples of creative sustainability, social ecology, adaptation to greener production models in arts and ecological approach both in creating artworks and in producing and disseminating art projects.

https://www.empact-project.org/empact-seminar-creative…/


Exhibition - On the meaning of ‘Gossip’

Group exhibition at the British School at Rome, curated by Marta Pellerini 

31 May – 23 June 2023, opening 31 May 18:00 - 20:30

BSR Fine Arts Exhibition with Maeve Brennan, Catriona Gallagher, Holly Graham, Helena Hladilová, Lulù Nuti and Marie-Agnès Nobecourt, Sharon Kelly, Lucy Tarquinio, Laura White.

In her book “Witch, witch-hunting and women” (2020), Silvia Federici traces the genealogy of the word ‘gossip’.

The meaning of this word became derogatory in Europe only in the 16th century, with the advent of capitalism and the intention of destroying the close-knit female community that existed at the time and that could oppose the new dominant social classes. Gossip today means informal discourse, often harmful to those affected by it, and is irrevocably linked to females or feminized subjectivities. These people gossip, having nothing better to do. Yet, as Federici says: “In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory – those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, who transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion. They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms – concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behaviour”.

Federici is not the only philosopher addressing the meaning of the word gossip. In transfeminist theory and practice, this term has often provided opportunities for reflection and revision of historical narrative structures, those that seem so consistent as to be immutable, and towards which there is an attempt of deconstruction through personal experiences.

Based on these premises, the exhibition aims to investigate the different forms of transmitting and receiving wisdom that the invited artists carry out in their research and that go beyond the norms of knowledge. Be it oral archives, metamorphosis of matter or collaborative practices, the artists focus on their position in the world through the works displayed.

photos by Roberto Apa


Exhibition - Roma: A Portrait, Palazzo delle Esposizioni

ROMA, A PORTRAIT. FESTIVAL OF FOREIGN CULTURE ACADEMIES AND INSTITUTES

May 10 - July 30, 2023. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Via Nazionale, 194, 00184 Roma.

Curated by Cecilia Canziani with Francesca Campana and Giulia Gaibisso  

Roma, a portrait is the first edition of a project that will be turning the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on an annual basis into a primary observatory for exploring the visions and the research of those foreign scholars and artists who spend a period of residency in Rome every year as guests of the Academies and Cultural Institutes that have been a part of city’s life since the 17th century.  
The depiction of the landscape of Rome from the earliest “views” is the exhibition’s basic premise and starting point, unfolding thereafter in a range of different media and forms.    The exhibition continues with encounters, performances and screenings hosted at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and with an invitation to take part in the exhibitions and open studios in the academies and institutes that are, today, venues for encounter and cross-contamination among careers, identities, styles, disciplines and communities that recount the complexity of our present era. 


Screening and artist’s talk at the British School at Athens

BSA Friends Lecture: “An Athenian plant through time: a film screening and artist’s talk” by Catriona Gallagher Visual Artist (Bridget Riley Fellow 2022-23 – BSR)

Thursday 11th May @ 6:00pm BSA Upper House (Director’s Residence), 52 Souedias Street, GR10676 Athens, Greece.

To attend IN PERSON please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/595732089717 

In 2013 British-Irish artist Catriona Gallagher discovered an unfamiliar plant growing from Athens’ urban fabric: περδικἀκι (perdikaki). She returned to Athens in 2014 to research the prolific yet overlooked weed in drawing, writing, and video. The resulting film, Perdikaki (2019, 38 minutes), traces the plant’s relationship to Athens – from Pliny the Elder’s medicinal descriptions, through the Grand Tour, to the abandonment of the crisis years. The film led to projects such as Athina Garden City, centered on creating an urban garden for A-DASH project space in Neapoli, as well as the artist’s current research at the British School at Rome on the metamorphosis of the mythological figure Daphne.


Daphne: Screening and Performance Lecture

Photos by Alexandra Masimanidi for Atopos CVC

Atopos CVC, Athens - for the Office of Hydrocommons project curated by Eleni Riga. Themed evening: Water as an Agent of Social Justice in Mythology and the Folk Tradition. 21:00–22:00

Performance lecture by Catriona Gallagher, in conversation with curator Eleni Riga.

A presentation of digitised 16mm film, phytography, text, and documentation of the eco-developing process of a filmwork in-progess. In Daphne was a torso ending in leaves (2023), Catriona Gallagher aims to make a film about Daphne with daphne, by hand-processing black and white 16mm film in an infusion of bay leaves. Ovid’s version of the myth of the water nymph turning into a bay-laurel tree after being pursued by Apollo is reapproached from a perspective that keeps Daphne central to the story, investigating the bay-laurel plant as a persistent symbol in contemporary Rome, and exploring what metamorphosis looks like from the inside. This work was developed during the artist’s Bridget Riley Fellowship at the British School at Rome between September 2022 and March 2023. 


Screening at Fondazione Giuliani

On 24th March, the British School at Rome presents the event “Catriona Gallagher in conversation with Léna Lewis-King and Luca Peretti: a dialogue and screening on experimental analogue filmmaking and eco-developing with plants” hosted by Fondazione Giuliani and curated by On Site.

Intertwining different areas of visual culture, from film to video, from photography to illustration, the relationship between analogue and digital is a central theme in contemporary moving image creation. The space of contact between analogue and digital opens up the infinite possibilities offered by the hybridisation of mediums and languages on the one hand, and reclaims the necessity of the preservation of analogue materials and technologies as a living source for contemporary creation on the other.

Catriona Gallagher and Léna Lewis-King, in conversation with Luca Peretti and the On Site team, will present their own research and artistic practices that explore, in different but assonant ways, the territories of transition between analogue and digital, the creation and re-signification of the archive, and the city of Rome in which they have lived and worked for a period of residence.

During the talk archive materials from the 16 mm medium will be screened, in addition to a selection of the artists’ projects.

We thank Graziano Schiano for the archival films.

Photo credits: Silvia Calderoni for the BSR


Open Studios at the British School at Rome - 9th-11th March 2023

Thursday 9th March - Saturday 11th March, British School at Rome, via Gramsci 61, Roma

The artists will be present with some of their work to answer visitors’ questions and share their research: Maeve Brennan – Sainsbury Scholar, Luke Burton – Abbey Fellow in Painting, Hardeep Dhindsa – Leverhulme Study Abroad Scholarship, Catriona Gallagher – Bridget Riley Fellow, Holly Graham – Sainsbury Scholar, Sharon Kelly – Arts Council of Northern Ireland Fellow, Lucy Tarquinio – Abbey Scholar in Painting, Laura White – Ampersand Fellow 2022-23.

The Winter Open Studios 2023 will be an opportunity to highlight some aspects of the research that underpins the artists’ work, including reflection on Rome and its connection to food; the urgency to re-visualise our relationships with plants and the ‘beyond’ world; painting as a narrative device; the usage of colour to critique the myth of Whiteness in classical sculpture; creativity as a support for the processing of personal or collective trauma; forms of repair and reparative histories; the malleability of memory and the subjective nature of collective experience; and visual research into the connection between Mannerism and Cosmatesque mosaics.

The event represents a different way of experiencing research in progress, that aims to give the audience a broader insight into the artists’ work, to discover their residency projects, their creative practices and, most importantly, to understand how a new environment, meetings and network with the local artistic community, can give rise to new experimentations.

Photo credits: Luana Rigolli

photos by Luana Rigolli


Meet the Artists: Catriona Gallagher, interview part two on the BSR blog, March 2023




ENTWINED publication

Available for purchase from Corner House Publications and VARC.

182 pages, full colour publication that expands on some of the conversations and ideas sparked by the ENTWINED:Rural.Land.Lives.Art. programme and reflects on VARC’s 21 years as an arts charity based in rural Northumberland. Authors include: Dave Pritchard, Susan Trangmar, Lucy May Schofield, Lesley Guy, Mike Collier, Alexander Marr, Ingrid Pollard, Julie Crawshaw, Ysanne Holt, Cynthia Morrison-Bell, Mike Pratt, Corrine Fowler, and Menelaos Gkartzios. There are also pages dedicated to each of the ENTWINED artists: Andrew Burton, Robbie Coleman & Jo Hodges, Sam Douglas, Shane Finan, Catriona Gallagher, Bridget Kennedy, Emily Ketteringham and Kate Liston.

ENTWINED: Rural. Land. Lives. Art. is a multi-partner project, organized by VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities). The book is published alongside an exhibition that was held at VARC, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland (4–12 September 2021); Assembly House, Newcastle upon Tyne (1–11 December 2021); and The Sill: National Landscape Discovery Centre, Hexham (edited version, January 2022)


Roscommon Arts Centre

stills in log from new filming in the West of Ireland, July 2022

Roscommon Arts Centre is delighted to announce its Creative Ireland “Wings” Resident for 2022 is Visual Artist Catriona Gallagher.

Catriona Gallagher is a British-Irish visual artist based in Athens. Her work moves between film, drawing, writing and installation and navigates the overlooked details in our physical surroundings and the psychological landscapes mirroring them.

Catriona is currently developing a new film work Forest AI (working title) which uses a documentary approach to research forest ecology in commercial plantations across the British Isles. Walking interviews with foresters, ecologists, volunteers and local residents are overlaid with a speculative narrative exploring the not-so-distant future of AI technologies being used to manage commercial forests. A series of drawings and models sit alongside her film work, depicting the rhomboid shapes of Sitka Spruce plantations from above and emulating the increasingly digital mediation of the landscape. During Catriona’s residency at Roscommon Arts Centre, she will be collecting new film footage of forestry practice in the West of Ireland, developing her film narrative, and working on drawings and models in the studio.”

https://roscommonartscentre.ie/catriona-gallagher-announced-as-creative-ireland-wings-resident-for-2022/


Using Format