Performance & Exhibition: Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Michael O'Rourke & Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rotator

Pallas Projects in Dublin city currently contains the collaborative exhibition by artists Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty. The show, aptly coined with the palindrome Rotator, loops around secrets, crypts, water and topographies in a variety of media forms; it explores the lesser-known currents of one of the city's more familiar waterways (the River Poddle), records endless passageways of/in brick, and commemorates the hidden stories of the underground.

 

The rich textures of Clinton and Moriarty's exhibition - dizzingly wet, mossy and stony - are sensationally enlivened in a recorded "tour" of the exhibition performed by the artists themselves, Michael O'Rourke and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (read by fellow artist John Ryan) on a wintery March evening. Beginning with an introduction by O'Rourke, the tour takes the form of a question-and-answer conversation between the participants inflected by the exhibition works. "Hydrocryptographic", O'Rourke describes Rotator, and the four performers draw upon Serres, Cixous, Derrida, myths of the giant Balor, Blake, T.S. Eliot and a particuarly savvy twenty-questions AI algorithm to trace the damp crevasses of the show within this 45 minute audio recording.

 

Audio of the tour can be found here. The exhibition catalogue is downloadable here. Further pictures and descriptions of the exhibition can be found in the artists' blog posts, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty as well as the Pallas Projects website, where may also be downloaded an information sheet related to Rotator and a podcast interview with the artists recorded by RTE Lyric FM.

"Rotator is more attuned to the inclinations and glossolalic streaming together of matter. The exhibition is an exercise in diverculvertation as we drift from territories of the infinitesimally small - our selves and bodily matter composed mostly of water - to the infinitely vast - rivers, seas, oceans, the sky, moon and stars."