Join Joseph Noonan-Ganley in Studio 6 for a conversation with curator Vaari Claffey to coincide with the screening of Our Bed at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Our Bed is an expansive body of work by Irish artist Joseph Noonan-Ganley made over several years. It includes film, writing, performance, participatory readings, sculpture, and photography.

The work retells the famous story of a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes following a plane crash in 1972, previously told in newspaper articles, books, television shows and a Hollywood film. Noonan-Ganley’s film is narrated by the reconstructed voice of one of the players who describes the design, construction and use of the team’s emergency beds inside the fuselage of the wreckage. Images, sound and text from archives, mass media and personal notebooks make space for viewers to cohabit these beds, to partake in the imaginative composition that they create. The protagonist elaborates upon the methods that the boys improvised, drawing on an example: a contemporary alphabet fashioned out of jockstraps. This cliché of homosexual identification helps express the different contexts that the boys find themselves in (bed, plane, book).

By interjecting footage of a live televised rugby match, rain and mud disturb the clean capture and transmission of the game. Streaks from the player’s bodies are animated into muddy smears on the video screen, activating their gestures and blurring the subsequent content for the viewers of this video.

Our Bed will be screened for one week as part of an installation in Studio 1 in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Tuesday 12 - Sunday 17 September.

Our Bed was produced with CGI, AI and technical consultancy from Harry Sanderson, and translation by Maria Jose Legelen and Núria Querol. Supported by The Elephant Trust and The Art Department, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Joseph Noonan-Ganley's recent exhibitions and projects include: Loading Bay, National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023), Our Bed, 6 Seville Place, Dublin (2022); Phoenix Art Space Invitation, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, (2022); Sad Mirror, Xero, Kline & Coma, London (2018); Something 3 Be Scared of, no.w.here, London (2018); Amended Plastics, puntWG, Amsterdam (2017). Recent writing and publications include The Cesspool of Rapture, MA Bibliothèque (2019) and Femme Fabrications, Eros Journal (2016).

This event is a part of the expanded programme accompanying Reflex Blue, an exhibition with Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa and Léann Herlihy. The expanded programme includes artist talks, film screenings, publication and performance. Invited artists are Michael Hanna, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Alice Rekab x Stephen Rekab.

Image description: A white-beige jockstrap letter 'R' sits in the middle of a flat black background in this video still. A graphic brown-green CGI mud streak cuts across the right hand leg of the letter 'R' in a diagonal downward stroke.