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Padraic Barrett

Pádraic Barrett is a contemporary Irish artist working in a variety of media including performance, film and installation. Barrett was born in Kerry and graduated from the MA in Art & Process at Crawford College of Art and Design. He recently undertook an artist residency in Lisbon, Portugal where he has been developing work in performative film. Barrett works in a range of media, often outside the tradition of fine art and more from the digital and urban landscape. He has explored themes of surveillance, capitalism and queer theory wherein he creates multi-sensory installations that echo our contemporary experience.

 

Barrett’s work was recently on display at the Lisbon Art Fair in collaboration with Sluice and PADA curator led projects in 2022, titled Machination. Barrett’s work has been exhibited internationally and has ongoing collaborations with his collective INTER_SITE. He has been the recipient of Arts Council funding, Cork City Council funding and the Valerie Gleeson Bursary award.

i'After Light: These Dark Citizens' by Peter Power, with National Sculpture Factory at Cork Midsummer Festival 2022 / Photograph: Jed Niezgoda - www.jedniezgoda.com
Artist statement

My work is a response to techno-capitalist structures and explores alternative vantage points in the realm of the Anthropocene, that contains a mapping of futurity. By placing the queer body in a suspended and simulated space in time, I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia and imagine other ways of being in the world.

 

I merge performance, film and installation to explore human and machine agency through bodily and technological frameworks that can open a space for reflection on the nature of our contemporary experience. These complex relationships are interrogated through nonhuman imagery and post-human landscapes, casting resonances on how the current world is constructed. This demonstrates how the body can mediate the tension between cinematic modes and how we live our lives.

 

Explorations of the social and spatial experience to the ubiquity of machines are impressed upon by fictional frameworks that have a direct port into our lives. The work seeks out political imagination and presents a modeling of worlds past and future as a mode of thinking, sensing and seeing across time.

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