I, (Claire Feeley) am Fellow in Curatorial Practice at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork. In this position, I co-curated Grin & Bear It: cruel humour in art and life with Matt Packer. According to Antonin Artaud, cruelty is related to the act of unmasking, providing an aesthetic jolt needed to shatter false realities. Cruel humour, therefore, becomes a way of approaching uncomfortable truths about ourselves and society. As such, we felt it important to explore the social and historical connections between humour and cruelty. We collaborated with the department of Folklore and Ethnology at UCC in researching certain bizarre and ribald Irish funeral rituals. I also co-curated Then + Now: evolving art practices that revisited many of the most significant artist to emerge in Ireland in the last 25 years. For Then + Now, artist Brian O’Doherty presented a reconfiguration of Tatlin, an important corner rope drawing first made in Italy over 20 years ago. For the past 50 years, Brian O’ Doherty has impacted on Irish and international art, both through his artwork and through his seminal writings, most famously Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space, which became a landmark text in the development of Minimal and Conceptual Art of the1960s.

Alongside this, I have curated a number of thematic group shows in temporary exhibition spaces including, most recently, The Gold Standard: shifting values in art, in Iceland. Taking its title from ‘the gold standard’, a physical way of measuring value that has subsequently been abolished, this exhibition understood value as something liquid and opaque but nevertheless central to our understanding of contemporary art.

As a confirmed bibliophile, the practice of art writing has served as a lifeboat, a repository of ideas and occasionally as a friend. I am an occasional contributor to Circa and VAI but a more frequent contributor to artist’s catalogues. Recent papers include Debating Demos delivered as a workshop at Public Preparation, Estonia where I problematised the notion of a cosmopolitan citizenry as an adequate response to the democratic deficit in the EU. I also wrote a play, A Mathematician’s Apology, which will be performed in the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast in August 2009. This play reinterprets the final days of the mathematician G. H. Hardy and stands, in many ways as a eulogy, to the failing doctrine of the enlightenment.

I am editorial coordinator for a new magazine for contemporary art in Ireland, Art in the Contemporary World, launched in collaboration with the National College of Art and Design. The first issue, due out late 2009, is loosely themed around issues of Noise and Silence, with contributions from writers, theorists, artist, curators and innovators. For Sommerakademie 2009, I will present on a current research project: the artist as educator.