Padraig Cunningham’s With-Hold
NCAD postgrad exhibits at Goethe-Institut Irland
With-Hold forms part of artist Padraig Cunningham’s 2019 thesis submission for the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World in the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin.
The exhibition at the Goethe-Institut, With-Hold proposes a series of intervals, each one based on a particular site: firstly the Goethe-Institut itself and its role as instigator as a place to think and explore, and how it along with the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World have etched a series of intersecting possibilities for education, theory and making; secondly, Kesh Caves in Sligo and the folklore narrative the cave as a portal, a primordial site of consciousness, a place to enter and a time to be-in; and thirdly, the tiny Claggan Island in Co. Mayo that is just about held onto the mainland by a small sandbank. The film explores the cliche of the cave while an accompanying publication speculates on the island’s precarious position and the opposing forces that keep it in place.
The work is presented as a series of intervals, embedded in the philosophy of Deleuze and his reconsideration of temporality through cinema and image-making.
An embodiment of thought in-time or sub-time where Art as a quasi object, a portal, is unfixed and in transit.
An event.
Something to be apprehended than held counter to.
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With-Hold is organised under the aegis of Common Denominator, an exhibition programme curated by Art in the Contemporary World, a theory-practice postgraduate MA/MFA programme at the School of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, led by Francis Halsall, Declan Long and Sarah Pierce.
Return Gallery
Goethe-Institut Irland
37 Merrion Square
Dublin 2
Opening 20th September, 2019, 6.30 – 9pm
Exhibition runs through 31st October, 2019.
