Talk: Gerard Byrne

Thursday, March 7, 2019 | 7pm | Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema | FREE

SFU School for the Contemporary Arts invites you to join us for a talk by Irish artist Gerard Byrne. Byrne works in video, photography, and performance art to address ideas of time while examining the complex operation of transposition involved in the act of translation of texts to images. He produces multi-media installations that reenact moments from the past drawing from art history, popular culture, and literature. Byrne’s sources include: Samuel Beckett’s 1953 Modernist play Waiting for Godot; a conversation led by André Breton published in La Révolution Surréaliste in 1929; a 1964 radio conversation with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Frank Stella; a 1980 Chrysler advertisement featuring Frank Sinatra; and transcripts of Playboy interviews from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Byrne was born in 1969 in Dublin, Ireland, where he lives and works. His solo exhibition, Upon all the living and the dead, is currently showing at the Secession in Vienna. He has recently held exhibitions at: Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); FRONT International Triennial, Cleveland (2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, UK (2016); GrazMuseum, Austria (2015); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2015); Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013).

In 2007 Byrne represented Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has also participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); Performa, New York (2011); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Auckland Biennial (2010); Gwangju Biennial (2008); Sydney Biennial (2008); Lyon Biennial (2007); Tate Triennial (2006); and the Istanbul Biennale (2003).

Gerard’s talk is made possible by the Audain Visual Artist in Residence program at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.