Catalyst Arts presents THIS IS WATER, an exhibition by Simon Cummins,Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch.
The exhibition takes its title from This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, an essay by David Foster Wallace that was written as a graduation speech for Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005.
Cummins, Hallahan and Welch have produced an exhibition of works with Foster Wallace’s text in mind, through conversations with each other about the ideas behind it and the idea of beauty. THIS IS WATER sees the trio move forward from their collaborative project in 2013 titled Fuck, Shit, Piss, exhibited in 126 Gallery, Galway. For Catalyst Arts the artists have put together works that will attempt to both stand on their own and also be part of one overall installation encapsulating the gallery.
Martin Boyle | Liliane Puthod | Atom Tick | Iain Griffin | John Macormac | Anita Delaney | John Lawrence | David Blandy
24th April 2015 – 8th May 2015
Opening: Friday 24th April 2015
18: 00 – 19:30: Exhibition Opening at 126, Galway
20:00 – 21:30: Live Event at Áras na nGael, Galway
“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves. You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
― George Carlin
Since its inception over twenty years ago, by a multidisciplinary group of artists, theatre makers, architects and educators, Catalyst Arts is one of the longest running artist led organisations in Ireland and the UK, committed to delivering a programme which embraces risk and expands beyond the gallery to provide innovative opportunities for artists.
This year, through a series of small scale collaborations with artists, collectives and organisations Catalyst Arts will pilot a new auxiliary offsite programme titled ‘Garrincha’ which will further promote the commissioning of new works of artistic merit by emerging artists with a non gallery centred practice, for temporal and event based works.
The first of these collaborations has been through the invitation of 126 in Galway, for which Catalyst Arts has selected artists working across a range of disciplines, encompassing a two person exhibition at 126 Gallery space by Martin Boyle and Liliane Puthod, whose work excavates or activates commonplace aspects of the civic and urban landscape which have been ignored or overlooked in recent times as the sites for new interventions and dialogues.
Following the opening of this exhibition on Friday 24th audience are invited to a join us for an offsite, live event held at Áras na nGael from 8pm showcasing a selection of video screenings, performance and music by artists from across Ireland and the UK. Within this context of re-interrogating conventional modes of artistic practice ‘The Existence of Flamethrowers in your Street’ aims to continue Catalyst Arts commitment to providing opportunities for a range of multidisciplinary activities both in the gallery framework and offsite.
Catalyst Arts would like to thank 126 for the invitation to collaborate on this projects and to extend an open invitation to all to attend both the opening and live events which are free.
Primary Resource is a curatorial project taking place in 126 throughout 2015 that aims to make a practice based response to the 126 FOOTFALL research report that was published in March 2015. FOOTFALL began an line of enquiry into what separates the activities of artist led organisations from those of other art institutions in Ireland and what role they play in artists’ careers. With Primary Resource we invite five diverse artist led organisations to react to the FOOTFALL research and findings though their own practice. These five responses may take varying forms and will take place in the 126 gallery space throughout 2015. Each organisations response to one curatorial arc will contribute to a process that can be critically viewed as a whole.
Continuing Catalysts development of one night off-site events through our GARRINCHA programme, Catalyst Arts in collaboration with Flax Art Studios presents a new video work by Glasgow based artist James McCann, MONOMANIA 5.
‘Situated within the detritus and imposing machinery of a dark workshop, ‘MONOMANIA 5′ is a video culmination of a number of different projects undertaken while trying to make sense of Cognitive Diagrams given to me as part of a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’
James Mc Cann is a Cork/Glasgow based artist and Royal College of Art graduate, he is currently studying for a PhD at Glasgow School of Art. His work is usually Sculpture, Video, or Performance based.
Corie Denby McGowan | Deirdre Canavan | Rachel Marum Louise Concannon | Brian O’Shea | The Edinburgh Nude Historical Re-Enactment Society | Nuno Direitinho | Cate Smith
6th March – 28th March 2015
Opening event: 5th March 2015, 6-9pm
Pre-show tour: 5pm – 6pm
Catalyst Arts is pleased to present the Student and Recent Graduate Show 2015. Get In Lane refers to the stifling necessity for graduates to decide on their future direction. Aiming to break these boundaries Catalyst encourages artists to experiment with their work in the space, creating new freedoms in a professional context. Selected through a UK and Ireland open call, seven artists show the breadth and variety of work being made in universities today. While gaining experience exhibiting alongside their peers, Catalyst is excited to encourage the artists at this point in their careers.
April Chiders | Ben Craig & Ben Gould | Jerstin Crosby | Rivkah Gevinson | Jonah King | Ben Kinsley | Jessica Langley | Una Lee | Johanna Leech | Andrew Salomone | Leah Beeferman & Pierre Le Hors
Catalyst Arts 5th-26th February 2015
Closing Event: 26th February 6-9pm
Johanna Leech Performance 7pm
BASIC OPERATION is an experiment in a collaborative process between New York and Belfast based artists, concerned with the creation, value and experience of art.
Initial ideas, concepts, starting points and proposals were firstly gathered from New York, with no restrictions on content, detail or format. The only request was that the submissions must be proposals for as-of-yet unrealised works of art and sent digitally via email. The suggestions may be from small observations to larger strategies; sketchbook pages, post-it notes, drawings, plans for social events and interventions.
Catalyst Arts will invite a selection of Belfast artists to respond to these original ideas and encouraged to open up, interpret, and misinterpret, the levels of the submitted content.
BASIC OPERATION examines ways of collaboration and authorship. Is it the artist who proposes the initial starting point the author, or the one who furthers and embellishes the idea? Or are they merely a filter? In what form can collaboration take place and, furthermore, must a work of art be unique, or can it be created independently by other artists?
Follow the artists progress at basicoperation.tumblr.com
Amanda Beech: All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down
Exhibition runs: 16th Oct – 21st Nov
Catalyst Arts is pleased to present ‘All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down’, the first solo presentation in Northern Ireland of the work of British-born, California-based artist Amanda Beech.
The exhibition features a new suite of works on paper (2014) alongside the large-scale video installation, ‘Sanity Assassin’ (2010).Together the works produce a certain narrative on the condition of reality and its architectures. ‘Sanity Assassin’ interrogates our obsession with reality, our desire to manifest our ideas of what reality really is, and the consequences of this desire, whilst Beech’s new works on paper respond to this folly in the proposition that we construct reality.
16th Oct | Artist Talk: Amanda Beech | Belfast School of Art
15th Nov | ‘Televisual Transport: Freeways, Museums and Model Homes’ : Lecture | Maeve Connolly
Over the course of three weeks, three exhibitions will present new works from over 50 of our current members,
highlighting the disparate and varied practices of artists, both local and international.
This festival seeks to re-evaluate and re-align the position of the members show within the Catalyst program.
It is a rolling event that will feature performances, talks and free workshops for our members to attend over the month of September.
EX Michael Fortune | Jeremy Hutchison | Jonah King | Eva & Franco Mattes | Ebrahim El Moly | Frank Wasser
Exhibition runs: 7th – 29th August
Closing Lecture: Sarah Tuck 12am 30th August
EX considers the tense relationship between theoretical belief and the extent to which those beliefs are or are not enacted. The exhibition deals with how conviction is continuously subverted by political and theological apathy which produces a society that is unable to absolutely realise ideological propositions of dissent.
Liam Crichton | Hannah McBride | Mark Orange | PRIME Collective | Tom Watt
4 – 25 July 2014
Artist Talk: Mark Orange, Friday 4th July 1pm – The Old Museum Arts Centre
For A False Sense, the Belfast based PRIME Collective invites visitors to join them at Catalyst Arts at 6pm on Wednesday, 9th July. The gallery will act as the departure point for a journey to Templemore Avenue Swimming Baths in East Belfast.
A False Sense seeks to challenge institutional structures for displaying art whilst asking questions of what the experience of visiting a gallery has become. The exhibition questions ideas around expectation, encounter and uses the peripheries of the gallery as a site for all the work. Catalyst Arts has commissioned the artists to create five new works. The artists selected engage with ideas surrounding architecture, navigation, and boundaries in a variety of media including sound, video, installation, sculpture and critiques.
With thanks to Uel Weir at Paperclip Architects, Rooneys Gym, HENCH, Tony Haynes, DSNT, Declan Hill at Forum for Alternative Belfast, FABLAB, Colm Clarke, Daniel Jewesbury, Ruaidhri Lennon, & all our volunteers.
somewhereto_, with curatorial support from @Catalyst Arts, present their Artists in residence open studio in Antrim town. They have taken over the upstairs of 55 High Street Antrim, formerly a Peacocks retail unit, before that Woolworths and for the past two years, an empty space! For the past 3 weeks they have experimented, explored, made, ripped, balanced, splashed their way through a number of ideas… and they’d like to share them with you. A dinner of sorts will be on hand, in the hope of a conversation around the space and what the creative future of it could be.
7th Aug | Open Studio Event | 55 High Street Antrim
Catalyst Arts is pleased to present ‘All That Remains To Be Seen’
All That Remains To Be Seen’ has been created in response to a joint members open call with Ormston House, Limerick. Two separate shows have been developed from a collection of artist members from the two galleries.
Catalyst Arts is pleased to present this year’s *Student & Recent Graduate Show
Selected through an international open call, the exhibition brings together students and recent graduates from throughout the UK, Ireland, Europe, and the United States. Universities represented through this exhibition include Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Frankfurt), Goldsmiths College (London), and Crawford College of Art & Design (Cork)
* Fred Bungay * Kristyna Campbell * Jenna Collins * Inga Danysz * Gretchen Geraets * Jasmine Johnson & Alice May Williams * Stephen Madden * Jessie Malone * Alexandra McNamee * Laura NiFhlaibhin * Roísín O’Suillivan * Giorgo Skretis * Jasper Weinstein Sheffield *
An exhibition of work to coincide with The Belfast Children’s Festival. Tactile is a one to one experience that has a direct encounter with the viewer, that reinforces the bond between artist and audience. Tactile embraces engagement with the work rather than the usual “Do Not Touch Artworks’.
Opening Night: Thursday 6th March 6-9pm (Late Night Art)
Momentum showcases MFA Belfast’s Fine Art final year students in their interim show. The work ranges from video, installation and sculpture to drawing, painting and performance. Momentum offers an insight into the unique vision of each artist, creating a dynamic, expressive and progressive show at a critical phase in their practice.
Aoife Brady | Pamela Byrne | Elizabeth – Ann Curistan | Cathy Droney | Andrew Glenn | Erin Hagan | Jonny McEwen | Rosanna McKenna | John Robinson |Katrina Sheena Smyth
Catalyst Arts is pleased to present a solo show by the Irish artist Fiona Larkin. Larkin has developed a new body of video work titled Backstory which involves writers responding to the character in the accompanying photograph. Thematically the work oscillates between fiction and documentary. The audience are encouraged to create rather than translate meaning.
Fiona Larkin artist and writers talk – discussion and readings – 07.12.2013 1pm
Opening preview: Thursday 5th December 6-9pm
Exhibition dates: Friday 6th December 2013 – Friday 17th January 2014
Aisling O’Beirn | Thorsten Fleisch | Pól Murphy | Christian Cherene | Richard Box
Forces is a group exhibition that investigates artists that relinquish control to natural forces or attempt to harness them in their work.
Each work is made from found objects that, by exploiting specific scientific properties of the materials, the artists have created dynamic works where functional objects are re purposed and become animated.
Radiation, electricity, electrical resonance, entropy and gravity are manipulated in order to create works where the final outcome is uncertain.
Frequently flirting with danger, the exhibition becomes a high energy, tense environment.
Exhibition dates: Friday 8th November – Friday 29th November 2013
Dorothy Cross | Emmanuelle Negre | Marie Farrington | Laura McMorrow | Jacqueline Holt
A Subtle Matter was an exhibition that predominantly focused on fragility. A discrete set of works by artists from the UK, France and Ireland prompted considerable movement within the gallery space. The artists explored the theme through video, sculpture and installation. Using the aforementioned mediums to engage with space, light and time. The show constantly changed; thus creating intrigue and excitement to highlight miniscule the happenings.
The 10th edition of FIX performance art festival will be held 4th – 20th September 2013 in Catalyst Arts Gallery and around the city centre of Belfast.
FIX 13 is the tenth installment of Europe’s longest running performance and live art biennial. Established in 1994, FIX has sought to bring together a dynamic and diverse range of local and international practitioners across a variety of city centre and site-specific locations.
Bringing together both emerging and established artists and performance collectives, FIX 13 will launch with an open platform at Platform Arts on 4th September for all those wanting to be involved.
This is the most heavily programmed FIX to date, with over twenty performances across a two week period. FIX 13 is an integral part of Catalyst Arts’ twentieth anniversary celebrations.
Participants include: Amanda Coogan | Bbeyond | Charlotte Bosanquet | Colm Clarke | CROW | David Fagan | Debbie Guinnane | Essi Kausalainen | Katharina Greeven | Janks Archive | Marcel Sparmann & Mayte Kappel Rovira | Mediations: The Map is not the Terrain | Mitch Conlon | Nora Jacobs | Phil Hession | Rob Ireson | Remi Voche | Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell | Tonya McMullan | Unit1 | Triple AAA.
Liam Crichton | Flora Moscovici | Phil Hession | Brain Patterson | Eoin Dara | Deirdre McKenna | Rob Hilken | Mark Orange
Susan MacWilliam | Christoff Gillen | Craig Donald | Benji De Burca | Joanna Fursmann | Heather Allen | Alice Clark
Jean-Baptiste Ganne | John Matthews | Miguel Martin | Ben Craig | John Cashin | Alastair MacLennan | Niamh O’Malley | Nevan Lehart
Amy Brooks | Daniel Jewsbury | Siofra Campbell | Brian Connolly | Fuyuka Shindo | Helen Sharp | Jane Butler | Keef Winter
Tonya McMullan | Phillip McCrilly | Colin Darke | Lyndsey McDougall | David Mahon | Charlotte Bosanquet | Colm Clarke
Allan Hughes | Seamus Harahan | Phil Collins | David Sherry | Katrina Sheena Smyth | Aisling O’Beirn
Eva Isleifsdottir & Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir | Karen Vaughn | Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell | Hugh O’Donnell | Barbara H Larkin
Duncan Ross | Stephen Millar | Dougal McKenzie | Caelan Bristow | Kim McAleese | Joanne Proctor | Mary McIntyre | Peter Richards
Keike Twisselmann | Breda Lynch | Clodagh Emoe | Maurice Doherty | Gerard Carson | Michael Hanna | Elina Medley
Jonathon H S Ross | Brendan O’Neill | Zoe Murdoch | Caelan Bristow | Aisling O’Beirn | Iain Griffin | Cian Donnelly | Jordan Hutchings
Kevin Gaffney | Dan Shipsides | Ursula Burke | Fiona Larkin | Brian J Morrison | Una Walker | Sinead O’Donnell | Sara O’Gorman
I Heart Catalyst Arts was a fundraising event organised as part of Catalyst’s 20th Birthday Programme. The event consisted of a fundraising raffle, offering ticket buyers the chance to acquire works by a range of different artists, some local and emerging, others international and established. Catalyst invited previous directors and artists who have exhibited at Catalyst in the last twenty years to make and donate a piece of work in a medium of their choice. These works were in turn entered into a raffle where the raffle tickets cost £15. The pieces were exhibited online and in the gallery for a period of time before the birthday party; allowing visitors to view the works in the run up to the raffle and offering the Belfast public a chance to experience a broad overview of the visual art scene across Northern Ireland.
Participating Artists: Kurt Johannessen/Pavana Reid | Monika Gunther/Ruedi Schill | Nathan Walker/Victoria Gray | Paul Carter/Alexandra Zeirle | Paul Coillard/EdJohnson
DUO DAYS is a performance art event, inviting artist couples from around the world, (artists in a relationship, collaborating in performance) to investigate the theme of duality. Through collaborative performances we observe how two people who co-exist and co-inhabit through performance art as well as domestically, utilize this closeness and intuitiveness which their relationship affords, providing opportunity to further test the nature of relationships; from domestic life to social ethics, from mind and body to art and audience. Duo performances demonstrate how exchange and dialogue in the live moment can reflect upon interconnectedness in the wider sphere of social responsibility.
Long Drawn Out is a contemporary drawing show that focuses on processes of production that include time-based drawing, performance and mechanically assisted drawings where authoritorial control is sometimes relinquished.
The participating artists are: John Beattie, Séamus Dunbar, Tim Knowles, Alice Maher, Christine Mackey and Jonathan Ross.
Ciaran Hussey / Aisling Kane / Tonya McMullan, with Jordan Hutchings / Duncan Ross / Andrea Theis
The practitioners featured in this exchange between Catalyst Arts (Belfast) and Monstertruck are all connected to and/or based in Belfast – a city that is often subject to misrepresentation as a result of frequently one-dimensional, myopic (international) press coverage of events.
The works shown in P.O.V. (points of view) in different ways examine, subvert or challenge ideas surrounding the theme of representation, questioning how a perception of a particular place, subject or of the human condition can be mediated by the method used to portray it.
Dead Air, Ciaran Hussey’s three-channel video/sound installation, explores the themes of expectancy, media representation and the deferral of arrival.
Referencing The Theatre of the Absurd – particularly Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ with its themes of failure and breakdown of communication – Dead Air features found footage of TV reporters in stasis and unaware of the gaze of unseen viewers as they await some form of response, command or instruction from those behind the camera.
The redressed power balance and altered relationship between subject and viewer generates an uneasy state of suspense; the humorous, awkward atmosphere amplified by the waiting room-esque melody of a generic, midi-file version of the song ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’. Hints of vulnerability, confusion, dissatisfaction, vanity and boredom interrupt the reporters’ normally carefully constructed onscreen confidence and scripted emotional reactions.
Plate 36 from Goya’s The Disasters of War depicts an army officer taking pleasure from his installation of a corpse. The image of Lynndie England, joyfully posing with a row of naked and masked Abu Ghraib prisoners, has become notorious – the photo ‘tableaux’ constructed by her and her fellow soldiers perpetuating through the World Wide Web as a collaborative opera aperta.
Duncan Ross’s Fail is an object extruded from this image, selected for its meme status as one of the most disseminated and widely re-appropriated images available online.
Roughly the size of a typical computer screen image, the cross stitches mimic pixilation and provide a disconcerting contrast between the handmade quality of the object and the subject matter of the original image – domestic labour used to sew a folktale from its palette of flesh and military. Ross outsourced the fabrication of the piece to Wai-Fun Wong, introducing an additional state of mediated reproduction.
Many of those living in the area of north Belfast known as the Ardoyne, especially men, are often misrepresented in the media. By taking portraits of close friends and members of her family, Aisling Kane aims to redefine and reclaim a place that is still regarded with unease, offering a different, unmediated perspective of what could be considered to be a ‘hidden’ community.
Photographed in domestic spaces, Kanezo, James and Gabe provide an account of men from this community who, in their half-naked, tattooed state, appear almost vulnerable and yet are also powerful and iconic. They are depicted in a situation and context that, in collaboration with Kane, has ultimately been determined, decided and approved by them.
“The Lure of the Local is the pull of place that operates on all of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation”.
The postcard is a nostalgic artefact – an unsealed message imbued with memory, distance and the ideals of tourism. Here You Go began as a participatory postcard project that invited members of the public to mark and describe a place of significance on a postcard mapping a mile radius (with the gallery PS² in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter at its centre)
Since then these locations and recollections have been photographed by Jordan Hutchings and Tonya McMullan. The photographs aim to capture the locality as it is today while still referencing the personal significance of the initial contributor.
37 of the original 60 postcards and their re-imagined doubles are now on display at Monstertruck. They show views and recollections of the city, of the places that are and the places that were, presented by those living in it.
The touristic act of photographing Weimar’s iconic monument of Goethe and Schiller in Andrea Theis’s mixed media installation Reviewing Image Disturbance serves to generate meaning for the visitors to this site – a record of their presence in a city that has created a (cultural) identity for a German nation. Theis’s intervention, carried out over a period of five days, questions this experience. Her presence at the monument, and in the images taken of it, places her in a situation where she is at once in a position of power and also highly vulnerable, exposing herself to a range of responses from tourist faced with this unexpected interruption (documented on the wall-mounted image panels).
The video documentation of the work is projected on to the window of the gallery, creating an interplay between the time-lapse CCTV footage of crowds visiting the statue in Weimar and the unceasing flow of passers-by and tourists traversing Dublin’s busy Temple Bar district.
The methods used to visually represent a subject or place are becoming increasingly problematic in a society in which visual imagery holds so much currency and its distribution is instantaneous and widespread. What is undisputable in each of the works in P.O.V. (points of view)is an awareness of the inherent power vested in the act of capturing, (re-) appropriating and (re-) presenting an image.
Exhibiting Artists : Alisson Gothz, Yiftach Belsky, Jonathan Schmidt-Ott, Marilyn Gaffney, Tom Ridout, Suman Kabiraj,
Anastasia Savinova, Sebastian Reiser, Gregor Schlatte, Viktoriya Beshparova, Vlado Alonso, Ebrahim El Moly, Noor Iskandar,
Rola Khayyat, Kevin Traynor, Nicolas Lamas, Robert Ellis, Lucía Luna, Martin McGagh, Barbara H. Larkin, Algimantas P. Kaveckis,
Damian Magee, Andrea Wenglowskyj, Oscar Ledesma, Jon Delgado, Jack Latham, Lea Golda Holterman, Sabina Grasso, Samantha Harvey,
Ar Do Rothar, David Nugent, Ann Mansolino, Ruby Wallis, Rowan D G Corkill, Katherine Mitchell, John O’Toole, Ashle Bailey, Kristian Smith.
In conjunction with the Belfast Photo Festival, Catalyst Arts has selected photographs from a local, national and international open call of emerging photographers. Catalyst will present a slideshow projection of the chosen work at Love and Death on the 7th of June. From the 8th of June the photographs will then be projected at The Black Box intermittently throughout the Belfast Photo Festival.
PAUL CHAZAL | EARS | HOLD^UP | MARTIN HYDE & ADRIEN AROUD | LAWRENCE STREET WORKSHOP | TWELVE/ELEVEN
UNDERCONSTRUCTION will feature works-in-progress made by local and international artists and collectives. This exhibition aims to question collective experience and the relationship between artistic process and the audience’s experience of a finished ‘product’. UNDERCONSTRUCTION invites visitors to view all stages of the set-up and actively participate in upcoming associated workshops (EARS) and open calls (Hold^Up and Untitled Gallery).
Featuring
Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell, Ms Clare Biddles, Linda Monks & Uke Belfast
Tucked away in a charming lane this stunning 0.0478-acre campsite offers a beautiful location for relaxing holidays. Play games and if you’re feeling adventurous sunbathe indoors. Or why not while away an afternoon on our bijou golf course, a shining symbol of all that is the very best in contemporary golf. If it’s hidden gems with friendly staff you’re after, then make sure you include Catalyst Campsite on your itinerary.
Facilities
• We accommodate up to 5 tents
• The campsite offers excellent toliet facilities
• The campsite is open 1st-16th March 2013
Grid Ref: NW460296
Elevation: 8m
Activities
The Catalyst Campsite offers a range of activities to keep everyone occupied. Surrounded by 1.7 km of trails, there’s plenty of space for walking.
If you’re feeling adventurous, we also offer:
a beach
arcade
tumbleweave racing
lawn sports
shadow puppetry
stone painting
100% safe indoor sunbathing (may only result in a fake tan)
With our evening entertainments zone, there’s more than a day can hold.
Exhibiting Artists : Alessandra Giacinti, Liam Crichton, John Duncan, Jacqueline Holt and Stephen
Madden
9 March – 14 April 2013
Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall
The works selected for In a Certain Light engage with ideas surrounding alternative narratives
and shifting physical and liminal spaces in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture and
photography.
Exhibiting Artists : Niall de Buitléar | Erin Doherty | Clodagh Emoe | Helena Hamilton | Peter Marley
OUT|TUO is an exhibition that will showcase work by five selected artists who use their work as a way of enquiry into the abstract nature of human thought. Working in an ephemeral nature these artists explore their inner workings that are made accessible to the external world, often in an engaging manner.
O U T | T U O | Workshop events
Tuesday 22nd January | Goal Setting
12:00 – 13:00 Fergal O’Malley from VAI will give a talk about the transition between student and artist 13:15 – 15:00 Personal Planning and Action Plans – with Catalyst Arts director’s Alice Clark & Katrina Sheena Smyth
Wednesday 23rd January | Artist Tools
12:00 – 13:00 Brendan O’ Neill from QSS will give a talk on his experience in receiving artist submissions for
exhibitions. Followed by a presentation on the handling and transportation of artwork.
13:15 – 14:00 Professional tools that support our practice with Catalyst Arts director Katrina Sheena Smyth
14:00 – 14:45 How to write an Artist Proposal with Catalyst Arts director Alissa Kleist and Amy Brooks
15:00 – 16:00 The importance of promoting your practice with Catalyst Arts director’s Rob Hilken & Ruaidhri Lennon
Thursday 24th January | Building Art Relationships
12:00 – 13:00 The importance of volunteering and being involved in the arts with past-director of Catalyst Arts Deirdre McKenna.
13:15 – 13:45 Iain Griffin will talk about his experience gained from working on Art Magazine Critical Bastards
13:45 – 14:15 Anthony Champa will give a talk about the experience of running Array Studios 14:30 -16:00 – Katrina Sheena Smyth will give a brief talk about the OUT|TUO exhibition followed by a screening of
Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present
Thursday 31st January | 18:00 – 19:30 | Participatory Performance Art Workshop with Brian Patterson
This workshop will introduce aspects of intention, what is the place of intention in performance art in general and particularly in respect to improvisational or process work? Individually, what are our main intentions and collectively can there be any unifying intentions behind improvisational or process work?
Thursday 31st January | 18:00 – 19:30 | Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought with Clodagh Emoe
Clodagh Emoe will give a lecture on Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought.
Catalyst Arts presents the Annual Student Show which provides a platform to demonstrate innovative, dynamic and stimulating work from the UK, Ireland and Worldwide. The selection of students and recent graduates work ranges from performance, installation, painting, sculpture and inter-disciplinary practice.
Featuring: Craig Cox | Kevin Gaffney | Cecilia Giménez ® | Anthony Luvera | Brian J Morrison | Artur Zmijewski
WE is a group exhibition featuring selected works by local, national and international artists that explore issues surrounding identity through various mediums.
Anthony Luvera will give an artist talk at 1pm on Friday the 17th of November. This is a free event and all are welcome.
Persijn Broersen | Stuart Calvin | Phil Collins | Martin Healy | Margit Lukács | Tim Millen
What is reality and how is it defined?
Catalyst Arts presents Fata Morgana, a group show featuring selected
works by local, national and international artists engaging with
aspects of ‘reality’. The exhibition reflects on how artists question,
negotiate, examine, (de-) construct and manipulate our perception and
experience of reality by exploring the cinematic, the artificial,
fantasy and the mythical in a variety of different mediums.
Fata Morgana will include a number of artist talks and screenings in the gallery.
Saturday 20 October
2pm – 3pm
Artist talk by Dublin-based film maker and photographer Martin Healy
Catalyst Arts, Belfast.
from 9th to 21st of September
Opening 8th of September at 7pm.
In May 2012, Catalyst Arts exhibited a selection of our members work in ‘La Station’, nice.
Now the tables have turned, we are pleased to present La Stations’ selected artists here in Catalyst Arts. The 9 artists from Nice are : Jean-Baptiste Ganne, Alexandra Guillot, Florian Pugnaire & David Raffini, Vivien Roubaud, Ugo Schiavi, Cédric Teisseire, Tatiana Wolska and Gérald Panighi
Motohiko Odani
Takeshi Murata
Thomas Johnson
Alexis Milne
Craig Fisher
————–
The show explores the relationship between violence and acting out. Freud’s death drive has been described by Jean Baudrillard as a “nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another”. Baudrillard discusses this subconscious desire in relation to the project of science and technology, which he suggests, is driven by a quest for immortality, exemplified through cloning and cryogenics. Science and technology also have the effect of manifesting homogenous and uniform objects and experiences, which embody the formal qualities of the death drive. In this sense he suggests that the project of science is “to reconstruct a homogenous and uniformly consistent Universe.” This clone of the real world, in a technological form, embodies the formal qualities that satisfy the death drive; repetition and homogeneity.
The show will explore the relationship between Baudrillard’s notion that science and technology produce objects and experiences that embody the death drive and Freud’s notion that the death drive leads people to re-enact (act out) and repeat traumatic experiences. This relationship can be realized by viewing technology as a form of performance or acting. The resultant technological object / experience is a kind of travesty, a fake or re-enactment of nature. The works in the show will explore the new sanitised invention of the world, our technologically mediated environment, the environment in which abject and mucky nature has been eradicated. This environment is presented as a world in which the death drive is satisfied, where violence and the abject have been displaced through a technological, man made infrastructure, suggesting that, through our engagement in a technologically mediated world, we have suppressed our fear of mortality and absolved ourselves of responsibility, distorting our relationship with the origins of all our actions; “real,” unmediated nature.
Catalyst Arts will be taking over the Belfast Waterfront for the month of August with our latest exhibition ‘Augment’.
‘Augment’ is a curated members show of the surreal, featuring local and international Artists who work with a broad range of different media.
Blaine O’Donnell / Robbie Nolan / Joanne Proctor / Fiona ni Mhaoilir / Ramon Kassam / Michael fitzgerald / Greg Rook / Carol Anne Connolly / Ciara McMahon / Heather Gabel / Sharon Boothroyd / Emma Campbell / Aoife Flynn / Cainneach Lennon / Janet Moris / Tadhg Ó Cuirrín / Olivier Larivière / Leo Koivistoinen / Ross Watson / Judith Leupi
The exhibition will open at 6pm on the 2nd of August at The Watefront Hall.
Flora Moscovici, Craig Donald, Karin Hagen, Emma Boyd, Helen McDonnell Deirdre McKenna & Miguel Martin (workshop)
An exhibition of works by contemporary painters, maybe.
∆CURSED∆ provides a platform for these artists to display works that exist on
the periphery of the medium. Their practices all challenge the formal
qualities and explore or bridge boundaries between painting and everything
else. This a painting show in the loosest possible sense.
Workshop with Miguel Martin, Saturday 23rd June 12pm – 4pm (Free of
charge)
For bookings please contact catalystarts@gmail.com
fifteenovereight is a collection of works from a group of thirteen
emerging artists in Belfast. These artists work in various media
forms, from painting and drawing to film, installation, photography
and sculpture with themes such as space, light, human and industrial
expression, and atmosphere.
Whilst the painters focus on bleak urban scenes and melancholic figure
work, the sculptors use ceramics and metal, combining modern
industrial aesthetics with traditional craft. An illustrator applies
dark humour and shrewd satire, and print and film-makers explore
innovative sculptural forms and dark atmospheric environments.
The uniting vision of these thirteen artists is to visually express a
current stance on our modern economic and social climate, and to
reflect on the influences this has on both a personal and communal
level.
Steven Pollock
Marc Dunlop
Megan Gibson
Tsui
Colm Wray
Hayley Patrick
Alison Steers
Paul Murphy
Rob Hilken
Allan McKeown
Sam Megaw
Adeva McGuinness
Tomaz Andreson
After the success of the first collaboration Switched in September 2010, The Joinery Dublin
will once again collaborate with Catalyst Arts Belfast to present a selection of work by two
recent graduates selected by the Joinery, from the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork
and NCAD in Dublin. This work will be re-exhibited in Catalyst Arts, providing the artists with
an opportunity to show in another gallery context and to a new audience. In March the recent
graduate works selected by Catalyst were exhibited at The Joinery in Dublin. This exchange
provides an opportunity for recent graduate artists to showcase their work to new and broader
audiences.
Richard Forrest was chosen by the Joinery as part of the 2011 graduate programme.
In his current practice Forrest explores a relationship with technology by making, hacking,
glitching and subverting assumed uses of digital media.
——————
Richard Forrest graduated from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2011 with first class
honours in his studio practice. Forrest is a founding member of Sample Studios. He also works
as a gallery facilitator in the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. In 2011, he was awarded the Tyndell
Purchase prize, the CIT Registrars Prize: Research Bursary, the Ciaran Langford Memorial
Bursary Award (6 month residency at Backwater studios), the Cork Printmakers Studio Bursary
Award and the Joinery Graduate Selection Prize for his work at last year’s Crawford degree show
exhibition,
Emanuel Rohss was chosen by the Joinery as part of the 2011 graduate programme.
His work takes the dialectics of materiality and form as its point of departure. In his recent work
Rohss investigates the physical characteristics of painting and sculpture – the limitations and
potential of the mediums – as well as the relationship between objects.
___________
Emanuel Rohss was born in Göteborg, Sweden. He studied at Valand School of fine Art and
graduated from the National College of Art & Design with a 1st class Hons degree in Painting in
2011. He has shown work in galleries, museums and art centres in Sweden, Germany, the UK,
Ireland, China, the Czech republic and the United States. He has worked in collaboration with the
Dublin based art group MART, and the Swedish fanzine collaborative Jarko.
Rohss is currently living in London undertaking an MA in the Royal College of Art.
The Joinery is a not for profit contemporary art and project space set up in Dublin in 2008 which
has become known for its challenging and energetic programme of visual art and experimental
live music.
SUNSHINE & PRECIPITATION / DE LA PLUIE & DU BEAU TEMPS
Catalyst Arts, Nice Exchange in partnership with ”La Station”, Nice, France.
This year we are very excited to organize a new partnership with La Station as an exchange between both organisation and gallery space.
SUNSHINE & PRECIPITATION / DE LA PLUIE & DU BEAU TEMPS
12th – 19th may 2012.
Opens on 12th at 6pm/18h,
Sarah Maison & Little d Big B will perform at 8pm/20h
The show will be presented a selection of Catalyst Arts members ‘s curiosities.
La Station is an Organisation that promotes the most contemporary artistic creations through its artists’ studios and its exhibition space. The collective has occupied many different spaces since 1996 and is now situated in a disused slaughterhouse.
La Station has participated in several projects and exchanges with other organisations around France and Europe.
more information on La Station can be found at www.lastation.org or via facebook: www.facebook.com/LaStation.nice
Catalyst Arts presents VICINITY, a group exhibition investigating temporary, adaptable and transitory methods for exploring Belfast city. Artists work in an engaged manner using the mile radius of the gallery as a starting point to make new work in the gallery and at offsite locations. Artists:
Bbeyond ‘fare’
fare utilised the transient communal site of the back of a black taxi inviting the audience to share an intimate experience with the artists as their taxi makes it way through the city. Ten taxis queued in Squeeze Gut Alley at the galleries entrance and begun their journey at 7pm sharp. Artists – Anne Quail, Fergus Byrne, Pavana Reid, Rainer Pagel, James King, Tina Hopp, Felipe Faundez, Chrissie Cadman, Sinead O’Donnell & Charlotte Bosanquet, Phillip McCrilly & Kim McAleese, each made live performances in the taxis
Jean-pierre Bertrand
Brussels based artist, Jean Pierre Bertrand, travelled to Belfast to make new work for Vicinity, his hexagonal concrete blocks can be found at six locations on the outskirts of Belfast
Fiona Larkin ‘Wolfs Den’
Larkin invited participants to borrow a custom embroidered ‘Wolfs Den’ jacket from the gallery, in return she asked that participants allowed her to follow and video them. The documentation of which was incorporated into the installation.
Shiro Masuyama ‘Legal Parking’
Masuyami has worked nomadically all over the world, recently moved out of Berlin and now based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For Vicinity Masuyami exhibited ‘Legal Parking’ for information on the project please follow the link. Legal Parking
Jim McCracken
McCracken is a belfast based print and street artist who created a site specific flyposted work in the gallery for Vicinity.
Seamus Nolan Nolan created a site specific installtion ‘pantone’ within the gallery by painting the back wall a mixture of the three colours of the Irish flag, mixed in equal quantities.
MA art in public Students on the University of Ulster MA Art in Public course used Catalyst as a research hub and installation area where they worked on projects which engaged with the are, using a range of media. On the last day of Vicinity Pauline Hadaway, director of Belfast Exposed Gallery chaired a discussion on their project entitled ‘walking as research’
zones of response zones of response developed an interactive project, participants were invited to explore the area on foot, then; using their mobile phones, text words they would like to see removed form the city to a designated phone number. The words were then projected onto the gallery walls revealing a textual narrative of Belfast city.
In collaboration with The Joinery, Catalyst Arts presents a selection of work by recent graduates chosen from the University of Ulster Degree Show 2011 (Belfast), highlighting the variety of output by local emerging practitioners. Graduates chosen are Amy Brooks, Stuart Calvin and Ruaidhri Lennon.
This work will be re-exhibited in the Joinery, and provides the selected artists with an opportunity to show alongside their peers in a new, curated context.
Afterwards, the recent graduate works selected by The Joinery will be exhibited in Catalyst Arts. Through this exchange both galleries hope that the work made by artists from both cities will reach new, and broader, audiences.
Catalyst Arts was founded to support and exhibit the work of students, local, emerging and more established artists, often exhibiting them alongside international names. The organization provides a training ground for future artistic, curatorial and arts administrative talent, and is committed to providing services and opportunities for its large members’ base. As a result, the gallery continues to present cutting edge and challenging contemporary art on a modest budget, showcased in an accessible and dynamic art space in the heart of Belfast. Over the years, Catalyst has worked and collaborated with a diverse range of organisations, groups and institutions in Northern Ireland, the Republic and abroad.
The gallery is run by a board of voluntary directors, each serving for a maximum of two years, and has implemented this model since its constitution. The gallery programme is co-ordinated by the committee and consists of both budgeted and unfunded projects, including an annual student and members show. Catalysts members pay an annual fee and in return can borrow equipment, contribute to the Annual general meeting, enter calls for open submissions and exhibit in the annual members show programmed by the gallery.
Opening to the public on Thursday 23 February, 7–9pm.
Catalyst Arts presents the first solo show in Belfast by Irish artist Sean Lynch, showcasing an expanded version of the artist’s ongoing DeLorean Progress Report. Based around the bankruptcy and subsequent aftermath of the DeLorean car factory, which operated in Dunmurry from 1981-2, a series of photographs trace a path taken by the artist to find the location of the tooling once used to make the body of the car. Furthering this investigation of the materiality of DeLorean, the gallery will feature ongoing work by Lynch to produce sections of a DMC-12 car by handmade rather than industrial means. New developments in the project are detailed in a free booklet accompanying the exhibition
In addition, a collection of photographs, sculptures and archival material are displayed in Catalyst’s Project Space, all collected through Lynch’s investigations into the contexts and histories of public art in Ireland.
Sean Lynch (b. 1978, Kerry. Lives and works in Berlin and Co. Limerick) has exhibited at IMMA, Dublin; Camden Arts Centre, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. He is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.
Sean Lynch will give a talk in the gallery on Friday 24 February at 1pm. All are welcome to attend.
Catalyst Arts presents The Featherweight Portable Museum, a joint venture between Catalyst Arts (Belfast) and Media Pyhat (Finland), bringing together an eclectic body of work made by selected UK, Irish and Finnish artists in a travelling multi-media exhibition. The first showcase of the exhibition will take place at Catalyst Arts on Thursday 1st of December, with screenings, installations and performance art running from 6pm to 9pm. The work (a combination of the independent selections made by both organisations) will travel to Finland this year.
David Callan, Aideen Doran, Nicola Godman, Laura Jarvelainson, Lisa Marie Johnson, Hyun Joo Min, Nicky Larkin, Henrik Malmstrom, Bita Razavi, Jaakko Karunen, Bennie Reilly, Dominic Thorpe
In 2003, in response to the increase in artists working with new media technology, Queen Street Studios set up a Digital Studio within their premises. With increasing demand, came an expansion of premises, the development of the programme and facilities. Then in 2008 the Digital Studios became an independent not-for-profit organisation and The Digital Arts Studios (DAS) was born. DAS promotes the convergence of art and technology and recognises the importance of providing facilities, resources and training in this rapidly advancing field. DAS continues to develop and expand, and its residency programme is now well established. The programme aims to encourage and support new and established artists in the creation of innovative, challenging and experimental new work. The programme offers four international residencies and twelve UK & Ireland residencies each year. This exhibition has provided DAS with a timely opportunity to showcase the work of some of these artists. The works on show here represent a diversity of strategy in terms of each artist’s engagement with the digital, whilst providing an exemplary demonstration of how new media technologies intersect with visual art.
19th August – 8th September
preview Thursday 18th August, 7-9pm
Artist Talk with Bill Drummond, Thursday 1st September, 7:30pm
Catalyst Arts Gallery
“The Curfew Tower is a fortified building built in the early years of the nineteenth century in Cushendall. It has five floors, one room on each floor. From the ground up: dungeon, bathroom, living room, bedroom, bedroom. There is a kitchen adjoining the back of the tower. The accommodation allows for no more than two artists in residence at any one time.“
‘NOTICE’ is a multi-disciplinary exhibition showcasing the work of the artists who took part in the Catalyst Arts curated Curfew Tower residency program of 2010.
Exhibiting Artists: Bill Drummond, Nathan Crothers, Sinead Conlon, Stephen Anderson, Anne-Marie Dillon, Aoife Desmond, Florian Hollerweger, Angela Halliday, FIELD.
This exhibition will explore ways in which artists today continue to challenge, subvert, or deconstruct hegemonic notions of heteronormative identity in contemporary visual culture.
Through video, photography, drawing, painting, and installation, the work on display will offer an eclectic and dynamic representation of ‘other’ in today’s society.
Exhibiting artists:
Breda Lynch (Limerick)
Gavin Devine (Belfast)
Ins A Kromminga (Berlin)
Jenny Keane (Belfast)
Quinnford + Scout (Manchester)
There will also be a series of glorious accompanying events running alongside the show. Please email the gallery at catalystarts@gmail.com to reserve a place for any of the following:
Ins A Kromminga – Intersex Identities and Politics
Saturday 16th July 6pm Catalyst Arts
An informal lecture followed by a Q&A session with critically acclaimed international artist Ins A Kromminga, which will address a significant gap in public knowledge on the subject of Intersexuality as well as offer fascinating insights into the artist’s life and work.
(dis)playing the Other Film Night
Thursday 21st July 8pm Catalyst Arts
A selection of cinematic delights selected by artists Quinnford & Scout. Details of which will be announced nearer the time.
Breda Lynch and Jenny Keane in conversation
Wednesday 27th July 7pm Catalyst Arts
As part of (dis)playing the Other, artists Breda Lynch and Jenny Keane will host an evening of engaging discussion, offering insights into their respective artistic practices and their work on show as part of the exhibition.
Pride Week tour of (dis)playing the Other at Catalyst Arts
Thursday 28th July 2pm
An afternoon introduction and tour of the show with Catalyst curators Eoin Dara and Kim McAleese.
Artist talk: Gavin Devine
Friday 29th July 2pm Catalyst Arts
Following on from the success of his recent degree show at the University of Ulster, Devine will be discussing his intimate portraits of an older generation of LGBTQ individuals in Northern Ireland.
Catalyst Critical Mass as part of Belfast Pride Parade
Saturday 30th July
Get your wheels out and come join the Catalyst Bike Gang as part of Ireland’s largest LGBT parade. Further details to be announced in the coming weeks.
2nd June – 23rd June. Preview Thursday 2nd June, 7pm-10pm
This art and architecture crossover exhibition explores the city of the past, present and future. Local Artists explore the vitality, heritage and character of old and new Belfast. What is the city becoming? Are we protecting heritage adequately? And international artist wouder if cities are just becoming clones of one another, creating an endless high street existence…
There will be a series of events/talks/debates running throughout the duration of the exhibition to keep things interesting and hopefully answering some of the above questions. Details of which can be found below
Exhibiting Artists
Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell / Aideen Doran / Andrew Dodds
Sharone Lifschitz (speaker) / Eoin McGinn / Michael Pinsky
Keith Winter / Forum for Alternative Belfast
Events/Talks-
Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell- Builder Bowling
7pm-10pm, 2nd June, Catalyst Arts Gallery
Playfully making visible the threat of extinction of real buildings in Belfast.
Keith Winter and Forum for Alternative Belfast.
6:30pm, 9th June, Catalyst Arts Gallery
A talk based on the work shown the gallery space, relating to the constant changing face of Belfast.
Sharone Lifschitz- The Traffic Light and Monument.
6:30pm, 16th June, Catalyst Art Gallery.
Sharone Lifschitzs talk will centre on actions and projects created in cities such as London, Munich, Belfast and Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Lifschitz’s work unfolds as a progression of actions and interactions for which she is both choreographer and participant and through which the city becomes a ground for an encounter and the encounter becomes a tool for a reading of the city and creating interventions in its urban fabric. The talk traces several projects both completed and in progress.
