Cill Rialaig Application Document

How to apply for a residency


Cill Rialaig’s purpose is to facilitate the creative work of fine artists, writers, poets, musicians and their peers.  By staying at this remote, ascetic village, free of charge and unencumbered by commerce, daily routine and demands, artists are able to recharge and enhance their productivity.
Residencies are open to full-time practicing professionals from Ireland and abroad for durations of one to six weeks throughout the year.  Competition for residencies is keen, but we are able to accommodate about 140 artists every year. 

To apply, please complete and return, by email or post, the basic information below along with a letter describing your work, the reasons a residency would be valuable to you, and what you hope to accomplish here.  Include with this a curriculum vita and a sample of digital reproductions of your work.   In your letter, please tell us your preferred time of year for a residency, bearing in mind that we are generally scheduling 9 to 18 months in advance. Complete the information below and return this application with your cheque or bank draft for €25 made out to Cill Rialaig Project.  Alternatively, this fee may be paid by bank transfer or credit card – see details below.
Applications are reviewed every six months, and are due March 15th and September 15th.  Our Selection Committee meets soon after these deadlines, and you can expect a reply within 6-8 weeks.  


      For our files:                           (please print clearly)

      NAME: _________________________________________________________
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      €25 Application Fee paid by (check one)   Cheque___________Credit Card ___________Bank Transfer ___________

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      Please indicate type of card: Visa_______  Mastercard _________ Laser _________   (American express not accepted)
Bank transfer within Ireland: sort code 936332 Ac 49361128 (with your name as reference)

      Bank transfer outside Ireland: Iban code IE39 AIBK 93633249361128 BIC code AIBKIE2D (with your name as reference)

The Cill Rialaig Project: A retreat on the edge of the world

The Cill Rialaig Project:  A retreat on the edge of the world


Founded in 1991 by Noelle Campbell Sharp, Cill Rialaig is located in the restored ruins of a 1790s pre-famine village in a wild and beautiful landscape situated on the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean in southwest Kerry.  Seven individual cottage studios are occupied by artists and writers, and the eighth cottage, Tigh an Comhrá (Meeting House) offers a place for residents to gather or enjoy a rich library.  
Residencies are open to full-time practicing professionals from Ireland and abroad for durations of one to six weeks throughout the year.   Each resident occupies a small cottage with its own living and work space. The residency is free of charge, although residents must provide their own transportation, food and supplies, fuel, and contribute to utility costs.  

Cill Rialaig, meaning “Church of the Regulars,” has a connection to the famous medieval hermitage of Skellig Michael; it was settled by “church regulars” after the monks abandoned the Skellig and built an abbey in nearby Ballenskelligs.  
Cill Rialaig is a quiet, remote retreat where one can temporarily renunciate ordinary domestic and work demands.  The isolation offers the opportunity to focus entirely on one’s creative work without interuption.  The landscape is full of inspiration and the local people are warm and generous.

The lifestyle here is very simple and basic.  Modern conveniences such as television, computers, internet, microwaves, etc. are not provided.  Residents cook their own meals, maintain their own cottages while in residence, and live as independent of their neighbours as they wish, in much the same way as those early ascetics lived “isolated but in close proximity to each other.”

Due to its location on a steep cliff side amid stone ruins in various stages of repair, the site is unsafe for children.  We strongly advise that artists do not bring babies or young children.  Out of respect to other residents, we also cannot allow pets.  Though the cottage can accommodate partners, it is recommended that all residents honour the intention of the retreat as a place of contemplation and work.  
The closest village, Ballinskelligs, is three miles away.  This is in a Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking area, and is one of the least populated areas in Europe.  Ballinskelligs has a population of less that 600;  it has one general store/petrol station, a post office, two pubs, and a few seasonal eateries.  The largest town, Cahersiveen is a 20 minute drive away, and here you can find several grocery stores, a great French patisserie, a hardware store, a news agent, and a good number of pubs that sometimes offer traditional Irish music as evening entertainment.
We run a gallery and shop in the nearby village of Dun Geagan, just east of Ballinskelligs, called Siopa Chill Rialaig.  There is a very nice café there, as well as ceramic, glass, and woodworking facilities.  Nearby are our staffed printmaking facilities.  Use of these facilities is generally by advance arrangements as they are often used for workshops.

Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Awards

This award has been set up by the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust to honour the life of the late Thomas Dammann Junior. The Trust is a charity, established in 1985, which  makes awards to applicants for furthering their research and practice and visiting exhibitions, museums, galleries and buildings of architectural importance. Applicants must have a special purpose and a specific programme intended to broaden their practice in the visual or applied arts, craft, design, architecture or history of art and design.

The awards are mostly sought by students but are open for anyone to apply. The maximum award is €5,000.

Application Process

During this application process you will be prompted to enter the following information.  Please ensure that you have all of the information available before you commence.

Personal Information

• Name
• Full address
• Telephone number
• Mobile phone
• Email address

Academic Information (if applicable)

• Level of studies - postgraduate, undergraduate or other
• Course & institution

Proposal Details

• The purpose for which you are seeking this award
• The value, importance and/or novelty of your proposal
• Details of the expenditure you expect to incur
• How your proposal relates to your personal or academic development
• Total value of award sought in €

Referee Details

• Name of referee
• Referee's institutional affiliation (if any)
• Email address of referee

Bank Details (To enable us to process prompt payment to successful applicants)

• Your preferred payment method
• Additional Bank related information

Very strange Video from Otto Muehl -vienna actionism in the 1960s

Otto Muehl- Artical from Frieze Magazine

Otto Muehl’s prolific practice is marked by an eccentric drive towards overwhelming experiences and the breaking of taboos. In 1961, in the ruins of Freudian and Reichian psychoanalysis, Muehl embarked – with fellow Vienna Actionists Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler – on a search for the cognitive foundations of artistic existence, asserting the need to move beyond easel painting and declaring the body as art’s playground. In their home city the group was isolated, criminalized and prosecuted; but in London, at the 1966 ‘Destruction in Art’ symposium organized by Gustav Metzger, they were celebrated as the ‘heroes of Vienna’.
By 1991, however, Muehl’s role as charismatic entertainer-in-chief and motivator for around 600 members of the Friedrichshof Commune in Austria (of which I was a member from 1973–90), all sworn to the principles of ‘free sexuality, common property, direct democracy and freedom of self-expression’, had got out of control. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for the sexual abuse of teenage girls and drug-law violations. The fusion of art and life that had dominated the art world of the late 1960s, and that Muehl had fully embraced, resulted in a disastrous meltdown.
The executors of the commune subsequently found themselves in a precarious financial situation; in 1996 they commissioned Viennese gallerist Hubert Klocker to sell off their valuable collection of Fluxus and Actionist works by artists including Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth. None of Vienna’s state museums – such as MUMOK, which had earlier acquired Schwarzkogler’s estate, or the Belvedere Gallery of Austrian art – responded. Neither, initially, did Rudolf Leopold, a private collector and founder–director of the Leopold Museum, home to one of the world’s largest collections of works from fin-de-siècle Viennese art (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele etc.). Interested in colour, composition, the erotic and the patriotic, in Actionism Leopold saw only destruction and aggression. He viewed the works, but decided not to buy. On the way back to his car, however, he noticed a pile of seven paintings by Muehl from the commune period which he immediately purchased. Over the course of several return visits, he eventually bought a total of 240 canvases, watercolours, screen prints and drawings.
Eighty of these works are now being shown for the first time at the Leopold Museum. Prior to the exhibition, there was some debate as to whether Muehl’s pictures from the commune period should be exhibited: opponents declared the images ‘criminal material’ and thus inappropriate for a state museum. As a consequence, Leopold’s son, Diethard, who assumed the role of curator after his father (who died in June) fell ill, explicitly avoided works from the series ‘Unfälle im Haushalt’ (Accidents in the Home, 1986), which contains candy-hued scenes of sexual violence for which Muehl’s teenage victims posed as models.
Also conspicuously absent from this exhibition are Muehl’s early material pictures (1961–4), the communist-style propaganda scenes of the late 1970s, and his ‘12 Aktionen’ series (12 Actions, 1970–1), which marked the true end of Actionism and which would have provided a logical starting-point for a presentation of the paintings from the 1970s and ’80s. As Muehl once said: ‘What I have tried to do here using the means of painting is to portray aspects of human cruelty and perfidy that could not be portrayed in the form of an action. The “12 Actions” are to be understood as a kind of “Stations of the Cross” of human inadequacy and baseness.’
Of the works that are included in the show, the curatorial decision to group them thematically (heads, figures, couples, etc.) does not do justice to Muehl’s actual intentions. These works were made according to a range of premises: painting as the endpoint of Actionism; painting as an academic study of the techniques of the Old Masters; painting in the form of ‘propaganda panels’ to illustrate ideas about a future ‘communal’ society; and painting simply as painting.
Works from the artist’s ‘Van Gogh’ series (1984) provide some of the show’s strongest visual moments. For Terese Schulmeister’s experimental movie Vincent (1984) about the inner life of Vincent van Gogh, shot at Friedrichshof, Muehl painted the works attributed to the main character – a portrait, for example, of Hermann Nitsch as Claude Monet. Parallel to the making of the film, Muehl painted a series in which visions of a crazed maniac are implanted into Van Gogh’s sun-drenched landscapes and nocturnal café scenes. These works make plain why Muehl’s influence on artists such as Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Paul McCarthy and Albert Oehlen is not limited to his Actionist practice.
Although the Leopold Museum exhibition is a bold attempt to offer insight into Muehl’s practice, it leaves gaps in important phases in the artist’s career and, as mentioned, the grouping of works is at times misleading. But maybe it is impossible to do justice to the artist’s entire oeuvre in a single exhibition. After all, Muehl (who, now aged 85 and very ill, lives a secluded life with a small number of loyal followers in southern Portugal) embodies the full schizophrenia of the 20th century: anarchy and monarchy, communism and fascism, artist and petit-bourgeois, taboo-breaker and paranoiac, victim and perpetrator. As a person, Muehl failed spectacularly. But as an artist and visionary, he made an important contribution to widening our concept of freedom.

Theo Altenberg

An interview with Adrian Ghenie from Flash Art Magazine

MAGDA RADU: You deliberately leave room for the intervention of hazard and for arbitrary choices when you paint. To what extent does this interfere with the control you have over the painting process?

Adrian Ghenie: When I provoke an accident and I let the oil or acrylic paint leak over a

surface, I get interesting results and satisfying solutions that I haven’t thought about. Representational painting can be quite tedious when it comes to the painterly facture, when paint is applied with a brush in a conventional way. The mix of colors resulting from accidents endows the compositional elements with vibrancy and I use this type of execution when I paint the background. In my works, the space framing the figures has to be painted as loosely as possible.

Duchamp’s Funeral (detail), 2009. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy Nolan Judin, Berlin.

MR: There is a tension in your work between a carefully planned preparatory stage (the making of collages and models) and the actual process of translating that into painting. Can you comment on this?

AG: An antagonism is embedded in my paintings, which is not something I was fully aware of. On one hand, I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light. On the other hand, I do not refrain from resorting to all kinds of idioms, such as the surrealist principle of association or the abstract experiments which foreground texture and surface. If the distribution of elements is precisely premeditated, paint is nonetheless applied freely, with unbridled gestures. The oil paint medium triggers a range of technical possibilities, which I am committed to explore in various combinations. For example, I mix various colors on a trowel and I apply it directly onto the canvas. Then I wipe it off with something else. Quite often I paint with a house-painter’s brush. I’m interested to see the outcome of such exercises.

MR: You have started making large-format paintings and recently your palette has diversified. What brought about these changes in your practice?

AG: I wanted to confront this diversity, to test the combinatory possibilities after a period

in which I employed an almost monochrome tonal range that reduced the intensity of experimentation. The decision to adopt a larger format came out of the same curiosity. Looking at Renaissance painting, I was keen to explore pictorial issues regarding the construction of space, such as the succession of planes, the use of perspective. My inclination to investigate geometry and volume demanded — for me at least — a bigger dimension to work on. At the same time, I was drawn to the illusionistic power of the cinema screen.

MR: Can you describe the impact of film on you and your work?

AG: If you look at my works, there is a filmic quality in all of them. In my case, the film has provided the most important ingredient of my visual background. When I paint I have the impression that I am also involved in directing a film. Looking at a film made by Lynch or Hitchcock, experiencing the tension and drama of a thriller is at once realistic and beyond the ordinary. For me, the genius of cinema resides in its capacity to project an illusion. The emergence of every artistic medium relied on a technical invention that was originally designed to serve a practical purpose. At the beginning there was no aesthetic. All of a sudden one looked at moving images that previously existed only in one’s imagination. The first films had a certain type of grandeur because they captured historic moments, stories and myths that had to be represented on screen. There was the need to create worlds, inaccessible in everyday life. In the same vein, when the van Eyck brothers invented the oil painting technique they realized that it had the capacity to render details, texture, volume with an astonishing accuracy. An accidental slip of the paintbrush could yield unexpected results, looking like sand or fur or the leaves of a tree. Once you discover the potential of such an invention you cannot resist it. To the 15^th century spectator, the combination of religious subject matter with the illusionistic power of oil painting must have had a great emotional impact. The same effect was experienced by the viewer in the early days of cinema.

The Collector (detail), 2008. Acrylic and collage on paper, 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy Plan B, Cluj/Berlin.

MR: How do your works convey this cinematic feeling?

AG: The cinematic impression is partly given by light and texture. The settings in my  aintings seem real; they seem to have suffered a process of erosion, you recognize in them a diversity of textures. The background, enclosing human silhouettes, is made up of wet, burnt, damaged walls.

MR: What about the historical avant-garde and the way it is insinuated as a subject in your paintings? You conjure up the Dada Berlin exhibition or Duchamp.

AG: The state of painting today prompted me to choose this subject. The ongoing debate about the “death of painting” may be intellectually stimulating, but I think it is also anachronistic. There is enough evidence to conclude that painting is not dead. And yet, I wanted to return to the historic context in which this problem was first articulated. I view key moments and personalities of the avantgardes like Duchamp from a great distance and from a reversed perspective. Although I recognize the liberating effects produced by the outburst of the avant-garde movements (of which I am also a beneficiary), I can’t help but notice the extent to which some of their ideas — exposed in time to manifold appropriations — have imposed themselves with such forcefulness as to become canonical. I simply want to question this state of affairs without making accusations. But I feel I have the right to see idols like Duchamp or Dada in a different light.

MR: There are also references to the history of the 20th century, to figures like Lenin, Hitler or Goering. Do you invoke them because you want to address contemporary issues?

AG: We inevitably live in a post-WWII epoch, which means that we constantly have to look back to that watershed moment in order to understand our present condition. Rather than historic figures, Hitler and Lenin appear as ghosts in my paintings. Indeed, I chose to paint them in very few instances and their presence is not conspicuous at all. It was a period in which I tried to depict their residual image in the collective unconscious, painting after such clichéd photographs like the ones with Lenin lying dead, an image familiar to millions of people. With Goering — whose portrait was featured in “The Collector” series — the motivation was slightly different. I was more interested in his personality; for me, he truly embodied the archetype of the rapacious collector. I tried to grasp the psychological complexity of this man driven by a collecting bulimia, which in the end was totally compromised by his power.

Dada is Dead, 2009. Oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm. Courtesy Haunch of Venison, London. © Adrian Ghenie. Hunger, 2008. Oil on canvas, 40 X 30 cm. Courtesy Mihai Nicodim, Los Angeles.

MR: Your work is often discussed in relation to Communism. Last year you appeared in a video-film painting a portrait of Ceaucescu. To what extent does your work deal with the legacy of Communism?

AG: I am particularly interested in the state of exceptionality that characterizes everyday life in totalitarian regimes, not just Communism. In such circumstances everything is being distorted. However, in terms of subject matter, national-socialism is more present in my work. But there are more subliminal, subterraneous ways in which I was marked, for example, by early memories of my life lived under the Communist regime. The basement of our family home was a space which contained many objects that were discarded, and this space represented for me the true receptacle of personal memories. The painting Basement Feeling (2007) is one of the few autobiographic works that captures this melancholic encounter with my past. The work with Ceaucescu is a project by Ciprian Murecan; he wanted me to paint an official portrait of the dictator, giving me indications to comply to all the parameters of a conventional and neutral posture, as if an artist of that epoch had received this commission. The overwhelming majority of such portraits were horribly painted and ridiculous, so we wanted to find out if, given the imposed iconography, it was still possible to make an aesthetically passable work. It is an open experiment; the portrait turned out ok, but still, we didn’t exactly live in those times.

some works from adrian ghenie

Pie Fight Study 4, 2008

The Blue Rain 2009

Duchamp, 2009

Untitled 2009

Adrian Ghenie: Darkness for an Hour is at Haunch of Venison, London,July 25, 2009

In his first solo show in Britain, young Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie presents a body of work which fill the vast space of the new Haunch of Venison galleries. The title of the exhibition, ‘Darkness for an Hour’ refers to energy protests and the resulting Earth Hour on March 30, 2009, during which lights were switched off in buildings all over the world.

Despite the title, Ghenie’s series of paintings is not anchored in ecology or environmental politics. Rather, the artist seems endlessly fascinated with the familiar imagery of the 20th century, with both Hollywood and Dada acting as recurring themes.

Ghenie’s technique implies the process of remembering, and his figurative works are obscured by a thin veil of abstraction, perhaps standing in for temporal distance. He clearly paints from the combined sources of authentic memory and pictorial evidence, resulting in paintings which are obviously memories of shared historical experience.

Marcel Duchamp is perhaps the most constant theme in this series, evident in two portraits and two paintings of his corpse at his funeral, the moment which declared ‘Dada is dead.’ Ghenie paints Duchamp furiously in a way which declares remembrance: the compulsive rethinking and re-evaluation of a scene long after its expiration. Ghenie’s technique is so gloriously dark, so heavenly beautiful, that it almost defies articulate description. All things are tangible in his swift handling of paint: memory, loss, a deep cultural mourning.

The new Haunch of Venison gallery in the former Museum of Man is perhaps a difficult space in which to launch a solo show for an emerging artist. The walls are enormous, the rooms expansive. The entire building is so infused with grandness, that the empty space could potentially seem more potent than the art. Fortunately, Ghenie’s brilliant works rise to the challenge of the white box spaces, surpassing perhaps even the most liberal imagining of their potential.