Nobodaddy opens on Bloomsday, Monday 16 June, 6–8 pm and at weekends 12 –5 pm, and by appointment until Sunday 13 July.
This group exhibition, in which artists make works as a response to their reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, will open on what has come to be known ‘Bloomsday’ — Monday June 16, the day and night in which the events of the novel take place in Dublin, 1904.
Ulysses is one of the great novels of the 20th century. As Joyce takes us through the characters’ days, he also examines what it means to be a modern artist, to reckon with the history of the novel, to experience modernity, and to live in a city — the joy and the grind of existing amongst so many thinking and feeling, loving and hating human beings, each in their own movie all together at once.
Discarding a single dominant narrative voice and refuting multiple hierarchies (literary, colonial, capitalist, political, religious, patriarchal, gender-based), the book is today more pertinent than ever. There has never been a better time to think about Ulysses and absorb its strange, constantly fluctuating atmosphere, its tenderness towards the human animal alongside radical questioning of the status quo.
As the protagonists traverse the city from day till night, Joyce takes on all of his literary forebears in funny, utterly irreverent fashion, offering pastiches whose humour is undercut by the vast weight of the knowledge he holds. With so many references, literary styles, and fragmenting narratives presented as interior monologues, it is traditionally seen as a ‘difficult’ book. But the great upending of everything that had gone before (accomplished with as much reverence as the weekly refuse collection) make it extremely democratic — the reader/consumer of the novel is an active interpreter, and ‘the death the author’ is the birth of the reader.
One of the novel’s strands — the idea of metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul — led easily to the idea of asking artists to consider, absorb, transmute and revive the ideas and images in the text. Joyce dissolved the traditional realist novel’s ideas of plot and protagonist, so a group show of many interpretations seems an obvious celebration of Bloomsday — a mirroring of its many twining narratives and individual voices.
The artists in the show are all real readers for whom books are important. One of the themes of Homer’s Odyssey, (the framework underlying Ulysses) is zenia — ‘guest friendship’. Being hospitable is of great importance in Ulysses — kindness to another and a welcoming offering of your home to them. Grouping artists together to be in conversation with each other is, I hope, a continuation of this — and I hope for your company too.
The book lives on — beautifully poetic, provoking, disturbing, confusing, and amusing — because it is above all deeply kind: a book that requires and repays our attention and involvement.
Nobodaddy opens Monday 16 June, 6–8 pm and at weekends 12 –5 pm, and by appointment until Sunday 13 July. Please contact the gallery for further information.
Artists in the exhibition:
Felicitas Aga
Paul Becker
Mikey Cuddihy
Paul Housley
Chantal Joffe
Jeff Mcmillan
Anne Ryan
Andrew Child
Byju Sukumaran
Joel Tomlin
Katherine Tulloh