NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO BUT THE PAST
Curated by Gregory McCartney

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts’ UnSelfing Programme
Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture
ONLINE via Abridged + printed publication
1 December 2020 - 25 March 2021


ARTISTS
Nadège Mériau
Stuart Cairnes
Daniel Seiffert
Tara Wray

WRITERS
Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Peter Knight
Dr Dara Downey
Anna Walsh
Gail McConnell
Sharon Young

"In Meriau’s suite of imagery fish skins act as negatives, snails illicit physical responses, a seabed becomes a reflection of inner states, the body becomes a darkroom; magical images emerge from the unseen. If, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, the body can expand our understanding of knowledge, what does this mean about the possibilities of how we interact with art? The embodied looking I encountered in Meriau’s pieces The Fall, In these Times and They Who Eat My Flesh shows that art has the potential to transcend the material and the subject/object orientation. Through this process of ‘reciprocal interrelation’ new knowledge can be discovered in unexpected ways. The magic of the photographic darkroom is not confined to a darkened room but can be carried with us in our bodies, if we choose to allow ourselves to step into that concrete essence that leads to existential experience." Sharon Young, In The Darkroom of the Body, 2020.

https://galway2020.ie/en/projects/nothin…
Direct link to my work https://www.abridged.zone/nadege-meriau/
Direct link to Sharon Young's essay https://www.abridged.zone/sharon-young-i…