Sarah Browne, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Marielle MacLeman at Kunstverein Aughrim

Throughout 2024 Kunstverein Aughrim will accompany the practices of three artists across multiple projects.

Sarah Browne thinks about the tensions between what a body knows and what it is told. Implicitly aligned with marginalised perspectives, Browne’s practice explores embodied experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. While working on a new commission for Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, County Cork, and other multidisciplinary research projects, Browne will be supported by Kunstverein Aughrim to develop evolving methodologies of collaboration and presentation such as the model of parallel play. Browne is curious about the potential of this model to arrange relations between collaborators, materials, or sensory channels, to create meaning in registers that are felt rather than understood. Browne’s work will be on view at Kunstverein Aughrim from September 21 to December 21 2024.

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah creates visions of resistance, transformation and queer possibility. In his work glitched bodies float in fantasy realms, transcending their digital existence through the slippery portal of consciousness. Kunstverein Aughrim will support the development of a real world vessel for Al-Sabah’s dreamworld ideas by facilitating a scent-making retreat at Cow House Studios, Wexford. Al-Sabah will work together with frequent artistic collaborator Jennifer Mehigan with the aim of producing a boggy floral fragrance that encapsulates their shared practice of thinking, dreaming and making worlds that are other. Al-Sabah’s work will be on view at Kunstverein Aughrim from June 1 to August 31 2024.

Marielle MacLeman charges traditional craft based processes with critical precision and conceptual rigour. Rooted in care, her works are applied studies of materials and contexts. Kunstverein Aughrim will support the development of performative methodologies across burgeoning bodies of work for projects with the Centre for Research of Fashion and Clothing (CIMO), Zagreb, and Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. From pulped nursing uniforms as paper, or tumble-dryer lint as cloth, to drawings made with the felled remains of diseased trees, reconstituted materials take centre stage in MacLeman’s unfolding corpus on care, service and labour. MacLeman’s work will be on view at Kunstverein Aughrim from March 2 to May 24 2024.

The mission of Kunstverein Aughrim is to develop curatorial collaborations with artists to support the artistic process of creating new work, and to bring audiences as close to the creative process as possible. In addition to showing artworks, ideas in development, bodies of research and glimpses backstage at our Aughrim office, we also host seasonal Previews, commission Editions, and produce Projects that can happen anywhere.

Continued collaborations from 2023 include those with: Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde whose work deep feels and fever dreams opens at Kunstverein Aughrim on December 21 2023 and continues until February 24 2024, and whose exhibition son of is currently at Void Art Centre Derry until January 27, Sonia Shiel whose exhibition Medusa in Pieces is at VISUAL Carlow until January 21, and Deirdre O’Mahony whose new moving image and sound work The Quickening will be screened in Aughrim on April 27 as part of her major commissioned solo exhibition at The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin, in Spring 2024.

Founded by Kate Strain, Kunstverein Aughrim is a curatorial production office located in south County Wicklow, Ireland. It is part of the franchise established by Kunstverein in Amsterdam, with sisters in Milan, New York and Toronto. Subscribe to the Kunstverein Aughrim mailing list should you wish to receive irregular digital updates. Kunstverein Aughrim is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Wicklow County Council.

‍