News Article

New Ecologies of Practice at NCAD Gallery features the Artist-Led Archive

New Ecologies of Practice: A short season of projects by Catalyst Arts [Belfast] / Occupy Space [Limerick] / The Good Hatchery [Offaly] / Basic Space [Dublin] runs in the NCAD Gallery from 9th February to 13th April 2012.

Artist-Led Archive, installation view, NIVAL at NCAD Library.

NCAD Gallery is presenting a series of new projects which will represent the work of a number of artist led initiatives, working throughout Ireland, which embodies a new approach and a challenge to institutional visual arts programming.

In recent years, and pre-dating recession in some cases, Catalyst Arts [Belfast], Occupy Space [Limerick], The Good Hatchery [Offaly] and Basic Space [Dublin] have established strong, coherent and critically significant presences in the Irish visual arts context and, in their strategic ideologies, argue for a reconfiguration of inherited thinking about the nature and purpose of art and the nature and purpose of art institutional practice. This aligns with other transnational artist led initiatives and ideologies which respond to 'situations'.

In addition to work by the artist-led initiatives the exhibition programme includes The Artist-led Archive - Sustainable Activism and the Embrace of Flux open to the public to view by appointment at the National Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) housed at NCAD Library. The archive was initiated by the artist and curator Megs Morley in 2006 as part of an on-going investigation into artist-led initiatives in Ireland. The project aims to decipher the kind of cultural conditions that contribute to the development of artist-led initiatives, their economic independence (or lack of), their organizational structures and how all of these factors effect their activities and life spans.
For more information on The Artist-led Archive please see www.theartistledarchive.com.
Or contact Donna at NIVAL at +353 (0)1 636 4347 or romanod(at)ncad.ie.