Reciprocal-ity – a response to DISSOLUTIONS 2024: an experimental film festival by AEMI by Tara McGinn
Published date: 06 Jan 2025
Mirror Lamp Press x The Complex Writing Residency
The MLP x The Complex writer-in-residence programme is aimed at early-career visual arts writers based in Ireland. This programme is designed to help writers develop their practice by inviting them to produce up to five new responses to the exhibitions and events programme at The Complex in Dublin.
From May – September 2024 Tara McGinn was The Complex’s Writer in Residence.
Tara responded to aemi’s first iteration of DISSOLUTIONS: an experimental film festival hosted at the Complex in September 2024.
Extract from Reciprocal-ity below:
~ INT. TARA’s HOME OFFICE
TARA SITS AT THEIR DESK. THEY ARE LOOKING AT A LAPTOP SCREEN WITH FIVE WINDOWS. EACH WINDOW CONTAINS A PORTRAIT OF A MEMBER OF THE AEMI PRODUCTION AND CURATORIAL TEAM: Alice Butler, Jenny Brady, Helena Gouveia Monteiro and Ruairí McCann. THEY ARE ALL AWKWARDLY TRYING TO TALK CASUALLY WITHIN THE SOCIAL CONFINES OF ZOOM. THE SUBJECT OF THE CALL IS TO DISCUSS THE RECENT ‘DISSOLUTIONS: an experimental film festival’ THEYPRODUCED, FOR WHICH TARA IS WRITING A RESPONSE.
ALICE: Dissolutions, it’s where I – no, we – feel Dublin is at right now as a city…there needs to be a room where room for
boundaries to be pushed can exist. Creating space for the experimental to be shared and appreciated is moving into “rare
occasion” territory and away from what was a more commonly practised culture.
TARA CONSIDERS ALICE’S WORDS AND IS INTERESTED IN A PLAY ON WORDS IN THE FESTIVAL TITLE.
CUT TO: ~ INT. LOCAL ARTS CENTRE CAFÉ IN BELFAST. TARA TYPES ON THEIR LAPTOP. THE DEADLINE IS LONG OVERDUE. SO
OVERDUE, IN FACT, THAT TARA IS STRUGGLING TO REMEMBER DETAILS OF THE CONVERSATION THEY HAD WITH THE AEMI TEAM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
READ THE FULL TEXT HERE
Tara McGinn is a visual artist with an interdisciplinary practice combining sculptural (re)productions, image-based assemblage and reflex/ct/ive writing. They excavate the language of sentimentality by perverting the syntaxes of domestic spaces, to translate subjects of withheld trauma, falsified memory, and queered identity. Their work has developed into a wider dialogue on mobilising the discomfort of the uncanny and critiquing the aesthetics of the familiar by exposing an emotional interior juxtaposed with decorative motifs and objects. Through their writing, the textures and surfaces of the works expand to become tactile and tangible fictions or speculative sculptures that communicate cultural practices and political narratives around the erotics of class, domesticity, bodily labour, and time, which they hope will grow into a performative practice in the future.
Recent shows include the group exhibition Mother Tongue at the MAC Belfast running until the 21st of July, the group exhibition Betwixt; Held at Mimosa House Gallery London in February 2024, and solo exhibition An Intimate Public at PS2 Belfast in June 2023. They have had short pieces of creative writing and criticism published in the VAN, CIRCA online, Bloomers Magazine and the Northern Irish Arts Network. They have also published art writing in various collaborative publishing projects and regularly posts on their Substack, Brown Studio. A studio member of Flax Art Studios since 2021 and a former Catalyst Arts co-director, they are also a family carer and base themselves between Belfast in the North and Enniscorthy in the Republic.
