Themes - kinship, biodiversity and habitats, sustainability, waste management, circular economy, public art, interdisciplinary, materials, interdependence and intra-dependence.
The KinShip art project is inviting you to a curated exhibition of creative works, Tentacular Thinking, carried out over the past 18 months in Tramore Valley Park, Cork.
KinShip is a long term public artwork, developing a variety of public activities at Tramore Valley Park, starting in 2022. Tramore Valley Park has been the site of great environmental change. From 1964 to 2009, this site was used as a landfill for Cork city. The area first opened up as a park in 2015 before fully opening to the public in 2019. The KinShip art project offers artists and interested communities an opportunity to gather together, and to respond creatively and critically to the ecological and climate action challenges we face today.
'Kinship' as an approach for addressing climate action is a concept borrowed by feminist scholar and theorist Donna Haraway. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and acknowledges the complex relationships and networks that exist within ecosystems. Kinship in art practice emphasises the perspective that humans are not dominant over, or separate from other living entities, but that we co-exist interdependently within a complex ecology.
Haraway also emphasises the need to confront the reality of damaged places (such as Tramore Valley Park), acknowledging that many environments have already been irreversibly transformed due to human activities. Rather than turning away from these places or seeing them as lost causes, she argues for an ethics of response and response-ability. She urges us to grapple with the entangled histories and ongoing consequences of environmental damage and to take action within these contexts.
The EXHIBITION name, ‘Tentacular Thinking’ inspired by the term coined by Haraway, refers to a way of thinking that embraces the interconnectedness and complexity of the world. Tentacular thinking encourages all of us to move beyond rigid boundaries and pre-existing hierarchical structures, instead embracing networks of connections and interdependencies.
Tentacular Thinking at the James Barry Exhibition Centre is an opportunity to consider some of the artistic enquiries, collaborator contributions and research work carried out to date in the KinShip project and it is a moment to share and reflect on future possibilities and actions. The EXHIBITION brings together a small taste of various works that have been created as part of the KinShip project, from the artist/plant species collaborative composition of a park anthem, to rammed earth soil samples from the architects and engineer team creating the EcoLab, or artefacts from the (Waste) Fibre Flows Laboratory, examining our complicated and entangled relationship with waste.
The EXHIBITION opens on Wednesday Sept 13th at 1pm features and an array of films, artefacts, sound pieces and installations. It represents diverse material thinking and processes aimed to weave paths, threading and sharing ideas and propositions for response-ability in the face of climate change.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a one-day SYMPOSIUM , Staying With the Trouble. The SYMPOSIUM emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and diverse forms of knowledge. By embracing multiple perspectives and ways of knowing, we aim to stay engaged with the complexities of the issues at hand when confronting environmental degradation.
The Staying With the Trouble SYMPOSIUM will take place in the last week of the exhibition on Wednesday 4th October, 2023.
The opportunity to bring this Exhibition and Symposium together is made possible by the Munster Technological University Arts Office, under the Create La Ceile fund.
The KinShip Project led by artists LennonTaylor is created in partnership with Cork City Council and a large community of collaborators and contributors , it is supported by the Creative Ireland, Creative Climate Action Fund.