Susan MacWilliam

Remote Viewing

Northern Ireland's presentation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

7 June – 22 November 2009

Venue: Istituto Provinciale per l'Infanzia
Santa Maria della Pieta
Venice

06/05/2009

In the depths of a Parisian cellar, Madame Yvonne Duplessis conducts fingertip vision experiments; New York in the 1950s and Irish-born medium Eileen J Garrett is exploring the psychic potential of LSD with Aldous Huxley; Winnipeg in the 1930s and the name of the French Astronomer and psychical researcher, ‘Flammarion', appears as a teleplasm on the back of a séance cabinet.
Susan MacWilliam, ‘Dermo Optics', 2006

These are the strange worlds and other times we are transported to through the remarkable video installations of Susan MacWilliam, the artist selected by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council to represent Northern Ireland at the world's foremost showcase of contemporary visual arts, the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Susan MacWilliam is one of the leading artists to emerge from Northern Ireland in the last decade, and she was nominated this year as one of Art Review magazine's ‘Future Greats'. In ‘Remote Viewing', her solo exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale, she will present video works based on her detailed research into the archives of paranormal activity. Underlying the compelling narratives are recorded historical cases, from séances to x-ray vision, which MacWilliam retells through a process of reconstruction and a layering of textual fragments, faded newspaper clippings, archive photographs, and first-hand accounts.

Modern spiritualism emerged with the development of photography, which was used alongside scientific testing to document and verify spiritualist activities. Exploring these connections MacWilliam's work reveals striking parallels between the medium and the artist, the séance and the process of creating art, raising questions about the possibilities and limits of vision, memory and representation.

MacWilliam's exhibition, curated by Karen Downey, features three significant video works: ‘Dermo Optics' (2006), an account of MacWilliam's visit to the Dermo Optical Laboratory of Dr Yvonne Duplessis in Paris, where MacWilliam participated in experiments testing ‘fingertip vision'; ‘Eileen' (2008) explores the social world of Eileen Garrett, Irish medium and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York; and a major new work commissioned specially for Venice, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009), which draws on the TG Hamilton Spirit Photograph Archive in Winnipeg and features Belfast poet and writer Ciaran Carson and Atlanta-based poltergeist investigator Dr William Roll.

Immersing the audience in the haunting anecdote and imagery of these extraordinary histories, MacWilliam creates a bridge between worlds, between past and present and between the worlds of art and psychical research.