Padraig Robinson, A Faggot is a Unit, 2023, studio prototype.
GALLERY TWO | PADRAIG ROBINSON
A FAGGOT IS A UNIT
CURATED BY SARAH JONES
SAT 06 APR 4.00PM - FRI 17 MAY 5.00PM
OPENING EVENT SAT 06 APR, 4.00-6.00PM
FREE TO ATTEND
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Monday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Tuesday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Wednesday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Thursday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Friday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Saturday 10.00am - 3.00pm
Sunday closed
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For the CURRENTS exhibition, Gallery One is darkly-lit to accommodate screen and projection works. Gallery Two is lit by daylight, and accessible via stairs or elevator.
Platform Arts is wheelchair-accessible via our Gheringhap St entrance. Unlocked, accessible bathrooms are available on both ground and first floors.
For accessibility enquiries, please directly contact us at hello@platformarts.org.au
In Padraig Robinson’s work, the fleeting emotional and visual potential of film combines and juxtaposes different histories, temporalities and social themes in unexpected, complex, yet legible ways.
For his first exhibition in Australia, Robinson will present the installation A Faggot is a Unit, developed for an artist book of the same name, published in collaboration with Have a Nice Day Press.
Here, seven years of research for film and publishing works are used as a substrate for a retrograde moving calendar work for Platform Arts, Geelong.
The exhibition includes a 20 April screening, as part of the Geelong Pride Film Festival, of Robinson’s feature film Masquerades of Research: Part I & II, 2020 - 2022, followed by a Q&A with the artist.
“A Faggot is a Unit (Hommage to Hanne Darboven)” is made up of working notes, sketches and ephemera from two books and a feature film, made between 2015 and 2022. Each selected page is a substrate for a retrograde moving monthly calendar. This is a way of acknowledging an approach that has kept my mind busy through many lives. Not so much looking back in a retro sense, but shimmering ass-forward into the future like a wired-up, slightly drunk version of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”, yet the detritus piling up behind her is digital — annoyingly digital actually. So identity, and of course "the image", maybe the only infinite resource we have left.”
- Quote from Padraig Robinson during a studio visit with curator Sarah Jones.
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Padraig Robinson (b. Ireland 1985) studied sculpture from 2004–2008 during a time when the image became the defining moment – when the screen altered our socio-political conditions. Coming out of extensive research projects, for example in the Irish Queer Archive and ONE Archives Los Angeles, condensed historical narratives in the temporal forms of books, screenplays and films circulate mostly outside the duration of the gallery context.
Time spent in archives is not a politely “retro” activity, rather, the “retrograde pull” of current work is devised as a response to a contemporary moment defined by speculations on the future as a techno-social commodity. The book Gaze Against Imperialism (Metaflux Publishing 2019) was launched as a reading room installation in the group exhibition CHROMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 2019 - 2020.
Other recent screenings and exhibitions include Dublin Independent Film Festival 2023; Cactus Club, Milwaukee, USA 2023; Gaze Film Festival 2023 Dublin; Pune International Queer Film Festival 2023 India; Melbourne Cineverse 2023 awarded Best Queer Feature; Belltable Theatre Limerick 2022; RCC Letterkenny 2022; NYI Institute of Linguistics, Cognition & Cultural Studies 2021; Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) 2021; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart 2020; Flattime House, London 2020. Robinson was a 2019 - 2020 Visual Arts Fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Council Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
