First impressions are that the exhibition feels overcrowded, with objects occupying the floor and images taking up all of the wall space, leaving little breathing room for individual artworks. Assumedly this lack of space is due to the nature of the curatorial project, which invited the same number of artists to return to Letterkenny as were included in Redline, Denver, a much larger and more minimal, warehouse-type space. In addition, the diverse range of practices, utilising all manner of artistic media, adds to the overall feeling of confusion in the smaller and more traditional white cube environment of Letterkenny’s Regional Cultural Centre. This overall impression signals one of the pitfalls of organising an exhibition in this manner – curatorial editing decisions can be overridden by the fact that artists have been invited to exhibit new works which may compete or jar with one another when brought together in a new space. Despite these initial reservations, closer inspection reveals that many of the works do in fact relate to one another by finding resonances in the landscapes of geographically remote places.

 
Deirdre O’Mahony’s photographic research project FARM (2015) reflects upon the global plight of farmers struggling to cope with extreme weather conditions – the result of global warming and the increasing decline in food prices caused by globalisation. As geographical distance becomes increasingly surmountable, and food can be easily transported from one side of the world to another, FARM explores the detrimental effects this has on agriculture. On first glance we see familiar images of farmland in Connemara and Kerry. To the distracted viewer this work is a straightforward portrait of characteristic Irish farmland. However, as one looks along two rows of photographs of sheep and cattle one notices that they are interspersed with images of men working the land. Like a type of photographic punctum, to use Barthes’ term, to the whole series, one image in the top row jumps out from the others: it contains two North American ranchers complete with cowboy hats. It now becomes glaringly obvious that we are looking at two very different landscapes. The top row of photographs documents the challenging effects of drought on beef production in Colorado, whilst the bottom row of images depicts Connemara lambs and the sodden farmland of Ireland, increasingly at risk of flooding. The surprisingly stark differences between these agricultural sites are cleverly disguised by O’Mahony’s carefully composed shots and the serial arrangement of photographs in a style reminiscent of conceptual art of the late 1960s-70s. The allusion of a visual closeness between these distant places works in harmony with the shared environmental concerns that FARM exposes.

 
Alongside the prevalence of landscape, a recurring theme of the exhibition is the trace, both in terms of the physical trace and the tracing of histories and receding pasts. Artist-curator Kerrane’s Memories of Barnesmore Gap (2016) remembers the history of railways in Donegal through personal recollections told to the artist by her mother who made journeys by railroad from Killybegs to Derry before the closing of the railway in the 1950s. Memories of Barnesmore Gap includes a handtraced map of the railroads of Donegal which is projected on the wall from an obsolete overhead projector. The now-vanished railway is represented by metal sections of track, derived from a plastic toy train-set now cast in aluminium, which roughly follows the course of the hand-drawn map. To the right are two original posters, which date from the 1950s, promoting Irish tourism in Donegal to a UK audience with quintessentially British depictions of piers and seaside promenades, set in the context of Ireland by the inclusion of shamrocks and Celtic patterns. Kerrane visually evokes time lost and memories of childhood through the toy train-track and the motif of the classic ‘choo-choo train’, which in reality proved too expensive to maintain, eventually leading to the railroad’s closure in 1959.

 
Traces of a time now past are joined by spectral traces in Denver-based Christopher R. Perez’s series of photographs that include the spooky Letterkenny Ghost (2016). This photograph depicts a meticulously made bed in a dilapidated and supposedly haunted house. This image is the result of Perez’s chance, and bizarre, encounter with a local Letterkenny man carrying a dead cat in a bucket whom he had stopped to ask directions. The response of ‘do you want to see a haunted house?’ was welcomed by Perez, whose work often combines early photographic processes with an openness to chance. This approach exemplifies what Margaret Iversen has called a type of ‘attentive exposure’ to the world which finds reflection in photographic receptivity and the analogue medium’s connection with chance (‘Analogue: on Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean’). Perez’s photograph draws on the history of spirit photography as he subtly evokes the ghost that killed the cat, presenting this image in an old found frame taken from the property. Perez’s encounter is the result of Kerrane’s two-part curatorial project which invited artists to exchange the landscapes of the US, for those of Ireland and vice versa. Hybrid Ireland explored the resonances between these disparate sites in works that explored common practices of working the landscape in a globalised world, notions of immigration and travel, and the transference of cultural production and iconography.

 
The exhibition in its entirety spanned three spaces: the mezzanine at the top of the stairs which displayed Inscriptions, and two darkened galleries. Inside Gallery 1 was found the multi-screen installation, Reports to an Academy, 2015, a sequence of four video works shown across three of the room’s four walls. Anti-clockwise from right to left were the shelves of an academic library, a stone wall shot on the island of Inis Oírr, vitrines containing stuffed animals from Dublin’s ‘Dead Zoo’, and the white walls of a studio space. Each image of this installation is strikingly still and each space flooded by water, the four scenes each becoming cross-sections of a drowned world. In each screen the water has risen up to a similar horizon line that reflected the space at the top of the image into the space below. Human life appears to have vacated these visions of a beautiful apocalypse composed of gently rippling water and slow-moving clouds that dreamily float through interior spaces. The only signs of life here are a number of relaxed looking birds of prey, an intriguing and recurring motif in Ní Bhriain’s practice.

 
Reports to an Academy was first shown at the RHA, Dublin, in 2015, as four large-scale video projections in a room blacked out with paint. Here at The Dock the whole room was cloaked in bespoke blackout curtains, which stopped light spillages and made the subtle yet evocative soundtrack seem softer. Large LED screens now brought the meticulously composed imagery into sharper definition and the colour was more vibrant. The swathes of a fresh pink fabric, moving ever so subtly in the breeze, were energised, and petrified animals sprang forth from a dense and saturating cadmium yellow. In the current climate of increasingly restrictive budgets, especially for regional arts centres, this financial commitment from director Sarah Searson and her team at The Dock enabled the achievement of these remarkable effects, and should be highly commended.

 
Reports to an Academy evokes the title of Franz Kafka’s eponymous 1917 short story. Kafka’s tale concerns an ape who teaches himself how to be human in order to escape captivity. In the story the ape reports back to an academy on how he effected his transformation. In three of the spaces that make up Reports to an Academy we see animals out of place in rooms reserved for human study. The three interior spaces – the studio, the library, and the museum – seem intimately connected to the research-based art practice from which they are born. This makes the stone wall in a quintessentially Irish landscape seem at odds with the others. However, perhaps this ‘report’ is to an art academy – a museal look back to, and transformation of, painterly traditions. Stone walls feature heavily in the history of Irish art, from Paul Henry’s post-impressionist paintings of the west of Ireland, to the more abstract work of Sean Scully. Though lens-based, Ní Bhriain’s work is remarkably painterly, with a distinctive style untypical of film/video work. In front of this stone wall is an owl perched on a rock which protrudes from the water. In the video to the right we also saw a falcon out of place in the library. These birds of prey reappear throughout Reports…, as does an eagle, and it would seem that the primary function of these birds is to enliven the stillness of each scene. However, these hyper-real compositions, with their recurring motifs of clouds, birds of prey, and bodies of water, are also very reminiscent of the paintings of surrealist painter, René Magritte, to whom I will return.

 
Suspended somewhere between reality and the fictional world of painting, or dreams, the tension between movement and stillness in Reports… was palpable. This gave rise to an inherent difficulty with the experience of viewing this installation, as a cinematic or sequential mode of looking came into conflict with the desire to become more deeply immersed in the meditative pace of each moving image. Gallery 2 suggested one way in which this tension could be resolved. Here we found a bespoke wooden screen, which stood diagonally in the space like a monolith. Projected onto the front and back of this screen were two companion videos, Departure and Window, 2013/14. Now the visual richness of each video could be fully experienced in isolation, whilst they still felt intimately connected as two sides of the same object. Departure and Window were shot in the decrepit disused spaces of the terminal of the old Cork city airport. The same tension between moving image and photographic stillness is at play here, however; while Reports to an Academy reduces video to an almost absolute stillness, Departure and Window are composed of still images which are animated via stop-motion animation and virtual tracking shots. Overlays of shots of the sea and flocks of birds again recall Magritte.

 
Departure and Window again feature a large bird of prey, perhaps an eagle or a hawk, who commands the space. In a poignant moment in Window the bird looks up from the ground and turns towards the camera, cocking its head sideways as if taking in the presence of the viewer. In numerous shots the bird is joined by a fake-looking tree in a pot. This juxtaposition brings to mind Marcel Broodthaers who, like Ní Bhriain, was also invested in museology and surrealist legacies. The eagle was Broodthaers’ infamous emblem for art. It stood for art’s suspect character as a symbol of power and wealth. In the Département des Aigles of his ‘fictional’ Museum of Modern Art, Broodthaers brought together a display of objects and images of eagles captioned with signs that read ‘This is Not a Work of Art,’ directly referencing the famous painting by Magritte, a fellow Belgian, The Treachery of Images, 1928-9. The bird of prey in Departure and Window also has a suspect character. Though seamlessly composed, the highly mediated nature of Ní Bhriain’s works is never concealed as she reverses the operation of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe by imbuing things from the real world with the illusory quality of painting.

 
This perfectly encapsulates German media theorist, Wolfgang Ernst’s belief that the ‘technologically neutral code’ of photographic technology collapses through digital manipulation, which returns ‘images to a prephotographic quality of painting: that characterised by the painterly brushstroke.’ (Digital Memory and the Archive, 2013) Ní Bhriain consistently exploits the malleable capacity of computer-generated imagery always exposing and never repressing the structure of her medium to the point that Departure boldly displays the green screen itself. Drawing on art historical lineages and painterly conventions, these captivating works give weight to Ernst’s argument that the digital is less a continuation of analogue film/photography, than it is a departure that returns us to painting. Yes, Ní Bhriain’s imagery is treacherous, but it is all the more sincere because of it.

 
Kirstie North is an art historian and independent curator. Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s exhibition, presented in collaboration with Domobaal, London, was on view at The Dock, 8 April – 27 May 2017.

In this, Starting Over recalled another celebrated artist-curated show of recent years, Simon Starling’s Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts), which took place at Camden Arts Centre, London, in the winter of 2010-11. Starling’s exhibition demonstrated that this concern with looking back in order to move forward is indicative of today’s renewed sense of temporal instability, as reflected in the practices of numerous contemporary artists, Starling himself included. The strength of Starting Over lay in its conceptual coherence and its relevance to such broader shifts in artistic practice. The existing discourse on archiving as artistic method points to its symptomatic nature: as a mode that exposes problematic technological developments, such as the ascendency of the digital (as argued by Hal Foster in his essay, ‘An Archival Impulse’, 2004), and advancements in technological warfare and science (as articulated by Starling in his aforementioned exhibition). While drawing on this discourse, O’Kelly’s project avoided being derivative by effectively refocusing this archival concern away from outside influences and in towards the more enduring and insular conditions of the artist’s studio. The works in this exhibition were offered up to the viewer as material remnants of the process by which an artist thinks through their own practice. As O’Kelly asserts, this gesture acts to bring ‘poignant focus to the ways in which the passage of time transforms the interpretive meanings of artworks…as life brings us further and further away from the initial moment of making’.

The relationship between the presentation of a finished artwork and the often unseen preparatory work, relegated to the confines of the studio, was alluded to formally throughout the exhibition, as scrawled notes, erasures and hasty diagrams were coupled with unveiled material supports, such as Post-it notes, blackboards and the backs of canvases. The first works encountered in this small exhibition space were Alan Brooks’s series of primitive looking drawings that are derived from rubbings taken from graffiti found on the city streets. The imagery is mostly made up of human heads as well as sexual organs and scrawled expletives, which often become titles of specific works, as in Portrait of jw the cunt (2007) and Shithead (2010). Contrary to appearances, Brooks does not present us with the original rubbings, but meticulously repaints them onto archival-prepared Post-it notes. These surfaces make discernible the artist’s method as these small and delicate supports bear no marks or indents of the pressure required to make a rubbing. Rather, each miniscule mark is reproduced obsessively by the artist’s own hand. Brooks’ work serves to introduce a concern with both the indexical mark, as a found material trace of the past, and the graphological gesture.

Tacita Dean’s Sixteen Blackboards (1992) couples this emphasis on mark making with themes of departure as it pinpoints the beginnings of her artistic career. Sixteen Blackboards is composed of 16 photographs of the same blackboard which has been erased and drawn over. These surfaces contain drawings, notes and photographs that display numerous leitmotifs and references to later works (for example, we see many drawings of feet and references to the act of walking or limping, a theme Dean explores most explicitly in her 2003 film Boots). In 2006, Dean herself reflected on this early work saying, ‘What staggered me looking at myself is, how much of the subject matter in those drawings in that period of time are the ideas that I’m still working on’ (Tacita Dean: Analogue). This act of departure and revisiting was replayed in other works, as can be seen in the photographic documentation of Mark O’Kelly’s and Gerard Byrne’s joint visit to the site of Byrne’s earlier work, Temple Bar Music Centre site-specific commission, 1993. This same emphasis on the return journey was evident in Scott Myles’s Everything Inbetween, Dundee, Scotland Oct 2 1996, Everything Inbetween, Monument Valley, USA, Mar. 23 1998 (1996- 1998). This latter work consists of two almost identical photographs of the artist pictured in the same clothes against the backdrop of Monument Valley; however, on closer inspection we see that the artist is older in one of the images.

This theme of departure and revisiting, which recurred throughout the exhibition, was solemnly concluded by Myles’s The Lecture (2010-2013). This free-standing, aluminium-backed mirrored screen print shows the back of a poster taken from one of Felix González-Torres’s stack pieces, Untitled (1992/3). On the face of the mirrored surface we see the swipe of a roller and the marks left by the adhesive previously used to stick up the poster. These marks could be read as the brushstrokes of a large paintbrush as this work resonates with a series of black and white photographs by Gerard Byrne depicting the backs of Old Master paintings. On the other side of Myles’s work, which the viewer was free to walk around, is a reproduction of González-Torres’s black and white print of a lone bird ascending through a cloud-streaked sky. As is well known, González-Torres’s stack pieces often invited the viewer to take something away, in this case a print. These works all related to the grieving process and the death of the artist’s lover from AIDS in 1991. This work acted to bring the exhibition’s themes of mark making, departure and reclaiming the past full circle, by referencing the act of mourning and of letting go, a necessary part of the process by which we start over. O’Kelly’s impressive curatorial debut seeks to anchor the transience of the present moment in the context of the recent past as these four artists turn back to old works, an older generation of artists, and their younger selves in the hope of facing the future with a firmer footing.

For Kubler, the appearance or detection of a prime is comparable to the perception of the light of a dead star, he writes ‘[w]e know of their existence only indirectly, by their perturbations, and by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their paths’. This metaphor of the light of a dying star seen from Earth resonates further with Upton’s project, which anticipates the re-opening of the Earth Station – due to start a new life as a deep space radio telescope, capable of detecting a range of phenomena such as exploding or dying stars.

 
Ma Bice Bolje (It Will get Better) (2002 – 2005) is an installation combining photography, video and text by Swiss duo Goran Galic and Gian-Reto Gredig. The project explores the residual impact of the Bosnian war on both the landscape and on those who were directly affected, being comprised of a series of photographs of differing sizes, that document the visible scars and fractures left on the landscape. These images are accompanied by a series of five documentary-style films. There are many overlaps between the films and photographs: in one film, for instance, we meet a photo journalist who was witness to a massacre in a market place (his portrait hangs among the photographs). The photographer explains that he did not feel it appropriate to photograph the aftermath of the massacre, and instead helped clean up, shockingly sweeping a human brain down a drain. Although he didn’t take a photograph he adds that this image remains forever burned into his memory. This story illustrates an ongoing concern of Galic and Gredig: the gap between personal memory and the portrayal of events in the media.
 
While this project draws attention to the still visible remnants and traces of the Bosnian war, possibly more disturbing than the war itself are the anaesthetised relationship the country has to its own recent past. In one photograph we see a portrait of a woman in overalls smiling for the camera in a muddy landscape partitioned by tape. Accompanying text by the artists informs us that the woman is a forensic scientist working on an exhumation site, attempting to trace some of the 30,000 people still missing. It recalls the strangely relaxed atmosphere among the workers on site, who were laughing and cracking jokes whilst digging up the remains of children killed in the conflict. Ma Bice Bolje oscillates between these highly painful and personal eye-witness accounts of the conflict, and an almost complete detachment and divorce from it. Galic writes of the photograph of the forensic worker, ‘I had the idea to photograph the grave the way most Bosnian Serbs saw it – meaning not at all, looking past it’.
 
 
Both works were on view at the former P+D Furnishings store, Perry Street, Cork, November 19 – December 15 2011.

Two works concerned with time travel both making their debut here are Sean Lynch’s DeLorean Progress Report (2010), and Jeremy Millar’s The Man who Looked Back (2010). Lynch’s project traces the DeLorean car to the bottom of the Irish Sea, combining photographs of the rusty material on the sea bed with hand pressed stainless steel models of the DeLorean roof and wing panels. These models are instantly recognisable as an icon of time travel from the 1980s, made famous by Spielberg’s Back to the Future trilogy. Millar’s archival work The Man Who Looked Back continues the artist’s preoccupation with German art historian Aby Warburg. Photographic reproductions of images taken from art history (all relating to the myth of Orpheus, for whom ‘looking back’ had tragic consequences) are posted onto hessian covered free-standing boards, giving the project the aged look of an historical museum display. Among these older images are a number of stills taken from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), one of the most convincing expressions of time-travel in film.

 
As Starling anticipates CAC’s future programme with works by Lynch and Millar, Graham Gussin’s Fall (7200-1) (1998) exploits an agitated sense of expectation concerning a future event. Fall dominates the main gallery space and consists of a large projection of a lake coupled with a hard drive and computer that houses generating software randomly triggering an event in which we see something fall out of the sky, dramatically disturbing the surface of the lake. This event occurs so infrequently that the work becomes not so much about the disturbance but about the possibility of witnessing it, the state of anticipation holding the viewer in front of the tranquil scene for long periods of time, often with no reward.
 
Starling’s show works coherently on many levels, engaging the viewer’s collective and social memory whilst also engaging with the memories and objects that haunt CAC’s history. Starling himself is one such ghostly figure, now returning to the centre after a residency in 1999 and a solo show in 2000. For his solo show Starling had installed a roughly-built stove entitled Burn-Time in Gallery 3. When CAC was refurbished soon after, the architects, without realising the stove to be a temporary edition, included it in their plans. Starling’s own work is now an integral part of CAC’s structure, a strange coincidence because his great-great-uncle was the architect of the original building. Starling’s project is inspired by this meeting across time, between the architect who designed the Centre’s outer space and his future nephew, who time and again has transformed its inner space.
 
 
Simon Starling: Never the Same River was on view 16 December 2010 – 20 February 2011.

An introductory text on the gallery wall, tells us that the exhibition is divided according to key themes such as ‘material’, ‘speculation’, ‘site’ and ‘narration’, and that these themes have been further designated with ‘keywords’ that allow for different trajectories to be mapped across the space of the galleries. This interesting curatorial proposition implies that the keywords would operate like meta-tags, creating a rhizomatic network of associations between the physical art objects which would reflect the interconnectivity of the digital archive. However, this hypertext of keywords seemed to be absent. Perhaps the idea is that the viewer forges their own connections between the artworks and the thematic words provided; however, this asks a lot of the viewer in terms of cognisance of the curatorial project, while it is also to some extent a method of mental reflex and association that happens naturally in the context of any exhibition. This aside, Selective Memory was an informed exhibition which explored the changing nature of the relationship of archival technology to memory.

As would be expected, much of the work in this exhibition is lens-based. However, there is no clear-cut distinction between analogue and digital images. In fact, in many works the differences between these two media are blurred, as one engulfs or appropriates the other, and this is perhaps the point. Jasper Rigole’s Paradise Recollected (2008) is a collection of found 8mm films, sourced from flea markets and garage sales, which have been transferred onto video. Much of the material consists of amateur footage and home movies which have been saved by Rigole’s ‘International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories’ (IICADOM). The resulting video is a kind of essay film complete with a voiceover which reflects upon the nature of collective memory. Rigole connects temporally and geographically distant footage through an effective editing process which groups together familiar and universal memories through a system of montage that produces a sense of objective classes of memory. This comes across most powerfully in a series of shots of different infants, captured in flickering film, at different times and in different places, all taking their first steps towards the camera.

The video is accompanied by a diagrammatic textual poster which breaks the film down into discrete terms; the moving images of saved memories are here transcribed into different units of data, just as the actual images were when the films were transferred into a digital format. The self-awareness of this transference from film to digital video in the context of the gallery is refreshing. To further emphasise this transition from real indexical imagery to sets of discrete data, Rigole provides us with a Mac monitor and keyboard displaying the web page of IICADOM, which the viewer is invited to interact with. Here we can browse all of the films that are being projected, as well as being able to change the search terms on the footage. For example, a black and white film of an old lady eating can now be tagged with the terms ‘boy’ ‘playing’; thus Rigole’s archive itself is susceptible to inevitable corruption and disorder. By juxtaposing analogue and digital archival technologies Paradise Recollected draws attention to the differences between these processes. The traditional archive is a static and orderly collection of physical documents which should not be altered or interfered with, while the digital archive promotes an interconnectivity operating according to a more dynamic mnemonic logic which continually updates, rewrites and erases itself in virtual space.

The tension between preserving and destroying is a key paradox of the archive. It also alludes to the problematic nature of new technological shifts for artists, as the digital is perceived to threaten analogue mediums. This incompatibility is played out in a series of works by Sean Snyder that has evolved from his project Index. Here, Snyder has been editing and digitising the archives he has amassed while researching previous projects. During this process many of the physical elements of the artist’s archive have been destroyed. We see the discarded remnants of this process in Untitled, (printed materials, broken DVDs) (2009), a collection of photographs of close up details of cracked and smashed DVDs and shredded pieces of printed text. This process of digitisation, through which the material remnants become unreadable and are then discarded, acts to draw attention to the surface materiality of the technical support itself. In Snyder’s photograph of a smashed DVD we actually register the material properties of the object’s mirrored surface, the way it cracks and breaks like glass, but also bends because it is plastic. This emphasis on the material properties of different surfaces relates to questions concerning the relevance of the concept of medium specificity in a digital age, as digitisation erases the differences between media. Text, sound and visual images all become data files that are read indifferently by the computer.

The transition from analogue to digital archival processes is also the subject of Zbyněk Baladrán’s Working Process (2007), another video essay which utilises found film footage and old film stock transferred again to video. The film is overlaid with horizontal blocks which give way to text evoking the now obsolete aesthetics of early computing. In this work text and image are vying for attention as the eye has to switch rapidly between reading the text, which sits over the image, and perceiving the image behind the text. At one point a series of blocks gives way to the sentence ‘THE PAST AND FUTURE CAN EXIST NEXT TO EACH OTHER’. In many ways this sums up Selective Memory, which is reflective of our current, transitional phase in the history of the archive, a phase in which its past and future states co-exist.