The Queeratorial
A Pallas Projects exhibition curated by NCAD postgrad Aoife Banks
Pallas Projects/Studios present The Queeratorial curated by Aoife Banks the fifth exhibition of its 2019 Artist-Initiated Projects programme, featuring artists Becks Butler, Andrej Gétmán, Jordan Hearns, Ciarán O’Keeffe, Day Magee, Maïa Nunes, Lu Saborío, Jack Scollard and Hannah Tiernan.
The Queeratorial posits an inquiry into contemporary queer expression, embodiment and desire in Ireland. Presenting work from emerging artists working in a diverse range of mediums such as photography, performance, sculpture, interactive gaming and textiles, this group exhibition addresses pressing issues surrounding gender, sexuality and race in Irish culture. Through spatial queering and a series of performances, workshops and reading groups, The Queeratorial transforms the gallery space into a queerscape of dialogue, relation, affectivity and reorientation in which we may explore what it means to be queer in Ireland and the effects and affects of our cultural and spatial surroundings on identity and desire.
Through playful spatial deviation and architectural disruption, the curational queering of the gallery space and the work that sits within it brings to question how the space we inhabit may orient or disorient us. As Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance. How do we reorient, or disrupt space? The spatiality of heteronormative and cisnormative hegemonies orient the LGBTQ+ body so as to make it queer, or “other”. Queer bodies are not only shaped by the orientations they have but the orientations that bodies have toward others shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies. The feel of space or the impression of space upon a body constitutes the relations that occur between corporeal matter and architecture thus forming a queer spatiality. How may a queered space orientate, or disorientate, the queer subject? Within a queerscape how may queer bodies exist in relation to objective and subjective spatiality?
The Queeratorial aims to provide a communal space of relation, reflection and inquiry into the conditions of the Irish LGBTQ+ community such as the phenomenology of queer bodies in space, activism, disruption, desire, spatial queering, trans eroticism, coming out, fear, pleasure, shame, postcolonialism and queerness, visibility, dissent, affectivity, sociopolitical touch and trauma, gender expression and identity, postmemory of our LGBTQ+ history, invisibility, orientation and reorientation, the intersections between race, sexuality and gender and more.
Aoife Banks is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator based in Dublin. Working in sculptural, relational and curatorial queeration and disruption, Aoife’s practice explores queer theory, affective relations and dissent against oppressive sociopolitical structures and hegemonies. She received her joint BA in Fine Art and Visual Culture from the National College of Art and Design in 2018. She is currently studying her MA in Visual Culture, Art in the Contemporary World, at the National College of Art and Design.
Opening reception: 6–8pm Thursday 20th June 2019
Exhibition continues: Friday 21st June 2019 – Saturday 6th July 2019
Gallery open: 12–6pm Thursday–Saturday
http://www.pallasprojects.org/
