Colin Darke & Aideen Doran

Artists Colin Darke and Aideen Doran have produced new artworks for Momentous Times. On October 12th Darke and Doran each do an artist talk, followed by a conversation with CCA’s Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh.

Originally from England, Colin Darke has lived in the north of Ireland for twenty-five years. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London, from 1977 to 1980 and recently returned to study, completing his PhD at the University of Ulster between 2007 and 2010. Drake’s work has for many years been informed by his interest in Marxism, primarily Karl Marx’s base and superstructure theory and Bertolt Brecht’s principles and practice of epic theatre. This has led him to explore various forms and media, including wall drawing, painting, animation, digital photomontage and installation. His use of text, however, has dominated his practice, through which he has attempted to explore dialectical relationships between content and form. The most recent formal change of direction – to making floor-based pieces – developed last year, during his Arts Council of Northern Ireland Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Darke has exhibited extensively, in Ireland and beyond. Group shows have included Tracings, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (1998), Manifesta 3, Ljubljana (2000), Venice Biennale (2003), Busan Biennale, South Korea (2004), God and Goods (Italy, 2008), Imagined Communities, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2013) and Labour and Wait, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2013). He has held solo shows in London, Belfast, Derry, Dublin, Drogheda, Oakville, and Livorno.

Aideen Doran studied at the University of Ulster, Belfast, and at the Glasgow School of Art, completing an MFA in 2012. She has exhibited widely across the UK and Ireland, and recently in Berlin, Helsinki and Tampere. Doran is currently completing a practice-led PhD with Northumbria University, Newcastle, on the subject of the production of value in art in an information economy. Between June and July of 2013, Doran was artist in residence with Britto Arts Trust, Dhaka. There, she has been continuing research into the declining value of labour, looking specifically at the international garment trade as it has shifted production towards low wage economies such as Bangladesh.

Image: Aideen Doran, Factory Queens (2013).