By Declan Clarke
The Niland Gallery, Galway, Ireland
13 – 28 May 2011
The show will consisted of three video works: Red Moon, Everything Must Finally Fall and Nothing Human is Alien to Me.
Clarke’s work is thoughtful and nostalgic, exploring the fleeting symbols and derelict statues of power, particularly the iconography of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Sarah Pierce writes: “Much of Clarke’s work connects his interest in political/socialist history with contrasting personal encounters with communism and it is through these connections that Clarke incites a contest between political stories and personal lives that is at the crux of any notion of representation”
In Red Moon New York passersby are asked if they know who Yuri Gagarin is. The video then travels to the site of the former Soviet space museum and ultimately reflects on the once optimistic look to expansion. In Everything Must Finally Fall a plane pulling the words ‘I Have Doubts’ is flown over a city. With Nothing Human is Alien to Me Clarke became interested in the processes of erasing the past. In the immediate wake of the collapse of European Communism many cities, Berlin in particular, chose to quickly eradicate any evidence of the former regimes.
Declan Clarke was born in 1974 and studied at NCAD and Chelsea College of Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions include We’ll Be This Way Until the End of the World, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin 2011; Loneliness in West Germany, Goethe Institut, Dublin; Declan Clarke & Derek Jarman Serpentine Cinema, Serpentine Gallery at The Gate Cinema, London 2009; Nothing Human is Alien to Me, Pierogi, Leipzig, 2008; Mine are of Trouble, Four Gallery, Dublin, Trauma and Romance, Gallery 3 off-site project, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin both 2006.
Recent group exhibitions include We Are Grammar, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; Der Menchen Klee, KIT Kunstverein, Dsseldorf; Ayn Rand | Wilhelm Reich, Essays and Observations, Berlin all 2011, Auto-Kino! Curated by Phil Collins, Temporare Kunshalle, Berlin, 2010; UR NOW Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable, UK; Our Time, Smallpox, Lisbon, 2009; 10,000 to 50, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Through the Lens, Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City, Beijing, China, both 2008; Left Pop, Second Moscow Biennial, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2007; Duncan Cambell, Declan Clarke & Emily Wardill, Art Now, Tate Britain, London. In May 2010 his work was included in the Migrating Forms Underground Film Festival, New York.
