Open Tabs brings together two separate bodies of work by Irish artists Vivienne Griffin and Cian McConn. It employs improvisation and play, and uses intuitive strategies as well as somatic exercises to identify common ground as well as a space-embracing uncertainty.
Referencing Pauline Olivero’s concept of Deep Listening as a way to perform a call-and-response between McConn who will be making a live, large-scale drawing in black ink in response to Griffin’s sound, in turn Griffin will respond to the marks being made. The piece consists of pure tones made with amplified tuning forks that are passed through a modular synthesizer, traversing the ‘real’ and the digital worlds, looking for the boundaries, the liminal spaces, opacity between the human and machine.
A series of works on paper by McConn will be installed in the space for the duration of the exhibition.
A text by Rebecca O’Dwyer, especially commissioned for Open Tabs, will accompany the performance and exhibition.
More informationVivienne Griffin (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses sound, sculpture, drawing and text in various forms. Griffin works with the voice through digital post-processing and in a workshop they devised called Synthetic Voices. They work with sound in live performances, alongside objects, sculptures and installations. More recently they have been using generative sound within videos and virtual worlds. Their current work looks at the opaque boundaries of human-computer relations. They use noise as a metaphor to ask, where does the mind end and the machine begin?
Cian McConn (he/him) is an Irish visual artist and performer whose non-hierarchical approach toward multimedia practice embraces image-making, text, performance, and collaboration with others. He lives and works in Berlin. Thematically he works with concepts of identity, persona and the performance of the self in relation to gender and community. McConn completed a residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in March 2023. Recent exhibitions and performances include ON EDGE: Living in an Age of Anxiety at Science Gallery London, and I AS IN US with Vivienne Griffin.
Rebecca O’ Dwyer is an Irish art critic and writer based in Berlin. Her writing has appeared in Paper Visual Art Journal, Source Photographic Review, Spike, Art Review, Real Life, Fallow Media, Apollo, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from the Department of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, where she wrote on the conditions of contemporary art criticism. From 2016-2018, she edited the online art-writing publication, Response to a Request.