Tadhg Ó Cuirrín - I Hear Voices
Public, participatory karaoke events
Saturday 12 Nov 2022
12-4pm and 6-7pm
Westside Playing Fields, Séamus Quirke Rd (12pm)
Blackrock Diving Boards, Salthill (1pm)
Ladies Beach, Salthill (1.45pm)
Fr. Burke Park, Fr Griffin Rd (3.30pm)
19 Eyre Square (6-7pm)
I Hear Voices is a series of public, participatory karaoke events. They look to provide a platform to empower more emotive, gestural forms of articulation, and promote an active listening, while reigniting an alienated public sphere. Join us around the city, to sing, or just to listen.
The past 2 years have brought forward many questions about how we will inhabit this world together in the future. We seek to find new ways of doing things, or to repurpose old ways. To speak to each other. To be together. Karaoke foregrounds the process-oriented value of amateur performance. Its promise rests in its affordance of a platform “to have a voice and be heard. To delight yourself and thereby delight others. To make a song your own and dispense it as a gift." 1 A community emerges as it listens.
It is through listening and adjusting our listening habits to suit the speaker that we begin to develop ethical models for intersubjective experience. This empathetic listening is analogous to the safety implied in the karaoke space, where participants may risk aesthetic exposure in front of sympathetic ears. More broadly, listening announces the promise of being somewhere. Listening brings us together. It stitches together bodies that do not necessarily search for each other, and forces them into proximity for a moment, or longer². It allows us to touch when we cannot touch. The voice as sound reaches us directly. It physically penetrates us through the ear canal, vibrating throughout our bodies. A voice note from a loved one. A playlist you made for someone.
There is usually a non-relation between karaoke and publicness. It is usually found in the dark bars and booths. We will create public spaces where we can begin to tease out old and new ways of saying and listening to one another again.
Tadhg Ó Cuirrín is an artist and teacher based in Co Galway, with a BA in Fine Art, Painting from the Limerick School of Art and Design. He works in a variety of media, and his work was recently shortlisted for the Hennessey Craig Award at the RHA 192nd Annual Exhibition. In March 2023 he will present a new solo exhibition at the Custom House Studios in Westport. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include "The Unexamined Life" in July 2021, and "Magic, Metallic Saliva” with Karen Conway at 126 Artist Run Gallery in March 2022. His work is supported by Ealaín na Gaeltachta, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Galway County Council.
References:
Drew Robb , Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody
Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Spatiality
Venue: 19 Eyre Square, Galway
Accessibility: venue is wheelchair accessible
Parking: pay and display
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland