Panel Discussion: Pathology of Energy with Curator and Artists

Join artists Day Magee, D Mortimer, Panteha Abareshi and curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais for a panel discussion reflecting on Pathology of Energy.

Monday 11 April 2022, 6:00pm – 7:30pm. 

Register for the Pathology of Energy Panel Discussion here.

Pathology of Energy is a Curated Space commission by Arts & Disability Ireland featuring Body Without World by Day Magee, Limp as a Mince: Disability, Desirability, Shame by D Mortimer and NOT A BODY by Panteha Abareshi. Curated by Iarlaith Ni Fheorais.

This panel discussion will explore these newly commissioned works by the artists and their broader practices. The conversation will reflect on disability, pain, gender, myth and stigma. They will also talk about the themes of the exhibition, most notably Susan Sontag’s writing.

Through moving image and text, the exhibition addresses the pathology of energy, described by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, in which diseases and their stigmas become associated with certain identities and behaviours. This myth-making reinforces the belief that disease is controllable, in some way unnatural, and therefore deserving of guilt.

After the panel discussion there will be a Q&A. The event will be recorded.

Captions and ISL will be provided.

To view the exhibition, click here.

Biographies

Panteha Abareshi is a Los Angeles based artist, whose work is rooted in their existence as a body with sickle cell zero beta thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain, and bodily deterioration that both increase with age. Being a chronically ill body has shaped their experience into one that is extremely, and highly isolating. The nuances of disability and chronic illness are lost on the average able-bodied individual, and the marginalisation, erasure and violence that they have endured from it alone is devastating. In combination with their personal notions of gender, racial and sexual identity, they are fully immersed in otherness. With so little discussion surrounding this, and little to no exploration of these topics in contemporary work, they aim to push against that lack of representation. In their practice they are warping concrete, physical forms into highly disembodied abstractions. Through their work they aim to discuss the complexities of living within a body that is highly monitored, constantly examined, and made to feel like a specimen. Taking images that are recognisable as human forms, and reducing them to gestural forms is a juxtaposition of their own body’s objectification, and dissection.

panteha.com

Day Magee is a genderqueer performance and visual artist based in Dublin. Since 2011, they have performed as part of live art organisations such as Livestock and the Dublin Live Art Festival, before pursuing a BA in Sculpture and Combined Media in Limerick School of Art and Design in 2017. Their work concerns the subjectivity of a queer sick body: queerness navigated via fundamentalist Christianity; sickness as manifest in chronic pain; and the body being the site of self-conception and the instrument of self-reproduction. Experience acts as the dynamo, and the ensuing emotional interiority is the well from which they draw, resulting in performance-centred/performance-initiated multimedia, performing images of a self-mythology.

daymagee.com

D Mortimer is a writer from London focused on trans and crip narratives. Their work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, Vice and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Queers Read This). They are a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Roehampton working on naming in transgender subject formation. Their debut collection Last Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in May 2021.

@fragile_masculinity

Iarlaith Ni Fheorais is a curator based between Ireland and London, UK.

Iarlaith is also a field:arts Independent Producer, a Creative Production Supports initiative funded by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. She is supported by Arts Council England through the Developing Your Creative Practice Award 2021 and the Agility Award by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

She is currently studying MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute.

@iarlaith_nifheorais