Preliminary Remarks on the Study of What Is Not There lays the foundations for the study of what is not there. What is there, which is not there? What are its categories and what methods are appropriate to approach it? The research brings together philosophy, science and art in search of things which are not there but were, things which never were, but might be, or things which never were, and never will be.
In trying to answer core questions on the nature of reality, philosophical investigation shares a common ground with the natural sciences, but starts to sound like a B-series sci-fi. Questions like “What is (out) there?” “What is it like?” are starting points of a trip in which philosophers, scientists and artists try to engage with a world beyond the senses. They try to smuggle the invisible and find a form of mediation for a reality which is utterly alien. Self-erasure brings together the realist philosopher, the scientist as a ‘modest witness’ and the practitioner of the occult, all trying to channel ‘the beyond’ through their imperceptible presence. At the other end of this xeno-race lies the interventionist idea of knowledge, the active endeavour of tampering with the environment of the magician-technologist, with a whole toolbox of manipulating devices at hand.
Biography
Irina Gheorghe
Irina Gheorghe studied painting and photography at the University of Arts Bucharest and is currently doing a PhD at GradCAM, DIT, Dublin. Her current work explores the notion of deviation as a technique of estranging the everyday. As tools for this estrangement, she is interested in how the language of modernism can become a platform for interstellar communication and how the absurd structures our relationship to a world beyond perception. Irina Gheorghe also works as part of the artist duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research to investigate how passions shape contemporary society, as well as our affective relationship to an unhuman universe. Selected performances include Preliminary Remarks on the Study of What Is Not There, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2017), Foreign Language for Beginners, Research Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017), rhiz Vienna (2016), Atelier 35 Bucharest and tete Berlin (2015), The Way to Go, eXplore dance Festival, WASP Bucharest (2016), Protect Your Heart at Work (with BMR), Times Museum Guangzhou (2016), Above the Weather (with BMR), Wing Hong Kong and MNAC Bucharest, (2016). Selected solo shows include Alien Passions (with BMR), Skolska 28, Prague (2014), The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (with BMR), Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest (2009). Selected group shows include The Return of Memory (with BMR), HOME Manchester, (2017), Feminism is Politics! (with BMR), Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York (2016), The House Is Looking For An Admiral To Rent (with BMR), MNAC Bucharest (2016), Heroism Rises in a Warehouse, Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest (2015), The Heart Is Deceitful Above all Things, HOME Manchester (2015), Parasite and Mimicry, CAC Vilnius (2015), To the Reader (with BMR), bak Utrecht (2013), etc.