The NCAD Gallery is delighted to announce the commissioning of new work for performance and exhibition, Principles of Space Detection, by artist Irina Gheorghe.

Artist Talk: Tuesday 28 March, 1.15pm
Performance: Wednesday 29 March, 7pm

In Principles of Space Detection, Irina Gheorghe continues her extensive study into the speculation of hypothetical, unobservable or invisible entities and how this act of speculation manifests within banal everyday situations. In conjunction with a newly commissioned performance that gives the project its title, the exhibition presents a site-specific installation, functioning as the environment in which the performance itself inhabits, which subsequently maps the space that visitors can interact with outside of the live event. Within this constructed space, the individual is invited to speculate, to pursue their own hypothetical engagement with things that are present and things that are not.

At the centre of the work is an interest in the role of secrecy in building a community. The things which are not present are not only things which are inaccessible due to distance, technological limitations or ontological uncertainty, but also things which are intentionally kept hidden. Processes of obstruction, deception and camouflage shape interactions between members of the same social group, and between a society and what it perceives as alien to it. The performance enacts the presence of this intentional invisibility as a spatial practice occurring between the performer and her audience, and, implicitly, between the spectators themselves. As in previous works, minimal alterations of spoken language, sound and movement aim to produce estranging effects, inducing sentiment of disorientation to a situation which is otherwise mundane and familiar.

Principles of Space Detection | Irina Gheorghe is curated by Anne Kelly and commissioned by NCAD Gallery in conjunction with:

SpaceX-RISE (Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic EXchange).Conference:
‘Behavioural Economics and Commoning Practices; From Cultural Value to Social Wealth’, Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd March, 2023.
Location :: NCAD, 100 Thomas St, Dublin 8, D08 K521. Organised by SpaceX researchers at NCAD and UCD with input from Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Irina Gheorghe works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, drawing, photography or video, to address the tensions inherent in the attempts to speak about things beyond our possibilities of observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Irina also works as part of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, that she co founded together with Alina Popa (1982-2019) in order to investigate how passions shape contemporary society, as well as our affective relationship to an unhuman universe. Since January 2019 she is also part of the Psychedelic Choir, a Berlin based group of vocal improvisers. Her work was shown at Künstlerhaus Bremen, Ivan Gallery Bucharest, Grazer Kunstverein, Suprainfinit Gallery Bucharest, Project Arts Centre Dublin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Changing Room Berlin, Zona Sztuki Aktualnej Stettin, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry, Glasgow International, TRAFO Budapest, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, BAK, Utrecht, DEPO Istanbul and Galeria Posibila Bucharest, among others.

Gheorghe studied painting and photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest and in 2021 she completed a PhD in artistic practice at GradCAM/TU Dublin, with the title “Betraying the Senses: Techniques of Estrangement, or How Art Speaks of What Is Not There”. Artist website