ARC student (and ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholar) Róisín Power Hackett has been selected by Arts & Disability Ireland as curator of the Open Call edition of Curated Space.

Curated Space is an online platform for Irish and international artists with disabilities. In each edition, a curator is invited to commission new work by artists with disabilities.

Further information from the ADI website:

Curated Space is Arts & Disability Ireland’s online platform for Irish and international artists with disabilities. For each edition a curator commissions new work or a reframing of existing work by artists. This next Curated Space edition which is called The Finest Specimens of Fossilized Duration will be published on our website in November 2020.

“I am delighted to have been selected as the curator for Arts & Disability Ireland’s Curated Space. This opportunity will support me to develop my current curatorial research around the inclusion in and access to the arts from people with disabilities/disabled people. I look forward to working closely with two fantastic artists.”

Róisín has invited, Áine O’Hara and Philip Kenny, to present existing works afresh. Áine O’Hara will present a recording and images of her performance The Birthday Party. Philip Kenny will showcase a filmed spoken word performance of his poem Ode to Sweeney’s.

“Both The Birthday Party and Ode to Sweeney’s show how our memories are rooted more often in places than in time. These works affirm the term topoanalysis, coined by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard believed that memories are ‘the finest specimens of fossilised duration concretized as a result of a long sojourn, [and] are to be found in and through space’.”

Biography

Róisín Power Hackett is an Irish curator, artist and writer. She has a background in visual art, art theory and art writing. She holds a BA Fine Art in 2012 and an MA Art in the Contemporary World in 2013 from the National College of Art and Design. Since her BA she has worked with interdisciplinary performance as she has always been intrigued by the crossovers between visual art and literature. Conceptually, she is drawn to the deconstruction of language and history, often from a feminist perspective.

In 2017, Róisín began to explore another aspect of her identity, her disability. In 2019, she was awarded the inaugural ARC-LAB Gallery Curatorial Scholarship to research access to and inclusion in the arts for disabled people/people with disabilities. As part of this scholarship she is a student on the Institute of Art, Design and Technology’s MA in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC) program and based at The LAB Gallery as Assistant Curator. As the Curatorial Scholar, she will be curating A Consideration of All Bodies, an exhibition of work by artists with disabilities, to take place in The LAB Gallery in 2021.

Róisín has previously held positions in Pallas Projects/Studios, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and Sarah Walker Gallery.

You can find out more about Róisin’s practice here