Sunday Afternoon with Sarah Pierce, Bik van der Pol, Bea McMahon, Pilvi Takala, Noor Abed, and friends

Sunday 9 November, 14:00–17:00

We will close Coalescence: Happenstance With All Due Intent on Sunday 9 November with the launch of Sarah Pierce’s new book with a conversation between Bik van der Pol, Eloise Sweetman, and Pierce. Following the launch, there will be a performance by Bea McMahon. To conclude the event and the exhibition, we will host a conversation with and screening of Pilvi Takala’s work, whose incisive videos probe the subtle codes of behaviour that govern social and professional life, exposing both their fragility and absurdity.

Bea McMahon uses many different media including sculpture, performance, song, dance, moving image and installation, often working in collaboration with others. Trained in mathematics and mathematical physics, she navigates through conceptions of reality and their corresponding appearances in the outside world. In her work she plots out scenarios whereby a range of behaviour, movements and intentions are delineated and then are played out to their logical conclusion in a given media. In doing this, she wants to make work that sees what we can make happen, and if we can tell the difference between that and what is happening to us anyway.

Through their practice Bik Van der Pol aim to articulate and understand how art can produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination. This includes forms of mediation through which publicness is not only defined but also created. Their work follows from research of how to activate situations to create a platform for exchange and experience of different knowledges. Bik Van der Pol’s mode of working consists of setting up the conditions for encounter, where they develop a process of working that allows for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories, and publics. Their practice is site-specific and collaborative, with dialogue as a mode of transfer; a “passing through”, understood in its etymological meaning of “a speech across or between two or more people, out of which may emerge new understandings”. In fact, they consider the element of “passing through” as vital. It is temporal and implies action and the development of new forms of discourse. Their practice is both instigator and result of this method.

Noor Abed (Palestine) is an artist who works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019, and in 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/ Museu Tàpies Film Production Grant in 2022, and her film ‘A Night We Held Between’ was selected as a first-prize winner of the e-flux Film Award 2024. Abed is the Grand prize recipient of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Her book ‘Stars at Midday’ was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.

Pilvi Takala lives and works in Berlin and Helsinki. Takala represented Finland at the 59th Venice Biennial in 2022. Her work has also been shown at FACT Liverpool, UK (2024); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2023); Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2023); Pavilion of MUNCH Triennale, Oslo, Norway (2022); Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia (2021); Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2018); CCA Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (2016); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2015); MoMA PS1, New York, New York (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); New Museum, New York, New York (2012); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2011); Kunstinstituut Melly (Formerly known as Witte de With) Rotterdam, Netherlands (2010); and 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2005). Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.

Since 2003, Sarah Pierce has used the term the Metropolitan Complex to describe her project, characterised by forms of gathering, both historical examples and those she initiates. The processes of research and presentation that she undertakes demonstrate a broad understanding of cultural work and a continual renegotiation of the terms for making art, the potential for dissent, and self-determination. Pierce works with installation, performance, archives, talks and papers, often opening these up to the personal and the incidental in ways that challenge received histories and accepted forms. Her interests include radical pedagogies and student work, art historical legacies and figures such as El Lissitzky, August Rodin, and Eva Hesse, and theories of community and love founded in Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille.

Thank you to Culture Ireland & Frame Finland for making this part of the exhibition possible