Ciarán Walsh—this brief visual pattern

Pallas Projects presents this brief visual pattern new work by Berlin-based artist Ciarán Walsh.

In the video work It’s Just a Shadow Away two actors sit in a production studio, re-performing the original Russian dialogue (a language in which they have no knowledge) of two short sections of the 1972 film Solaris. Caught in the looped repetition of this projection, they struggle against the limits of this alien language, and this fragmented staging, in the attempt to create meaning and emotional verisimilitude. The characters they work to bring briefly to life – ghosts that inhabit only the space of the screen – argue over their memories, their clouded past and their lack of Being.

In an adjacent room, an assemblage composed by a sculpture, an archival photograph and several watercolour pictures – fragments of the artist’s ongoing visual and textual research – reflect the artist’s interaction with found images and short fragments of text, drawing on historical imagery and science-fiction film to consider both physical immediacy and gestures that promise transcendental agency.

For more information please download the following:

PP—Info Sheet 5

Biography:

Ciarán Walsh, born in Ireland (1980), completed a MA in Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD in 2007 and currently lives and works in Berlin. He has developed a research-based practice – encompassing sculpture, installation, video and works on paper – that draws heavily on historical sources, science-fiction and marginal knowledge to consider the problematic agency of subjectivity, fakery and performance. He showed recently at a range of solo and group exhibitions throughout Ireland including FOUR Gallery, Mother’s Tankstation, Project Arts Centre, Kilkenny Arts Week, Galway Arts Centre and VISUAL Carlow. In addition, he co-curates the artist’s publications project, The Reading Room (Berlin).

Curators note: Each exhibition at Pallas Projects will be forwarded by an artwork element, or text, by or about the artist. In this instance we are presenting a PDF version of the accompanying publication no one can arrive in the past before they depart from the future, edited correspondence between Ciarán Walsh, Padraic E. Moore and Friedrich von Bose. Also a sequence of still images from his new work It’s Just a Shadow Away, selected by the artist.