19 April 2023 - 19 April 2023
18:30
Irish Film Institute, Dublin
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aemi & IFI present: The Sun Gives Without Asking, curated by Sean Lynch

19 April 2023 / 18:30 / Irish Film Institute, Dublin
This is a description of a painting titled Pintura En Askeaton, created by Argentinian artist Magdalena Jitrik in 2009. The artwork is an abstract composition that features a dynamic interplay of shapes and colours. Slanted rectangles dominate the painting, overlapping and intersecting with each other. The centre of the painting features a large trapezoid with a red circle inside, which enhances the artwork's sense of movement and energy. The colours used in the painting are bold and vibrant, with a range of blues, greens, reds, and yellows.

Magdalena Jitrik, Pintura En Askeaton, 2009, image courtesy of the artist

aemi is delighted to present ‘The Sun Gives Without Asking’, a screening programme curated by artist Sean Lynch featuring work by Dan Graham, Paul Gregg and Annette Clancy, Magdalena Jitrik, Amanda Rice, and Jorge Satorre, alongside excerpts of Lynch’s own ongoing video project What Is An Apparatus?.

Revolving around the radical potential of storytelling, Lynch’s programme proposes forms of cultural pursuit that interrogate the complex motifs found deep in everyday life, place, and capitalist society. From windows, supermarkets, and telephones, the measures and shapes of the Western world that aim to manage and orient human behaviour become evident – with a sleight of hand they might change into new malleable and eclectic forms, gleefully spurred on by artistic energies!
This screening will be followed by a discussion with Sean Lynch and Amanda Rice. 

Film information
Magdalena Jitrik, Pintura En Askeaton, 2009, Ireland/Argentina, DCP, 7 minutes
Sean Lynch, What Is An Apparatus?, 2016-2022, Canada/Ireland, excerpt, DCP, 3 minutes
Jorge Satorre, Windows Blowing Out, 2005, Ireland/Mexico, DCP, 7 minutes
Sean Lynch, What Is An Apparatus?, 2016-2022, Canada/Ireland, excerpt, DCP, 3 minutes
Dan Graham, Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05), 1986-2005, Canada/USA, Digital, 8 mins,
Sean Lynch, What Is An Apparatus?, 2016-2022, USA/Ireland, excerpt, DCP, 3 minutes
Amanda Rice, No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun, 2021, UK/Ireland, DCP, 21 minutes
Media footage featuring Paul Gregg and Annette Clancy, 1998, Ireland, DCP, 10 minutes
Sean Lynch, What Is An Apparatus?, 2016-2022, Ireland, excerpt, DCP, 5 minutes
Running Time: 67 minutes

Magdalena Jitrik, Pintura En Askeaton
Argentinian artist Magdalena Jitrik spent time in Askeaton during 2009 making a small painting that, according to prominent curator Adriano Pedrosa, ‘is a splendid abstract geometric composition – one can see the same mosaic of multicoloured slanted rectangles forming a larger, again not so orthogonal square, which in turn is intersected by a trapezoid figure, offering a feast for the formal connoisseur.’ In her accompanying video one can observe the painting’s growth from a blank canvas to a completed artwork, accompanied by a soundtrack by Jitrik’s band, Orquestra Roja (Red Orchestra). In another sequence, the painting appears as an apparition amongst gravestones and medieval stone carvings in the ruins of the Askeaton’s Franciscan Abbey. Jitrik’s Askeaton artwork later featured in 2011’s Istanbul Biennial and as part of Phaidon’s Vitamin P2 compendium of contemporary painting.

Sean Lynch, What Is An Apparatus?
What Is An Apparatus? was initially produced during travels throughout 2016 in Europe and North America, composed as a series of anecdotes or short films assembled together with a voiceover performed by long-time collaborator Gina Moxley. While initially appearing as a collection of somewhat ludicrous encounters with nuclear submarines, postmodern architecture, Ivy League colleges, robots, scrapyards, tin mines, folk parades and supermarkets, it gradually becomes apparent that stories told are generated as the result of living in an increasingly technocratic life. The measures and institutional values of the western world that aim to manage and orient human behaviour become evident in each of the sixteen tales. Following presentations in Rotterdam, Vancouver, Cornwall and Dublin, the piece continues to grow in shape and content, dictated to by the exploration of specific geographical locations, undertaking forms of pseudo-ethnographical fieldwork, and keeping a keen eye and ear out for everyday situations that might reveal the often preposterous yet frequently hegemonic nature of the contemporary world.

Jorge Satorre, Windows Blowing Out
In December 1976 the artist Gordon Matta Clark was invited to take part in a group show entitled Idea as a Model that was held in the attic of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where he would show together with other architects including Richard Meier, Graves and Guatheney. Together with Peter Eisenman, the director of the institute, they represented the formalist current at that time, which emerged from Cornell University, where Matta Clark had studied but critically rejected. Matta Clark exhibited photographs of the urban disaster of South Bronx, which showed abandoned buildings revealing signs of the scant importance assigned to public housing issues at the time by architectural theory in the United States. The attack was clear, Meier himself had designed some of those buildings. On the night before the opening of the Matta Clark show, the artist borrowed an airgun from his friend Dennis Oppenheim and fired at the windows of the Institute of Architecture, the exhibition venue. Eisenman ordered the panes of glass be replaced immediately before the opening. This work was titled Windows Blow Out. My project consisted in recovering, almost theatrically, this referential piece through the construction of three windows, made to measure, to be installed in an old abandoned house near the town of Skibbereen in West Cork, Ireland, where I was invited to carry out a site-specific project.

Dan Graham, Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05)
Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Mall draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Amanda Rice, No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun
This three-part moving image work takes the form of a research essay which explores the mineral silver and its subsequent integration in solar energy technologies. The work thinks through both material histories and sunlight as something which is both entangled and interconnected, personal and political. Green energy systems, and in the case of solar energy, is sold to us as immaterial and renewable; but their technics are grounded in the extractive and geophysical, de-territorialized and disseminated. The work moves between personal mediations on light and geology, and thinks about sunlight as an elemental, omnipresent and global experience, one which pervades bodies – both human and non-human; also as a global commodity, one which has been subject to the laws of capital and extraction.

Biography, Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch (b. 1978, Kerry, Ireland) is an artist living in Askeaton, Limerick. Alongside representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015, prominent exhibitions include Edinburgh Art Festival, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, CAPC Bordeaux and Modern Art Oxford. Since 2006, he has worked alongside Michele Horrigan at Askeaton Contemporary Arts.


Images:

A still from the short film What Is An Apparatus? (2016) by Sean Lynch. The image depicts a black mobile phone lying on a concrete ground. The phone's screen is completely shattered.

Still from Sean Lynch's What Is An Apparatus?, 2016, Courtesy of the artist

This still image is from the 2021 film ‘No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun’ by artist and filmmaker Amanda Rice. The image portrays a blurry hand reaching towards two clear panels, which encase gold crescent and circular shapes of various sizes that are reminiscent of ancient jewellery and artefacts. In the mid-ground, there are several objects including a jug and a rock, both with a similar archaic style. The background features a grey, dusty landscape. At the bottom of the screen, there is white text displayed on a grey border that reads

Still from Amanda Rice's No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun, 2021, Courtesy of the artist

This is a still from the short video work ‘Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05)’ by artist and writer Dan Graham. The image shows an area inside West Edmonton Mall, Canada, sometime between 1986 and 2005. In the foreground, there is a low pool of water with live flamingos inside. In the background, two men and two young boys stand behind panes of glass, observing the birds. The man on the left of the frame is wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans, and has short dark hair. In front of him, a young boy is pressing the palms of his hands onto the glass. The boy is wearing a dark-coloured t-shirt with white stripes and jeans. The man to the right of the frame is wearing a white t-shirt with a dark collar and glasses. The young boy in front of him is wearing a blue t-shirt with a bright yellow stripe across the front. Behind them is a typical shopping centre scene with a sunglasses kiosk, a red neon shop sign, and some plants.

Still from Dan Graham's Death By Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05), 1986-2005, Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

A still from the short film Windows Blowing Out (2005) by Jorge Satorre. The image depicts two men standing in front of a country house in a rural area. The man in the centre of the image has short grey hair and is wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt. His right arm is raised, appearing to throw something, and he is holding a stone in his hand. The man to the right of the frame is bending forward and picking up stones. He is wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved dark top. In the background, there are larger rocks and orange-coloured materials. The house is grey with a dark tiled roof, and the area in front of the house where they are standing is grassy.

Still from Jorge Satorre's Windows Blowing Out, 2005, Courtesy of the artist



Supporting and Exhibiting Artists' and Experimental Moving Image in association with LUX, the Irish Film Institute and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Supported by the Arts Council.