Sedimented Tactilities

Sedimented Tactilities brings together the work of Doireann O’Malley and the artist duo STRWÜÜ (Jo Wanneng & Lukas Fütterer) in a dialogue that traverses geological, political, and embodied terrains. During their time in Glenkeen Garden, the artists turned their attention to forms of relationality – spanning the cryptogamic and infospheric to the socio-political entanglements of identity, territory, and history. Through STRWÜÜ’s sculptural choreographies and O’Malley’s layered cinematic narratives, the exhibition reflects on networks of relation: between people and place, body and environment, nature and technology. What emerges are tactile meditations on entanglement – sensorial inquiries that trace the layered imprints of land, identity, and mediated perception.

Doireann O’Malley’s Maolaigh is the first in a multipart film series, primarily set on Clare Island. The film follows a fictitious younger self navigating an alternate biography, returning to the ancestral home of Gráinne Mhaol, the legendary ‘Pirate Queen’, who appears as a spectral guide alongside fleeting glimpses of the artist. Structured through a non-linear, dreamlike narrative, Maolaigh blends the rhythms of island life – sheep, seals, an abandoned boarding school, and agricultural labour – with interior, surreal experiences. The work navigates the terrain of magical realism, blurring boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and fluidly shifting across gender, time, and identity. Through its liminal, multisensory journey, Maolaigh critically examines colonial and neo-colonial mechanisms of control over nature, female bodies, animals, and ultimately, the Irish people. What emerges is a deep yearning for an untamed, pre-industrial landscape, unshaped by the forces of techno-capitalist patriarchy.
  With their multi-species organisms, the artist duo STRWÜÜ challenges the supposedly linear demarcation between living and inanimate subjects, thereby significantly destabilising the dualistic notions of nature and culture, humans and technology.

The protagonist of their latest work is a boulder from Glenkeen Garden. As one of innumerable rocks, it characterised and structured the Irish landscape. In the course of human appropriation and cultivation of the land, boulders of this kind were piled up on the edges of fields to form enclosing walls. For centuries, they have also marked privatised land or nationstates — border architectures that function like biomembranes. Both are semi-permeable filters that only allow certain substances or subjects to enter.

Nowadays, a more complex system is required: satellites that allow an all-encompassing view from the skies. The robotic arms detect them and freeze the moment they themselves become visible. They refuse to be observed. As soon as the robotic arm is out of the satellite’s field of vision, it continues to scratch the rock’s surface.


Artist Bios
 
The artist duo STRWÜÜ (Jo Wanneng and Lukas Fütterer) was founded in 2014.
They kidnapped a plant, ate it for a stop-motion animation, and performed together with a giant water lily in a pond. They had inaudible sound objects concealed, used each other as marionettes, and spent a long time moving a small stick slowly forward. They layered animals into ever-changing patterns, provided old printers with prostheses, and made Chinese pigeon whistles circle in a huge hall. They tied strings to shape sounds, let insects rain, and constructed noise to be as unstable as possible.
They bridged time to generate space, accompanied industrial buildings while oscillating, and forced air to dance. They deprived fans of their cooling effect, cooked rosin to engender friction, and sank mycelium in dirges. They soldered a low-frequency flock ritually for days and stole your choice with captured wind.
 

Doireann O'Malley, born 1981 in Ireland, is a non-binary, trans* multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin and currently working on several projects in Ireland. Doireann is the recipient of the Berlin Art Prize 2018, Berlin Artistic Research Funding Program, and the Berlin Program for Artists.
They have held guest professorships at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2022), and Zurich University of the Arts (2020, 2021, 2023/2024). They have also been shortlisted for Ireland at Venice 2024, the Berlin Artistic Research Prize 2024, and the longlist for the Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin 2022. Major exhibitions include The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, Gothenburg International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Nordenhake Gallery CDMX, IMMA, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, and the National Sculpture Factory in Cork. Doireann’s films have been screened at MUMOK Vienna, Barbican London, Oberhausen Film Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. Doireann participated in the Glenkeen Garden residency with writer and researcher Elisa T. Bertuzzo, who collaborated on the research and development of the film.


The exhibition and event series is curated by Ben Livne Weitzman.