Please join us for a screening of Maria Fusco´s Opera-Film History of the Present, that takes place in partnership with Teak´s Visiting Expert Lecture Series. The screening will be at the Sörnainen Campus, Fine Arts Academy from 5.30pm. After the screening Maria Fusco will be in conversation with Paul O’Neill.
The Curatorial reading group with Maria Fusco focuses on art writing and takes place during the day of October 9th at PUBLICS as part of The Centre for Curatorial Thinking programme.
A small group of participants from local museums, institutions, freelance and small-scale organisations are invited to meet at PUBLICS to think, discuss, read, engage and listen to Maria Fusco to discuss art writing currently as an innovation in curatorial practices.
If you are interested in this reading group please contact annabelle.antas@publics.fi to register for a place. Or find more information about the screening
HERE
Spaces for the daytime event and the evening screening are limited. Registration is required.
History of the Present, 2023 is an opera-film, made collaboratively by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, featuring new compositions by Annea Lockwood, libretto by Maria Fusco and improvisational vocal work by Héloïse Werner. Shot on 35mm by Margaret.
This intersectional, intergenerational feminist work forefronts working-class women’s voices to ask: who has the right to speak, and in what way? Layering sociological, cultural, and political themes from the recent history of Northern Ireland, the work exercises voice, breath and field-recording composition through a range of film techniques and operatic articulations, to amplify marginalised stories. Made on 35mm and video in the streets of Belfast, the Ulster Museum and the Royal Opera House in London, History of the Present observes how defensive architecture defines movement to enforce intersectional histories and identities within daily experiences in conflict and post-conflict zones on an international level. Early stages of the work were developed during my fellowship at the Royal Opera House. The work premiered in the year of 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.
Maria Fusco
Maria Fusco is an award winning working-class writer. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she now lives and works in Scotland, where she is Professor Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee. Her work is protean in nature, characterised by critical attention to intersectional socio-economic circumstances through an experimental lens. Working across performance and theoretical writing, she is the author of eight books and four largescale performances, her writing is translated into ten languages.
Her most recent projects are History of the Present, an avantgarde opera-film about the legacies of defensive architecture in Belfast, which is co-directed with artist Margaret Salmon with new music by Annea Lockwood, and Who does not envy with us is against us, a book of lyric essays about working-class-ness as method (both 2023).
Dr. Paul O’Neill
Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a position he took up in September 2017. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS.,The MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. His most recent coedited book is Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present published with MIT Press, 2019.
Paul is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, and leading scholar of curatorial practice, public art and exhibition histories. Paul has held numerous curatorial and research positions over the last twenty years and he has taught on many curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe,The USA,Asia and the UK. Paul has co- curated more than sixty curatorial projects across the world.
Paul’s writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines. Paul is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the EducationalTurn (2010), and Curating Research (2014) both with Mick Wilson, and published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London). Paul is author of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam,Valiz, 2011), co-edited with Claire Doherty and author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS.,The MIT Press, 2012). Paul is responsible for the agenda- setting series of three recent curatorial anthologies, The Curatorial Conundrum; How Institutions Think, and Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present, co-edited with Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson et al, and published with the MIT Press, CCS Bard College and Luma Foundation, in 2016, 2017 and 2019 respectively. Paul has recently completed artist’ books with Maryam Jafri and is working on books with artists Kathrin Bohm, and Dave McKenzie, as well as two new books of curatorial texts called CURED, and CURIOUS.
For more information please email annabelle.antas@publics.fi or valentina@publics.fi