Undercover: A Dialect

Undercover: A Dialect is a group exhibition curated by Michele Horrigan at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow in 2013. It explores how artists are involved in covert and almost hidden activities, often acting out individual trajectories away from any public attention. Taking the position that artistic work is not about fitting into a consensus or about desiring populist approval, it identifies attitudes that enjoy an undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, haphazard formality, and changeability. Their artworks create a grammar, a particular kind of dialect borne out of the methodologies of visual art, forms of speech that challenge assumptions of the generic, the typecast and the stereotype.

Images and a series of short essays written by exhibition curator Michele Horrigan detail artworks by Stephen Brandes, Berndnaut Smilde, aiPotu, Jeronimo Hagerman, Magdelena Jitrik, Fiona Larkin, Sean Lynch, Pilvi Takala, and Lucy Lippard’s 955,000.