Curated by Aoife Tunney
Associate curator Chris Fite-Wassilak
"I don't even know who I am anymore. Who am I? Do you know who you are?" Hari asks. "Yes, all humans do," Kelvin replies.
It is a function of our biology to strive to survive day to day. Our futures - and our forming identities - depend on the choices we make. Once we make a choice, we are oblivious to other possible futures; but we sometimes remain transfixed by the path not taken, its unknown and unfilled potential. We can have regret, imaginings and even memories of that unknown possibility.
In Andrei Tarkovsky's film of the sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), psychologist Kris Kelvin meets his dead wife on a space station in mysterious disarray. She is confused and asks Kelvin who she really is. Michel Foucault said it is an obligation of man to know himself. "One of the main moral obligations for any subject,” he wrote in The Politics of Truth, “is to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, and to constitute as an object of knowledge both for other people and oneself." But how can we know who we are if we are always choosing from different possible futures of ourselves?
Making sculpture with particular materials, placing artworks next to each other, or the way in which a film is edited reflects the practice and processes of the artist. The physical outcome is the telling of their journey, and the choices and mistakes made are perhaps analogous to getting to know oneself.
Life is a labyrinth. We move within a global network of labour. We learn about the world through the ever-forking paths of the Internet.
We lose our way. We try to retrace our steps to rediscover our original destination. But to be lost is also a liberation. The search is open ended.
The same is with art; artworks, exhibitions and their titles will never hold just one meaning. There are always various futures, choices and possibilities. Truth is never fixed.
As Kelvin says, “We question life to seek out meaning, yet all the simple and human truths have their own mystery, they are the essence of life.”
This project, All humans do, commences with this thought in mind, and has thus attracted a number of curators and artists into a collaboration that is timely, contemporary and urgent, while making a modest focus on some instances of art production around the notion of contemporary Irish art. Thus the notion of a patriotic or nationalistic art is abandoned from the start, and the journey commences with this open-ended question of process, identity and philosophical task within creativity.
Curatorial Panel members Gavin Delahunty, Head of exhibitions & displays, TATE Liverpool. Declan Long, Writer and Critic, NCAD, Dublin. Seamus Kealy, Director, The Model Sligo.