Researchers

AHDR/Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Nihal Soganci is currently doing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Her research and work focus on interdisciplinary practices that combine anthropological approaches with contemporary artistic practices. In February 2022, she has published a book chapter called Memories, stories and material traces: Exploring displacement through collaging and participatory art installation. She holds an MSc in International Public Policy from UCL and BA in Languages and Translation from the University of Surrey, UK. She has published and presented her work in various symposiums and conferences and organised collage workshops.

Relating to the SPACEX Project, she is interested in visiting the Royal College of Art in London focusing on how training and education in art and culture can respond to conflict through audience participation and co-production, looking into how it can provide the space to reflect and develop new understandings and methodologies.

Secondment Destination:
Royal College of Art, UK – October 2022

National College of Art and Design, Ireland

Michelle Browne is an artist and curator based in Dublin, Ireland. She is a lecturer in the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD and her teaching has focused on spatial practices with an emphasis on participation, collaboration and performative strategies.

Browne’s art practice is concerned with what it means to live together; how society organises itself – socially, politically and spatially – and how these relationships play out in the public arena. Much of her work is site specific, often using performative events to draw people together to consider alternative uses for public spaces. She is also interested in how ephemeral performative and participatory events are remembered and archived. Browne has curated a number of exhibitions and events in and for public space and from 2017-2019 she was part of Creative Producers International, a development programme to encourage new kinds of conversations with creative communities, citizens, and city authorities to effect change in their cities.

Secondment destination:
TBC

www.michellebrowne.net

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Tom O’Dea is an artist who works with mixed-media sculpture and social practice to interrogate the political implications of practices of computation and organisation in contemporary society. His work explores ways to understand how different forms of knowledge impact upon our ways of acting and being the world.

His project – The Department of Embedded Knowledge – explores the role of different forms of knowledge in the lived experience and administration of the city. The department interrogates knowledge that is embedded in people and in places, in communities and in relationships, in the multiple forms of the living and in that which is not.

Secondment destination:
Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg Plaz, Berlin, Germany
Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands

www.iamtomodea.com

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Seoidín O’Sulllivan is a contemporary artist with a socially engaged practice who lecturers in first year studio practice and the department of Visual Culture at NCAD. Her art projects are collaborative and focus on bringing people together in action to protect or develop an aspect of their ecological commons.

Seoidín works in the area of ‘Critical Ecologies’ connecting multidisciplinary teams and partnerships using creative participatory art methadologies to reveal, find solutions and work towards creating just multi-species futures and collecive imaginaries at a time of climate crisis. Creative out-put includes drawings, video, publications, walks and pedagogical exchange.

Seoidín is currently artist in residence at The Digital Hub and was recipient of the Arts Council Bursary Award 2021, Arts Council Next Generation Award 2018 and the inaugral Hyde Park, Chicago art residency award with IMMA and CREATE in 2017.

Secondment destination:
Casco

http://www.seoidinosullivan.com

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Gareth Kennedy’s work explores the social agency of the handcrafted in the 21st century and generates ‘communities of interest’ around the production and performance of experimental material cultures. Informed by an anthropological approach these works draw on the layered histories of a location. Projects are embedded, evolve over time, and are enacted by diverse publics and individuals. With the hyperdigitisation of our everyday, Kennedy is interested in the use of anachronistic processes and technologies to produce ‘critical anachronism’ and generate contemporary encounter and experience. He often works with individuals who hold skills or knowledge that has been transmitted across generations to this end.  

In 2009, he co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale alongside artist Sarah Browne and their collaborative practice, Kennedy Browne. In 2015 he was long listed for the prestigious VISIBLE Award for Die Unbequeme Wissenschaft (‘The Uncomfortable Science’), which explored a troubling history of anthropology in the Austrian/Italian Alps and it’s legacy. He is currently undertaking commissions for the National Children’s Hospital and Fingal County Council in Dublin. He is also developing a Microforest project over 2 years in a Dublin school through SUPERPROJECTS. Recent exhibitions include: Metabolic time / Am meitibileach, PROJECT Art Centre, Dublin; Data Streams, Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Intensive Places, 6th Tallinn Biennale, Estonia; Complexo Collosso, CIAJG, Guimarães, Portugal (all 2021-22). He teaches Sculpture and Expanded Practice and is lead on the new Studio+ FIELD module at NCAD, Dublin which charges students with developing new ‘Naturecultures’ in a brown Field / ‘ Novel Ecology site beside the college.

Secondment destination:
TBC

http://www.gkennedy.info/
http://www.firestation.ie/artists/artist/gareth-kennedy/

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Dr. Fiona Whelan is an artist, writer and lecturer at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). Her arts practice is committed to exploring and responding to systemic power relations and inequalities through long-term cross-sectoral collaborations with diverse individuals, groups and organisations. Since 2004, this practice has been rooted in Dublin south city, developing a series of collaborative, transgenerational projects, critically examining and responding to lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations (including class, gender, housing, policing). These durational and multi-faceted processes typically manifest as visual, performative or dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are exposed and interrogated. Fiona’s writing focuses on the complex relationality, labour and ethical challenges of her collaborative methodology, which emerges at the intersection of socially engaged arts practice, youth work and education. At NCAD, she is committed to the professional development of practitioners with socially engaged and collaborative practices, through the development and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate provision.

Secondment destination:
Rosa Luxembourg Platz, Berlin

http://www.fionawhelan.com/

Coventry University, United Kingdom

Marley Treloar is a first year PhD researcher at Coventry University exploring the development of participatory community practice between digital and physical spaces within cultural organisations. She graduated from Kingston University MA Museum and Gallery Studies in 2019 and has worked across the arts and heritage sector working as a freelance curator, public programmer and education officer. Marley is the creative director of Co-Curation, artist run curatorial collective exploring participatory, community and digital collaborative artistic practice.

Secondment Destination:
Sirius Art Centre, Ireland: TBC

https://www.co-curation.co.uk

Coventry Biennial, UK

I am an artist and curator interested in learning and collaboration.  I am the Founder and Director of T Street Gallery, an artist-led gallery space in Birmingham, Uk which was born out of research into the lack of equality in the arts industry in the region. The space was created as an act of rebellion to the societal ‘normalities’ of the industry and producing an egalitarian environment for artists.

I am also Operations Director at Coventry Biennial – a social, political and critical platform for Contemporary Art.

My artistic practice explores concepts of identity through linking mortality and memory into narratives, using experiences and cultural nuances to sculpt themselves into the outcomes.

I have exhibited in places such as Eastside Projects, Ikon, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, The Herbert Art Gallery, the Barber Institute, Birmingham Grand Central Station, Grande Mosque of Rome & Palazzo Comunale E.Gagliardi, Vibo Valentia.

Throughout the SPACEX project I will seek to build international relationships and knowledge in support of Coventry Biennial’s impactful work with artists and communities.

Secondment Destination:
Universita Degli Studi Di Modena E Reggio Emilia: May/June 2023