From 28 February until 5 May 2013, an installation of Orla Barry’s Mountain is part of the exhibition entitled Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio, at Bozar in Brussels. On the 27th of February, an ongoing performance of Mountain (free of charge) will be presented from 7pm till 9pm at Bozar in the framework of the Performatik Festival.

Mountain, the new work of Irish artist Orla Barry, takes as its starting point the premise that every sentence that we utter is an improvisation. In this performance, that is never the same on any night, Barry has worked with 57 words, an actor, a dancer and a musician to devise a work in which chance, fate, and a little witchcraft play equal roles. Barry, now shepherdess as well as artist, uses her new knowledge of primal materials and customs. She connects this to her longstanding interest in language, playing with different forms of text production such as speech, monologue, interview, poem or song to create a series of intentionally unplanned crossovers between text, meaning and performance.

Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio is an exhibition at Bozar in Brussels that brings together a group of Irish artists who illuminate the interrelationship between local experiences and global perspectives. Changing States also includes an exhibition of material from Francis Bacon’s Studio. BOZAR has chosen to pay tribute to the genius of this artist as well as to the talents of a subsequent generation of Irish artists. The show is curated by Margarita Cappock, Barbara Dawson, Michael Dempsey, and Christina Kennedy. Read more about the exhibition on the Bozar website

Mountain premiered at STUK kunstencentrum last November and was presented by If I Can’t Dance in Het Veem Theater in Amsterdam on 25 and 26 January. Another performance of Mountain will take place in South London Gallery on the 18th of May.

Partners
Mountain is a co-production of Playground (STUK & M), Leuven, If I Can’t Dance, and Het Veem Theater, Amsterdam and is commissioned by Corpus and co-funded by Culture Ireland, the European Union and the Mondriaan Fund. Thanks to the Gemeente Amsterdam and the AFK.