Gerard Byrne, Ireland’s solo representative in the 52nd Venice Biennale, is known in the contemporary art world for his large-scale video installation and photographic projects. His use of documentary materials, culled from popular sources such as magazines and newspapers, re-enacts and recalls key moments of the latter part of the 20th century, tapping into attitudes and conventions of our recent past.

The project 1984 and Beyond (2005)* features a discussion between twelve science-fiction writers that originally took place in 1963. Filmed in two locations in the Netherlands, the Sonsbeek Pavilion in the Kröller-Müller Museum and the Provinci Huis in den Bos, 1984 gathers such characters as Arthur C. Clarke and Rod Serling, who occupy these quasi-Brutalist settings to ponder Life on Mars, artificial intelligence, and over-population. A conflation of scientific fact and extraordinary speculation, as Emily Pethick remarks, 1984 and Beyond is “by no means a simple reconstruction of a document, but a collection of multiple narratives and parallel histories that lead tangentially outwards, forming connections between three time periods, 1963, 1984, and 2005.”**

New Sexual Lifestyles (2003)reveals both our proximity to a bygone era and just how far we have come. The ‘hip’ experts that populate the film (derived from a 1973 roundtable in Playboy magazine) seem utterly out-of-touch and naïve. Here, a notion of ‘retro’ is disarmingly awkward. The discussion progresses to reveal a complexity of social values that represent ‘the cultural revolution’ in historically loaded terms. Playing up architecture as a cultural backdrop, Byrne sets the piece in a unique late-Modernist house in rural Ireland, built in the year the roundtable was published.

In an extensive photographic project, A Country Road, A Tree. Evening (2006 – ongoing) Byrne takes as a starting point the famous stage directions that open Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Each photograph repeats the theatricality of this line, which effects a process of research that combines historical details of Beckett’s life with Byrne’s own conjecture.

This continual play reveals an attitude towards contemporary art practice that regards art-making as a continual renegotiation of conflicting realities. In Why it's time for Imperial, Again…, Byrne appropriates an ad for the 1981 Chrysler Imperial, which features a staged conversation between businessman Lee Iacocca and singer Frank Sinatra. He proceeds to reconfigure the copywriters’ original concept, that draws on these iconic personalities, by ‘recasting’ them amidst the decaying backdrop of New York’s Long Island City. Our protagonists walk through the streets, clothed in suits that imply we enter this conversation ‘the morning after the night before’. Each halting jump-cut emphasises a corporate inclination for technical jargon and high-powered speak, that through its own over-the-top inaccessibility, defaults to parody as we confront our parallel obsessions with ‘celebrity’ and the ‘latest technology’.

Byrne’s interests extend beyond image-based projects to performance-based works like In repertory and Exercise for two actors and one listener. Both made in-situ to address the conventions of the gallery-event, each uses performance as a means of critically challenging norms of production, mediation, and consumption in contemporary art. Similar to prescient works such as ‘Translations’ by the Irish playwright Brian Friel, Byrne revisits the past as a means to reconsider the present, and in doing so Byrne offers translations of sorts, for all their difficulties and inconsistencies, their relevance and applications.

Culture Ireland, the organisation founded to promote Irish culture internationally joins together with the Arts Council of Ireland in this presentation of a significant body of work by Gerard Byrne, in a new venue in the Institute Santa Maria della Pietà. In 2007 for the first time both the Ireland and the Northern Ireland Pavilion, which features the work of Willie Doherty, are located in the same building.

*Commissioned by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, (NL) and Momentum, the Nordic Biennial, (NO).

**Emily Pethick, on 1984 and beyond, If I Can't Dance..., Episode Publishers NL, 2006