Sketches for an Artificial Forest

11th November - 22nd December 2023, Roscommon Arts Centre. Curated by Naomi Draper, text ‘Nowing’ by Jennie Taylor.

ART DINERS announces its 3rd season with artist Catriona Gallagher. Running from 7th to 10th October 2023, it will present a contemporary reading of the subject of myth. ART DINERS is curated by Marta Gaudino, Irene Machetti and Alessia Simonetti, in partnership with Sa.L.A.D and with the support of the British Council, British School at Rome and Artable.

Season III presents a solo-show and a performance in the fascinating venue of Villino Sartorio, a villa usually closed to the public and home to many important artists’ studios. The artist’s work starts from the study of pellitory, a plant deeply connected to mythology, to explore urgent issues from a socio-cultural point of view. Gallagher’s solo-show presents the film Perdikaki and a selection of the Pellitory Study, also called Collector’s Archive (2013-18): 150 drawings, notes, anecdotes, diagrams, texts, pressed specimens that question the notions of existence and coexistence in today’s world. Through botanical processes, field observation, historical-mythical research and symbolic references, Gallagher meticulously mapped the growth of the pellitory (in Greek, ‘perdikaki’) in the urban environment. 

The opening performance will activate the artist’s work, in dialogue with a food-happening specially conceived by Irene Machetti: an edible garden populated by herbs and plants connected to mythology and sharing a common ambiguity. Like a pharmakon, they can either cure or be poisonous, just like the pellitory. 

Exhibition review and interview with ART DINERS

Roma, A Portrait. Festival of foreign Culture Academies and Institutes at Palazzo delle Espozioni, Rome. 
May 10 - July 30, 2023

Curated by Cecilia Canziani with Francesca Campana and Giulia Gaibisso
 
With the collaboration of Accademia Belgica, Accademia di Danimarca, Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis, Accademia Tedesca Roma - Villa Massimo, Accademia di Romania in Roma, Accademia d’Ungheria in Roma, American Academy in Rome, British School at Rome, Centro Ceco di Roma, Circolo Scandinavo, Forum Austiaco di Cultura, Instituto Cervantes di Roma, Istituto Polacco di Roma, Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, Istituto Svizzero, Real Academia de España en Roma

With artworks and intervention by Camille Aleña, Elvira Amor, Giacomo Balla, Sara Barker, Yasmina Benabderrahmane, Carla Boserman, Maeve Brennan, Andrea Büttner, Simon Callery, J. B. Camille Corot, Michel Couturier, Danica Dakic, Freya Dooley, Catriona Gallagher, Oona Grimes, José Guerrero, Ernest Hébert, Benedikt Hipp, Julia Huete, Sophie Jung, Winifred Knights, Tobias Koch, Jochen Lempert, Benoît Maire, Ana Mendieta, Bocar Niang, Ester Partegàs, Elise Peroi, David Schutter, Maya Schweizer, Something Fantastic, Jakob Strandgaard, Esther B. Van Deman, William Villalongo, Hannah Villiger, Konstantin von Kügelgen, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Laura White.

Screening of Perdikaki (2019), 7th July 2023 22:30

Terrapolis: Archeologie di Futuro festival, Parsec, Bolonga

“Terrapolis is a festival that revolves around the link between art and the environment, investigating the ways in which contemporary art practice can intervene in a wide range of ecological issues. The festival supports the development and sharing of artistic projects that, through the use of different media, investigate the existing and inseparable relationship between the ecological and social spheres. Terrapolis, named after a fictional equation reported by Donna Haravay in Chthulucene, surviving on an infected planet (Nero Editions, 2019), combines a variety of contemporary languages to reflect on important issues of our time, such as the relationship with the environment, possible new types of relationships between individuals and the collective imagination of the future.
Now in its third edition, Terrapolis – archaeologies of the future, reflects on utopia as a trace of the future to follow.
Damian Borovsky states that ‘amidst the ruins of the present, we trace archaeologies of the future’: when the most plausible predictions describe the future dramatically, and when any attempt at a utopian solution must face the pressures of post-industrial globality, a total rethinking of the fundamental mechanisms of society must be reaffirmed. Terrrapolis – archaeologies of the future reconsiders the role utopian thinking can play in the age of planetary crisis, during two different days characterised by different modes of imagination.

The preview day on 7 July will take place at Tenuta Bene (Podere Canova) in the hills of Bologna, in collaboration with Circolo DEV. The works reflect on the topic of “ambitopia”: world imaginations that aim to go beyond the dichotomy of dystopian or utopian futures. Ambitopias are different, sustainable and post-capitalist futures, they draw from a variety of approaches and beliefs and do not attempt to describe a better future, but rather the different directions in which reality might tend. Film works by Catriona Gallagher, Pedro Neves Marques, Gerard Ortín Castellví will be screened outdoors. The evening will open with a live recording session by Radio Khame.”

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…/

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

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. 

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.

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.