CCA is pleased to invite you to the opening of our next exhibition, Tiny deaths: glitches, spells, interruptions, on Saturday 18th March. The group exhibition features works by Zach Blas, Anne de Vries, Dave Loder, Conor McFeely, and belit sağ that consider the power of the interruptive moment.
Tiny deaths explores how these moments – often classified as flaws, accidents or errors – can be activated as points of reference and resistance. Its title derives from Paul Virilio’s definition of ‘picnolepsy’, the ‘epileptic’ lapses generated by the oscillation between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the compensatory impulse to smooth over these ruptures. Using this metaphor of bodily difference, Tiny deaths examines contemporary methods used to re-attribute value to absence or interruption, and the social and political implications of these actions.
The exhibition features practices that variously connect to these ideas, with works that employ the aesthetics of interference (Dave Loder) and question how images of violence shape perceptions of reality (belit sağ). Tiny deaths also includes works that present an idealised communal experience of seamless totality (Anne de Vries), tactics to interrupt the technological gaze and exercise a politics of escape (Zach Blas), and moments of altered consciousness (Conor McFeely).
Tiny deaths: glitches, spells, interruptions opens on Saturday 18 March at 7pm. Preceding the exhibition opening, please join us from 4pm to 6pm for the next CCA booksvscigarettes reading group event, where we’ll be reading Annemarie Mol’s 1985 essay Who knows what a woman is… More information can be found here. The exhibition and reading group event are free and all are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided.
Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of surveillance, security, and control with minoritarian politics. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blas has exhibited and lectured internationally, recently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; e-flux, New York; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. His current project Contra-Internet is supported by a 2016 Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields. Blas’s artist monograph Escaping the Face will be published by Rhizome in 2017. His work has been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, Art Papers, Mousse Magazine, and Art Review.
Anne de Vries works as an artist in Amsterdam and Berlin but currently lives in New York. His work explores the relationship between technology, media and mass experience and the limits of human agency, combining different media such as spoken word, sculpture and video, experimental photography and large-scale installations. Occasionally he teaches a masterclass at the University of Art and Design ECAL Lausanne. Group and solo exhibitions include the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2016); Cell Project Space, London (2015/16); Foam Museum Amsterdam (2015); Manifesta Foundation, Amsterdam (2014); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).
Dave Loder is a Belfast-based artist-researcher pursuing a materialist philosophy of language. His art practice is manifested through the fabrication of technical objects that deploy alternative linguistic aesthetics and space-time conditions. He is currently following a thesis that proposes language as a parasitic entity, posing that language might be lying dormant in – or is capable of infecting – alternative materialisms. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in China, Spain and Germany, and has also presented research at Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016); the 56th Venice Biennale (2016), and dOCUMENTA(13) (2012).
Conor McFeely was born in Derry in Northern Ireland, where he lives and works. Recent exhibitions include The Milan Art expo (2015); The Corner College Collective Zurich (2015); and since 2013 he has shown four cycles of Weathermen projects at the 126 Gallery, Galway, Franklin University Lugano, Switzerland and The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Past exhibitions include solo presentations at The Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin and the Czech Museum of Fine Art, Prague.
belit sağ a videomaker based in Amsterdam. She studied mathematics in Turkey, and audio visual arts in The Netherlands. Her video background is rooted in video-activist groups in Ankara and Istanbul, where she co-initiated projects such as bak.ma, an online audiovisual archive of social movements in Turkey. She was a resident artist in Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2014 and 2015), as well as in International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2016). Her work has been exhibited in international art spaces and festivals including EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam; The International Rotterdam Film Festival; Salt, Istanbul; DEPO, Istanbul; De-Militarized Zone International Documentary Film Festival, South Korea; Toronto International Film Festival; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
