Sedimented Tactilities

Exhibition Opening: Thursday, 15 May 2025, 6pm
All welcome.

Sedimented Tactilities brings together the work of Doireann O’Malley and the artist duo STRWÜÜ (Jo Wanneng & Lukas Fütterer) in a dialogue that traverses geological, political, and embodied terrains. During their time in Glenkeen Garden, the artists turned their attention to forms of relationality – spanning the cryptogamic and infospheric to the socio-political entanglements of identity, territory, and history. Through STRWÜÜ’s sculptural choreographies and O’Malley’s layered cinematic narratives, the exhibition reflects on networks of relation: between people and place, body and environment, nature and technology. What emerges are tactile meditations on entanglement – sensorial inquiries that trace the layered imprints of land, identity, and mediated perception.
 

Doireann O’Malley’s Maolaigh is the first in a multipart film series, primarily set on Clare Island. The film follows a fictitious younger self navigating an alternate biography, returning to the ancestral home of Gráinne Mhaol, the legendary ‘Pirate Queen’, who appears as a spectral guide alongside fleeting glimpses of the artist. Structured through a non-linear, dreamlike narrative, Maolaigh blends the rhythms of island life – sheep, seals, an abandoned boarding school, and agricultural labour – with interior, surreal experiences. The work navigates the terrain of magical realism, blurring boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and fluidly shifting across gender, time, and identity. Through its liminal, multisensory journey, Maolaigh critically examines colonial and neo-colonial mechanisms of control over nature, female bodies, animals, and ultimately, the Irish people. What emerges is a deep yearning for an untamed, pre-industrial landscape, unshaped by the forces of techno-capitalist patriarchy. With their multi-species organisms, the artist duo STRWÜÜ challenges the supposedly linear demarcation between living and inanimate subjects, thereby significantly destabilising the dualistic notions of nature and culture, humans and technology.

The protagonist of their latest work is a boulder from Glenkeen Garden. As one of innumerable rocks, it characterised and structured the Irish landscape. In the course of human appropriation and cultivation of the land, boulders of this kind were piled up on the edges of fields to form enclosing walls. For centuries, they have also marked privatised land or nationstates — border architectures that function like biomembranes. Both are semi-permeable filters that only allow certain substances or subjects to enter.

Nowadays, a more complex system is required: satellites that allow an all-encompassing view from the skies. The robotic arms detect them and freeze the moment they themselves become visible. They refuse to be observed. As soon as the robotic arm is out of the satellite’s field of vision, it continues to scratch the rock’s surface.


Following the exhibition opening at the Goethe-Institut in Dublin, a multimedia lecture performance by STRWÜÜ and screening by Doireann O'Malley will take place at Uilinn: West Cork Arts' Centre, Skibbereen.


Uilinn: West Cork Arts' Centre, Skibbereen 
17/05/2025, 3-5pm
Sound performance by STRWÜÜ and Screening by Doireann O'Malley


The exhibition and event series is curated by Ben Livne Weitzman.

Gallery Opening Hours
Monday - Thursday   10:00am – 6:00pm
Friday                        10:00am – 5.00pm
Saturday                    10:00am – 3:00pm
Closed on Sundays and Bank Holidays 
 
Please note that due to the protected structure of the Georgian building the exhibition is only partially wheelchair accessible.


Presented by the Crespo Foundation and the Goethe-Institut Irland as part of the exhibition and event series The Glenkeen Variations.