Keynote Lecture: Kennedy Browne
NCAD graduates Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne will discuss their emergent collaborative practice
Thursday, 13th May - Thursday, 13th May 2010
NCAD graduates Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne will discuss their emergent collaborative practice as Kennedy Browne, with particular focus on the methodologies used in this co-authored practice. Kennedy Browne’s most recent body of work, 167, was part of the Irish pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale and is currently installed in the NCAD gallery.
Kennedy Browne’s practice concerns itself with ways of temporarily occupying and transforming particular architectural fragments and cultural texts. These often obscure artefacts tend to be sourced from the last thirty years or so – within the parameters of the artists’ lifespan – responding to and being influenced by such everyday media as daytime TV reruns, reality/ surveillance television, X Factor and YouTube. Kennedy Browne is as promiscuously curious as an internet search engine and aims to sutre these found texts to existing or constructed communities of interest, typically using processes of scripting and appropriation and acting as co-directors in moving-image work. This practice often creates incongruous territories between ‘real’ and artificial, politics and kitsch. The actors in their projects are concerned with global economics and natural resources, and as a series, these uncanny cultural artefacts begin to re-trace an alternative historical trajectory linked to contemporary concerns.
167 addresses Dublin as ‘the city Google chose’, home to what Facebook – another recent corporate arrival to the city – has termed a ‘multilingual pool’. Kennedy Browne has filmed a video performance with an actor living in the city, selected from an open audition of people who ‘speak more than one language’. This performance took place on the roof of Liberty Hall, the city’s tallest building and home to the Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU. This performance forms a gestural riposte to a monologue dating from 1980 by economist Milton Friedman in which he discusses a pencil as an exemplary product of globalism, and evidence of the free market’s ability ‘to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world’. For the opening in Dublin, there is a special screening of 167 (Screen Tests) in the theatre space at Liberty Hall where it was originally filmed.
Sarah Browne and Gareth Kennedy graduated from the NCAD Sculpture Department in 2003, and have been working collaboratively as Kennedy Browne since 2005. Recent exhibitions include Blue Collar Blues at the Kunstihoone Tallinn, Estonia; SACRIFICE ZONE, online commission for Arcade, London (2009); Mediations II Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Poznan, Poland; and Current Trends, Past Prospects, solo exhibition at Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin (2007). Kennedy Browne will participate in Firestation Artist Studios THINK TANK programme with curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion and in 2010 will have a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and also present new work at the Lodz Biennial.
For more information please contact +353 (0) 1 6364390 or gallery@staff.ncad.ie
Open Mon – Fri 1pm- 5pm, NCAD Gallery, 100 Thomas Street, Dublin 8, Ireland.
facebook.com/NCADGallery
twitter.com/NCAD_Gallery
