Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh

‘The Current State’: The Entanglement of the Private and Public Body

The research engages with the position of the artist/cultural worker or ‘subbie’ and the human condition within the dissemination and circulation of capital and aims to understand how an analysis of cultural production through the infrastructure of the logistics industry and the art market is integral when addressing questions of dissent within late stage capitalism.

There are few alternatives for shadow practitioners who subsidize cultural production through the entrapments of the gig economy (Sholette, 2002). The imperative is to allow these specific often-invisible infrastructures within logistics to function as parameters to measure sites of power and propose alternatives of resistance (Easterling, 2016).

These mixed media investigations are borne out of first hand experiences of working environments, while acknowledging a position of privilege. Having identified a number of key sites that function like paradigmatic nodal points the research project proposes to use ‘infrastructure’ to investigate logistical frameworks within Contemporary Art, Finance Capitalism, enforced privatization, rurality and dissent through several key international ‘freelance’ work trips, ‘the family trip’ and a series of collaborative investigations undertaken with an artisanal community and in particular with the kinship formed with a family of donkey’s.

The work leaches out of the confinements of ‘work’ by giving most of my time to these ‘freelance gigs’ and by critiquing or piggybacking of official public art projects in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, the hidden epidemic of lyme disease in rural France and from a new relationship formed with a lifelong environmental activist in Spain. The work uses anecdotal writing and observations written in the first person with sculpture, audio field recordings and rhythmic sound devices and 3D audio studio recordings. 

Supervisors

• John Chilver
• Simon Sheikh

Website

• ciaranodochartaigh.org