sonia shiel

SUPERNATURAL BUREAU

Supernatural Bureau features a site-specific landscape painting, inside a hanging tray. It is both a screen, protecting an inner world, and a façade, projecting information. It is a topological enquiry and a pictorial representation of a multi-dimensional terrain. It sits aside a major new body of work by the artist Sonia Shiel, currently in production and commissioned by VISUAL Carlow, for exhibition there from 30 September 2023. What we see at Kunstverein Aughrim is a reflection of Shiel’s working processes and a portal into the sublime and slippery new world that she is conjuring.

Sitting within the bureau, a series of objects act like orientation cues in Shiel’s gameplan. These objects, retrieved, prepared and arranged performatively, as part of the Autumn Preview, are posed to activate the surface. They are the tangible physical result of a series of transformational image-making exercises, performed by actors at selected points on a map. They have been created using observational, alchemical and co-operative actions; burial and excavation, corraling, controlling, planting, picking, drawing, burning and sawing. Disruptive agents like the weather, crumbling walkways, tricks of the eye and ear, sleights of hand, and a gestural chants - all influenced their creation. Throughout her practice Shiel is interested in questions of agency and autonomy. She borrows from the fields of gaming, theatre-making, fiction and non-fiction writing, all narrative forms that show us how humans are both magical and powerless. Throughout this body of work, interactions between the artist and the landscape function as a method to solve artistic problems, in which the artist questions her own agency within the world, and how especially human it is to bet everything on hopeful acts.

Supernatural Bureau is on view throughout the Autumn, closing on 1 December 2023. The exhibition may be accessed during our opening hours 10am-5pm, Thursday-Sunday by appointment. Please email office@kunstverein.ie to schedule your visit.

Kunstverein Aughrim’s ongoing collaboration with Sonia Shiel is made possible with the support of the Arts Council.

Pulse event 3 with Elvia wilk / writer

On 1 August 2023 Kunstverein Aughrim presented Autumn Preview with Sonia Shiel.

Framed by the Irish celebration of Lughnasa, the event began with a woodland walk following a trail along the Ballycreen Brook. A series of exercises were performed at selected points on the map, by a group of actors tasked with conjuring objects, and retrieving ‘the bones of a river’ . Light lunch was served en route. Returning to the Kunstverein, gathered objects were arranged to complete Shiel's Supernatural Bureau, an exhibition that will remain on view until December 2023. The preview event concluded with a conversation on fan-nonfiction and our relationship to narrative and the natural world with a satellite appearance by the writer and author of Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk.

Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, n+1, The Paris Review online, Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, Frieze, WIRED, and The White Review. She received a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant for short-form art writing and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute. She teaches widely and is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal.

Autumn Preview with Sonia Shiel was an Pulse Event devised to offer insight into Shiel’s working methodologies as an artist, by inviting audiences into the making & thinking process. Shiel is currently developing a major new body of work commissioned by VISUAL Carlow for exhibition in September 2023. Kunstverein Aughrim’s ongoing collaboration with Sonia Shiel across 2023 is supported by the Arts Council.

More Pulse Events

*The Pulse Event Series takes its name from Elvia Wilk's analysis of Karen Russell's description of blossoming in The Bad Graft. Russell’s short story describes the relationship between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth as a metaphor for co-dependence between us and nature, and the couple at the centre of her story. Neither the moth nor the tree can survive without each other. Their relationship is consummated in a tremendous blossoming referred to by a local Mojave desert ranger as a “pulse event.” Such a term is associated with bomb test-sites, when a measurable electromagnetic pulse occurs. Invariably – a pulse event is also an immeasurable event of the heart. As a series of workshops, devised by Sonia Shiel in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, Pulse Events generate the opportunity for critique to advance the narrative of Shiel’s current work, and positively agitate the final phase of the project’s development.

Pulse Event #1 with Benjamin Hanussek / Gaming Researcher

Pulse Event #1 consisted of a generative morning session and a discursive evening session, both designed to test and parse ideas within Shiel’s current body of work in development, in the presence of video game researcher Benjamin Hanußek, who was invited to respond to Shiel’s material speculations.

Both sessions took place in Studio 6 at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The morning session involved the construction of a large gaming board, on top of which three active performers were invited to reconstruct a fragmented landscape, and to engage with its terrain according to a set of carefully crafted rules. The performers undertook a series of exercises addressing morality themes, haptics, meta-techniques, and the rules that form in spaces and around objects, as well as between LARP (Live Action Role Play) characters and their authority figures, NPC’s or ‘non-player characters’, in the construction of improvised site-responsive narratives, including those created between artworks and their audiences. Also present throughout this session were a caretaker/prop keeper, a sound maker, a videographer, two assistants/onlookers, and two NPC’s (the artist and the gaming researcher).

In gaming a ‘Bleed’ describes the indiscretion of self as indiscernible from fiction – where the edges between two images that should not merge, do. In this Pulse Event, portals into the fields of gaming and painting were opened, in the hope of manifesting a potential creative bleed between Hanußek’s gaming research and Shiel’s expanded painting practice. The pitfalls and potential of this way of working were explored further in a discursive evening session between Shiel and Hanußek. This conversation explored Hanußek’s current research and Shiel’s burning questions to him, asking how to be intentional and anarchic, digital and analogue, rule bound and rule breaker, and whether fiction can ever have any real effect in the world, and how we might learn ‘to be’ better from it?

Benjamin Hanußek is an educator and researcher in the field of game studies, design & development. He received his formal education at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. In 2022 he became an Austrian Marshall Plan Fellow enabling him to visit Teachers College at Columbia University in New York to conduct a research project on game-based learning. Currently, he directs PJAIT Game Lab at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw where he teaches, consults and supervises video game projects.

Pulse Event #2 with Anne Bogart / Theatre Director

Pulse Event #2 with Anne Bogart is produced by Kunstverein Aughrim, supported by the Arts Council. It takes place in Shiel’s studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and is made possible with thanks to Nyree Yergainharsian and Jocelyn Clark. The event is related to Shiel’s ongoing work for a major exhibition commissioned by VISUAL Carlow opening in September 2023.

The second Pulse Event takes shape in Shiel’s own studio, amid a selection of works in progress. These include three triptychs, in which figures appear to inhabit an extraordinary natural environment, ordinarily. The Triptychs have emerged from Shiel’s central Terrain work for her exhibition at VISUAL, which was first work-shopped through Pulse Event #1 with Benjamin Hanußek. The Terrain work is a dynamic floor piece made up of composite shape-shifting platforms, housing 7 slatted façades with a series of holes, features, and dressings that together form an enchanted landscape - through which a body may walk. The Terrain is many things at once - a painting, a map, a stage, a nature table, a board game, a music box, a birdsong, and an interactive walk. In its final composition it will orientate the viewer through the surrounding exhibition with audio-visual, haptic elements - apparent opportunities for agency. Adapted to this second generative Pulse Event, The Terrain will be presented in its contracted form, on a 380 x 80cm ‘nature-table’ top. The table will be dressed cumulatively, with interactive features and synchronised foley-sounds, enacted through a series of ‘exercises.’ The objective of this event - an intimate conversation with acclaimed director and co-author of The Viewpoints Book, Anne Bogart - is to explore exercises in ‘serendipity’, ‘nature’ and ‘dislocation’ in a conversation between two disciplines - one traditionally static and experienced in motion, and the other traditionally in motion and and experienced seated.

Anne Bogart is a theater and opera director and former Co-Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Works with SITI include Radio Christmas Carol, Falling & Loving; The Bacchae, Chess Match No. 5; Lost in the Stars; The Theater is a Blank Page; Persians; Steel Hammer; A Rite; Café Variations; Trojan Women (After Euripides); American Document; Antigone; Under Construction; Freshwater; Who Do You Think You Are; Radio Macbeth; Hotel Cassiopeia; Death and the Ploughman; La Dispute; Score; bobrauschenbergamerica; Room; War of the Worlds–the Radio Play; Cabin Pressure; Alice’s Adventures; Culture of Desire; Bob; Going, Going, Gone; Small Lives/Big Dreams; The Medium; Hay Fever; Private Lives; Miss Julie; and Orestes. Recent operas include Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale, Handel’s Alcina, Dvorak’s Dimitrij Verdi’s Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma and Bizet’s Carmen. She is the author of six books: A Director Prepares; The Viewpoints Book; And Then, You Act; Conversations with Anne, What’s the Story and The Art of Resonance.

Throughout 2023 visual artist Sonia Shiel collaborated with Kunstverein Aughrim to produce a series of Pulse Events. These interventions - with cross-disciplinary input from gaming researcher Benjamin Hanußek, theatre and opera director Anne Bogart, and writer Elvia Wilk - were designed to agitate the artist’s working process, as Shiel embarked on a major new body of work, ‘Medusa in Pieces’. The Pulse Events culminated with the launch of Shiel’s ‘Supernatural Bureau’, exhibited at Kunstverein Aughrim from 1 August 2023 - 1 December 2023. And on 30 September 2023 Shiel’s evolving exhibition ‘Medusa in Pieces’ commissioned by VISUAL Carlow and curated by Benjamin Stafford, opened. Tomorrow, 21 January 2024, marks its close. Video by Jenny Brady, recorded on location in 2023 at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; the Ballycreen Brook and Kunstverein Aughrim, County Wicklow, Ireland. Pulse Events 2023 were realised with the kind support of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, VISUAL Carlow, and the Arts Council’s Project Award. Kunstverein Aughrim is supported by the Arts Council and Wicklow County Council.