VIEW (nearer to the time)
A work in two parts

Kira O'Reilly
With Ernst Fischer

The first part is to make contact.

I can imagine a conversation we will have, you and I.
Maybe I'll have to phone you. Or email you.
We won't necessarily know one another; we may well be entire strangers to one another.
We will talk about a meeting and an action that you will perhaps do when we meet.
You won't do anything you do not want to do.
Perhaps I will suggest that all you have to do is to entertain a scenario or a set of possibilities and to visit me.
Nothing more.
Unless you decide to.

The second part is to meet me.

There will be a series of marks, real or imaginary made on my body, made in the interior of the ship Stubnitz, these marks onto skin will perform the notion of co-ordinates and dis/co-ordinates. A map of little signs, moments of juncture, intimate butcheries, considered openings.

The navigation of emotional distance, bodies strange and estranged, seeking and repelling, requests made, thwarted, granted, coerced and seduced.
Invitations and demands.
Refusals and aquiesences.
Comedies of manners and how to locate.
Where I am and where are you to one another?

A series of correspondences/conversations that articulate notions of disembodiment, intimacy, absence and presence, lack of geographical specificity.
A series of encounters that articulate embodiment, distance, absence and presence, real time and place locality.

The entire process of the work will be a navigation of sorts between audience members and performer as we try to find ways of collapsing and rearranging those roles, navigating through strangeness, trying to figure where the coordinates can come from in our correspondences and conversation, what can those reference points be based on as we engage across distances and then encounter one another in close but shrouded proximity.

Michele Serres speaks of the topography created in a crumpled and torn handkerchief in the depths of a pocket, where metric, linear, time and space are collapse into an unexpected topography of proximities and distances, where entirely other connections are made and events pulled into surprising intimacies and astonishing distances.

Kira O'Reilly

'My practice stems from fine art background employing performance, and some video and installation with which to consider the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations. The materiality or fabric of the body, as well as its specificity is important, relationships between bodily interior/exterior spaces are explored as a continuum, the permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed 'self'. Frequently directed interventions are made into the body as a bodily utterance or articulation; invoking notions of trauma (a wound) and stigma (a mark) towards a 'spoiling' and opening of the body suggesting an alteriy of otherness. The visual considerations tend to be formal, economical and precise. Its minimalist sculptural approach both informs and provides a frame work with which to view the work. Current research and development expands on ideas of mark making as a bodily trace using blood, foregrounding both a materiality and a fragmentation of the body within a given and specific space and place responding directly to the architecture and the body of the site."

Kira O'Reilly's work has been seen at the National Review of Live Art, in Glasgow (1998, 2001, 2003), at Arnolfini in Bristol, at Home in London and at several European festivals. In 2003/04 she undertook a residency with SymbioticA within the department of Human Anatomy, University of Western Australia.