20 August 2022, 5pm
Doireann O’Malley in conversation with Stanton Taylor

On the last day of Doireann O’Malley’s exhibition, you are invited to join us for a conversation between the artist and Stanton Taylor. The talk will start at 5pm and last approx. one hour, allowing for the audience to be able to experience O’Malley’s immersive 3D animation either before or after the conversation.

Doireann O’Malley’s two concurrent exhibitions Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm at Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung and Prototype II & III at BPA// Raum are both on view until 20 August 2022. 

Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung and BPA// Raum are pleased to co-present two concurrent exhibitions by multidisciplinary artist Doireann O’Malley. Both presentations bring together new and existing works to create a thorough impression of the artist’s practice during the past few years. O’Malley was a participant in BPA// Berlin program for artists 2019/20 and a fellow of Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung 2020/21. In different ways, both programs are dedicated to supporting emerging Berlin-based artistic practices and research. The exhibitions are accompanied by a newly commissioned text by Stanton Taylor.

Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm (2022) is the first iteration of Doireann O’Malley’s new body of work consisting of three acts based on their long-term artistic research commissioned by Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung in 2020/21. Shown successively over the course of the exhibition period, the different acts of this immersive 3D animation are probing us to reconsider the relationship between nature and technology, at a time of simultaneous crises, by looking into new forms of queer subjectivity and their entanglements with data economy, artificial intelligence, and identity politics. With references to surveillance architectures and computational networks, the installation is set in a virtual chatroom, at times reminiscent of an abandoned data centre or an empty casino, in which its queer protagonists find themselves trapped. Recalling these archetypical spaces for accumulation and reward constructed through systems of conditioning and reinforcement, the setting calls into question the psychological disorders and malfunctioning processes accelerated by the desiring machines of capitalism. The title of the new work is a quote from a script developed in a collaborative auto-fictional writing process, as part of O’Malley’s research fellowship. This iteration features two of the main collaborators, Mathea Hoffmann and Juan-Carlos Cuadrado, with parts of their script co-written by Jeremy Wade. The 3D modeling is created by Bertrand Flanet and Simone Mine Koza, the sound design with original composition is by Caroline McCarthy, and the space design is by Celeste Burlina.

Doireann O’Malley, Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm
9.6.–20.8.2022
Opening 9.6.2022, 5–8pm
Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung
Schönleinstr. 5, 10967 Berlin
Opening hours: Friday – Saturday, 2–7pm
Access: Free entry. Our space is accessible by wheelchair.

BPA// Raum presents two works of the three-part series Prototype (2015–2020), created during O’Malley’s participation in BPA// Berlin program for artists. Prototype explores the potential of technological development for a more complex understanding of the world beyond Western binary systems, deeply ingrained behavioral and structural patterns. The video installation Prototype II: The Institute (2018) follows protagonists through a series of improvisational exercises and psycho-therapeutic moments, set within the modernist architecture of the Interbau project in Berlin. Their self-reflections and descriptions of visions of a world without binary gender definitions mix with scenes of utopian implied science fiction. The virtual reality work Prototype III, New Maps of Hyperspace (2020), transforms the viewer into an actor, completing a shift from embodied experience to unprecedented entanglement with disembodied, floating simulacra or avatars. Doireann O’Malley is interested in exploring the appearance of unstable or shifting modes of existence and genders. Thus, Prototype II and III form an interrogation of trans semiotics by bringing together psychoanalytic practices, speculative technologies, and live-action role-playing techniques.

Doireann O’Malley, Prototype II & III
11.6.–20.8.2022
Opening 11.6.2022, 6–9pm
BPA// Raum
Sophie-Gips-Höfe, Sophienstr. 21, 10178 Berlin
Opening hours: Friday – Saturday, 3–6pm