Joseph Noonan-Ganley: Our Bed

About

1 December 2023 to 10 February 2024 

Opening: 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursday 30 November 2023  

Joseph Noonan-Ganley: Our Bed

Wrap yourself in the speculative terrain of Our Bed. Imagine its fibres under your fingers. Consider its weight through a flex of muscles. Measure your proximity to other bodies through their warmth and musk. Enter the screen, a threshold that re-performs the construction of a series of beds made by Uruguayan rugby players in order to survive their aeroplane crash in the Andes in 1972. Sink into this landscape and envisage the possibilities of a contemporary communal bed. 

An alphabet of jockstraps punctures the video. Material is intimately folded to construct letters, which mimics Noonan-Ganley’s methodology of enveloping archival fragments. This alphabetical punctuation plays host to scenes of the rugby players gliding across a mud-soaked pitch, as the horizon disappears under a cloud of rain and flesh. A collapse in the camera’s field of vision counters a belief in the autonomy of bodies, instead proposing that humans are porous, already open to the outside. Fragility is foregrounded, or a continuum of homoerotic ecology.  

Focus falls on the players’ contact with the sodden earth, captured in a set of digital collective residues. These imprints of multiple skids provide the score for a series of impacts between human limbs, bodies, and environment. A virtual ground emerges during the unearthing of these radical beds (hanging beds, nests, sleeping bags) from archival drawings, aeroplane manuals, and spoken interviews. The weaving of the archive co-constructs a critical-fictional relation with its subjects, invoking issues of care, sexuality, vulnerability, and material intervention. Our Bed proposes that, when mediated through imagery, sound, speech, and text, beds expand to make room for new inhabitants. In this way historical beds gain the power to include people of the present. 

Our Bed is the culmination of an expansive body of work made over several years. Video, photographic, and textile installations were developed through previous exhibitions at The Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, 6 Seville Place, Dublin, The National Sculpture Factory, Cork and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, among others. The video work was recently shortlisted for the CIRCA Art Prize (Sept 2023). A collection of Noonan-Ganley’s writings, including two essays on the work in this exhibition, is forthcoming from MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, London (2024). 

 Our Bed is a dual space, both metaphorically and physically, as it traverses the Steam Works gallery (upstairs) and WIP studios project space (downstairs) at Wentworth House. 

 CGI, AI and technical consultancy: Harry Sanderson. Translation: Maria Jose Legelen and Núria Querol.  

Address: Steam Works (Wanderscorde Woad Extractor), WIP Space Studios, Wentworth House, Dormay Street, London, SW18 1EY  

Gallery opening times: 12(noon) - 6pm Thursday and Friday, and by appointment 

Visit our website: Steam Works gallery  

Follow us on Instagram: @wipspace  

Supported by The Elephant Trust and The Exhibitions Hub, Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.