Sleepwalkers: Walker and Walker – Barry Flanagan

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22 February 2012 - 10 June 2012

Sleepwalkers: Possibilities - Contingencies

Curated ≈ Michael Dempsey

Walker and Walker - Barry Flanagan

Sleepwalkers: Possibilities - Contingencies is an investigational programming format based on ‘exhibition making’ and a ‘project in progress’ where one’s non-specific expectations of museums can be unfolded.

Following the metaphors explored in the Golden Bough exhibition programme, galleries eight and ten are activated as spaces of reflection and debate. The programme will reflect upon whether our collective memory is mirrored by the museum or does the museum construct a visual narrative of our identity that we internalise? This is of immediate importance in the contemporary debate of re-imagining communities and whether a singular stance is plausible anymore in the disrupting of established hierarchies.

Sleepwalkers is an attempt to develop a dialectic process between artist and audience in ‘exhibition making’ as it asserts itself through the interaction of chance and reciprocity. The moot points explored are the complexities of relationships between individuals and institutions in an exchange which transcends traditional inside/outside or right/wrong binaries.

The Owl of Minerva is the title for Walker and Walker’s installation in gallery ten and in it they will be showing their film Mount Analogue Revisited, a reworking of Rene Daumal’s book Mount Analogue. As the first exhibition in the Sleepwalkers programme, Walker and Walker have produced a body of new work which addresses both the concerns of the film, the two adjoining spaces, and a response to the work of Barry Flanagan, SILÂNS, as seen concurrently in gallery eight.