Feeling They have to Touch (Fingering)Kira O’Reilly (UK)

21/12/2008

14—16 h

MM Centar (Zagreb)

lecture

Feeling they have to touch (Fingering) will be a performance text/lecture that will knot and tangle unlikely (and unwanted) pleasures from an art practice that moves in and out of the borders of the laboratory.

Performed and spoken in cut ups, lab book notes and messy meshed threads it will speak of:

Lab shoots

Tequila shots

Shot guns

Dead things, living things and being undone.

Piggy bits, girly bits and strange powers.

Carnage and carny in vitro (and why they took their clothes off and got into the hood)

From my position as artist and maker in a bioscience context, the texts testy irreverence will attempt to utter and tease connections and frustrations, desires and pleasures between the various points my own body and other bodies occupy within the without the laboratory, as I prise, prod and prevaricate through layers of tissue, and architectures of time and interfaces between the material and the metaphorical. My textual investigation will attempt to hit (and miss) and engage a visceral and performative action in the reading and attendant hearing, of bodies at their most unstable.

Kira O’Reilly (UK)

Kira O’Reilly is a UK based artist; her practice, both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body. Her work has been exhibited widely. She has also presented at conferences and symposia on both live art and science, art and technology interfaces. She has been a visiting lecturer in the UK and Australia and U.S.A.; currently she is a part time lecturer in Media Arts and Performance in University of Wales Institute Cardiff. She is currently developing a new work, falling asleep with a pig, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst, for Interspecies, 2009.