EXHIBITION | Colin Darke 'With Hidden Noise'

Darke is originally from England. He moved to Ireland in 1988, spending twenty years in Derry, relocating to Belfast to return to study, completing a PhD at Ulster University in 2010. He has lived in West Belfast since 2012.

Group exhibitions include “Manifesta 3” (Ljubljana, 2000), the Venice Biennale (2003), “MAC International” (Belfast, 2014) and other group shows in Ireland, Britain, Italy, USA, South Korea and China. He has held solo shows in Ireland, Italy, Canada and England.

Much of his work has incorporated hand-written text. This initially referred to political prisoners’ letters - the “comm” or “teach” - written on cigarette papers. Darke took the essentially republican form of the comm and onto it wrote Marxist content, thus looking at the relationship between the two ideologies. The show at the Cultúrlann in part returns to this question.

The three pieces in Fuaim Faoi Cheilt refer to a 1913 work by Marcel Duchamp, titled With Hidden Noise.

One consists of external hard drives, containing unknown password-protected files. The largest piece consists of 1,275 gift boxes, tied with string and containing a British penny. Their tags have one word, adding up to James Connolly’s translated essay Socialism and Irish Nationalism. The third considers far-right bigotry towards immigration and consists of bottles of sea water from the west coast, and including the ironic poem Démocratie by Rimbaud. All three works form the basis of animations which will be included in the exhibition.

Colin Darke says of the show, “As a local resident, showing at the Cultúrlann has been an ambition for some years. Two of the pieces were made specifically for the gallery and I look forward to seeing them in place.”