AUGHRIM.- Throughout 2025 Kunstverein Aughrim will accompany the practices of three artists across multiple projects.
Bea McMahon has a background in mathematics, a missing vocal cord, and the ankles of a dancer. She creates work that is multidimensional, philosophically poised, and often collaborative. In 2025 McMahon will work with Kunstverein Aughrim to develop The Cricket Portfolio, a moving-image project arranged within the formal parameters of a TV show. The first episode, Pilot, was devised and shot at Treignac Projet in 2024, in collaboration with Deniz Buga, Zhana Ivanova, Nathan O’Donnell, Artémise Ploegaerts and Leonid Tsvetkov, and supported by the Mondriaan Fonds. Episode Two will be written and produced on location in Ireland in collaboration with The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely and with support from Dublin City Council in Summer 2025. Rooted in the genre of cringe tragedy, The Cricket Portfolio marries politics and the erotic, in search of the transformative potential of a storyline with general appeal.
Marie Farrington is curious about gaps, openings, and thresholds; in the landscape, in history, and in language. Through material interventions and participatory gestures, Farrington will realise Diagonal Acts, a new multi-platform project supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Beginning at the entrance of Kunstverein Aughrim in Spring 2025, the project continues with public workshops at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, and culminates in exhibitions at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, and Commonage Projects, London. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily “leaning” against contexts, communities and histories.
Ruth E Lyons thinks about time, matter, and the vast nothingness behind everything. Throughout 2025 Kunstverein Aughrim will work with Lyons on the development of two new bodies of work; The Sea Inside Us, a film by Ruth E Lyons and Colm Hogan that chronicles the human relationship to the sea through salt, and Until You Become Weightless, a series of sculptural portraits of the artist’s family as rocks. In May 2025 Lyons will host a live event at her studio in Mulranny, on Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast. This performative preview is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, and marks the launch of a new exhibition by Lyons at The Linenhall Arts Centre, County Mayo. From tracing the seam of an ancient sea, to imagining kin as future megaliths in the making, Lyons’ sculptural imagination reaches for the eternal, powered by a deep sense of the transience of life.
Kunstverein Aughrim develops durational curatorial collaborations with artists to support the production of new artistic work, bringing audiences as close to the creative process as possible. In 2024 Kunstverein Aughrim accompanied the practices of Marielle MacLeman, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, and Sarah Browne through new commissions, exhibitions, seasonal previews, companion publications, generative workshops and editions. In 2025 two new activities further shape the public programme; a collaboration with artist Fiona Hallinan to develop an Ultimology Summer School for Fire Station Artists’ Studios Summer Studio in May, and a pilot Summer Residency developed in collaboration with Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, welcoming artist Eslam Abd El Salam for a month-long artist residency to Aughrim in June.
Founded in 2022 by Kate Strain, Kunstverein Aughrim is a curatorial production office housed on the ground floor of a townhouse in south County Wicklow, Ireland. It is part of a franchise that was originally established by Kunstverein in Amsterdam, with sisters in Milan, New York and Toronto. The inaugural commission, a permanent site specific artwork by Forerunner titled Granite Leap, constitutes the physical space of Kunstverein Aughrim, and continues to evolve alongside the institution.
