Research for Exhibitions
Seamus Kealy
As the curator of the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada), I will be organizing an exhibition of contemporary art that responds and has been influenced by Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. This project (November-December 2006) will involve joint exhibitions of new media art, a symposium on contemporary art in relation to Beckett, and a publication, all to mark the centennial year of Beckett’s birth.

This project will tie together a number of contemporary artists' work in relation to a number of Beckett's modernist strategies, a re-appraisal of these strategies in the context of contemporary art production. Examples could include Beckett's use of repetition which resist a neutralizing effect and take up themes of failure, endurance, deconstruction and reflexivity; dystopian themes that speak to the everyday as well as (one could argue) to politics; resistance of nationalist identity (Beckett - the “unIrishman”); the task of onwardness within his work - a spirit of opposition; and the representation of abject bodies.

What interests me is producing a project that complements (or, more accurately, augments) the 2006 Beckett Centenary Symposium in Ireland (April). The Gate Theatre and Trinity College will host a symposium entitled: The Beckett Legacy: A Centenary Celebration, which includes partnered visual arts exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Trinity College Library will also hold an exhibition on Beckett.

This symposium and these exhibitions appear (from their promotional material) to be painting a portrait of Beckett while re-staging some of his plays. They seem to be exploring his work in relation to cultural theory and postmodernism, and influences on music, art etc. I'd like to take this 'celebration' of Beckett a step further and, like I mentioned, examine his modernist strategies as they have influenced contemporary artists and continue to be exploited, renewed, re-engaged and/or developed. This would be working project narrowed down to reflect on and parse with Beckett strategies.

In all, the project would involve new media work of a few contemporary artists, some film screenings (we have an "Image Bar" here - a giant screen for ongoing projections), and a symposium in collaboration university faculty and students, and involving some guest lecturers, such as the artist Stan Douglas.

For the International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006, I would present my research for the exhibition, including presenting a visual presentation of the artists who would be represented.
Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1