A UNIQUE and inspiring exhibition is to be hosted by KAVA in Kinvara, and opens on Culture Night (September 23).
The show, entitled ‘Altered State/the liquid of our modernity’ is by sculpture artist David Dunne and will run until October 2.
It features work that reflects on the interconnection between art, nature, science and technology. Dunne’s practice embraces installation, sculpture, video and live art.
The work has been influenced by the Arte Povera movement in making site-specific interventions.
Utilising wood, steel, concrete and low–tech archival electrical elements, this exchange of materials informs an intuitive, methodological response to particular archaic industrial situations.
Dunne outlined that the show draws inspiration from “the satirical title The Valley of the Clueless (Das Tal der Ahnugslosen) given to two regions in the southeast and northeast parts of the former East Germany from the mid-1950s to early 1990”.
“In these two regions TV programming and public broadcasts from West Germany television were out of reach with no reception,” the Wicklow resident explained.
“West German television stations were widely considered to be more reliable in their coverage than their East German counterparts.
“People who could not receive West German stations were thought to be less informed about the contemporary situation in their country and the wider world despite having access to Western radio.
“The state broadcaster Deutscher Fernsehfunk served as a propaganda outlet with censored political and non-political programmes featuring bias towards the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Eastern Bloc.”
Dunne’s current work is particularly concerned about how misinformation, disinformation, surveillance and censorship continue to be “critical factors that will permeate and occupy the way we function in our expanding global society”.
He believes that we live in an era of digital authoritarianism and have entered a period of unparalleled and destabilising change. Against that backdrop, he also believes that the rule of law and the freedom of speech have been eroded.
“The development and research of this proposal began in the second Covid lockdown and in the same year I was awarded a Visual Arts Bursary from The Arts Council,” Dunne noted.
David Dunne was born in Dublin and lives in County Wicklow. He studies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology and at Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture, New Jersey.