Invisible knowledge

Opening Reception and publication launch Friday 8th February at 6pm

Áine Phillips & collaborators:
Vivienne Dick (Ireland), Manuel Vason (Italy/UK), Tom Flanagan (Ireland), Nada Zgank (Slovenia), Rachel Davies (UK), Alex Chaise White (UK)

“Invisible Knowledge” is a collection of works made during collaborations between Áine Phillips and some of the most prominent artists in Ireland, UK and Europe who are documenting and interpreting performance and live art. “Invisible Knowledge” entangles ideas of vanishment, confinement and escape with portraits of lost girls, elegantly dressed trees and articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Collaboration is also a form of ‘invisible Knowledge’ in that it engages new aspects of creative self in revealations that happen in the artistic encounter with another. Art collaborations unravel each partner’s methods and processes forcing new creative approaches, generating new relationships between ideas and outcomes. Art collaboration is a form of dialectic: it generates dialoge as a method of intellectual investigation and enables the expression of two countering forces, while producing a synthesis of ideas in the form of a new work. In collaboration, two or more subjectivities meet to share the invisible knowledge they carry, and to manifest it.
Michel Foucault wrote about madness and unreason as being forms of ‘invisible knowledge’ and the projects featured in this show all explore aspects of invisible facts, intelligence or understanding outside of the explicit, visible world dealing with the vanishing of people, ecological inter-connection, social confinement and freedom. This exhibition “Invisible Knowledge” is also a refuge from unbelief. It is a series of works that evidence belief in the creative relationships that form the basis of art making to explore relevant and urgent human issues.

These projects are funded by the Arts Council, Galway city council, Galway County Council, NUI Galway and Clare County Council.