JAKI Irvine's Douglas Hyde show last summer, The Hot- test Sun, The Darkest Hour, used the gallery's difficult space brilliantly, animating it with the clatter and flicker of several 16mm film projectors aimed at various walls, inviting us to put together several fragmentary narratives.
Invited by Project to curate a show of work by international artists working with the moving image, she has very effectively adapted a similar installatiuon scheme in East Essex Street. Visitors encounter the new building as a series of mysterious, darkened spaces, while the main performance area, on the first floor, simultaneously accommodates projections by several artists.
It is Irvine's first curatorial experience: "I tried to strike a balance between things I love and things that haven't been shown here before. So it's partly historical but not entirely. And the choices aren't always the obvious ones.
"Tacita Dean groaned when I asked her for her piece and said `why that one?', `why not something more recent?' But what I like is that with her piece, and with Gary Hill's, you can't predict the way they went on to develop. The artist went one way but looking at the piece, we go another."
Her selection covers a lot of ground, from Marcel Broodthaers to Zoe Walker. She is particularly pleased at managing to include Broodthaers. A Belgian poet and bookseller who died in 1976, he turned to visual art only late in life, but his subversive take on the conventions of perception was a significant underlying influence on much more recent art, including British art of the 1990s. Irvine feels that, unfairly, his Broodthaers's contribution, and those of others, tend to be overlooked. "I've seen artists take from their work without acknowledgement, so they're written out of the history, which is unfair."
The "near Vada" of the show's title comes from Irvine's sister's mishearing of the word "Nirvana". "Vada" is somewhere else, somewhere magically removed from the ordinary. She cites the philosopher Stanley Clavell's ideas about our dulled, unreflective acceptance of the everyday, a state that becomes "home" for us. In their films and videos, the artists evidence "a doubting and testing of the very fact and fabric of what is ordinarily taken for granted."
For Irvine, this manifests itself as "a sense of testing things". In some of the pieces, particularly those made when the artists were younger, "there is a sense of the fragility of things, and a sense of yearning". In Coleman's La Tache Aveugle, ambiguous, successive frames from the film The Invisible Man perpetually blend one into the other.
"To me," Irvine explains, "that is about a yearning to see. But of course, because we are looking at something invisible, even when we see it we don't know if we are seeing it. It's a funny moment, that hovering between the past, present and future as the slide splits."
WE LONG to see but can never be sure. "What I take from it is an expression of my own yearning to see something that I can never really get to see. But that yearning is what motivates you." The transformation of the ordinary is strikingly dramatised in a relatively recent piece, Adam Chodzko's video projection Nightvision, which uses two screens to great effect, and should be seen, not described.
Gary Hill questions the everyday in an alarming way. In his video Why Do Things Get In a Muddle? (Come on Petunia), inspired by Alice in Wonderland and scripted by Gregory Bateson, workaday reality becomes disturbing and disorienting. For Irvine, this piece exemplifies the strengths of video. Many artists of the moving image have an exclusive preference for one or the other. She is not as doctrinaire about it as some, but admits that personally she prefers working with film.
"I know sometimes people panic when you mention video art. At a certain stage there was so much made in which video was synonymous with boredom. Having said that, I recognise that video is good for certain things, and for me the Hill piece is very much about the joy of video."
In this work, Hill ingeniously exploits the technical elasticity of tape. The actors perform backwards: even down to reciting their lines backwards, which apparently took a great deal of work. The tape is then reversed so that things are the right way around, but not quite. Stange distortions creep in from this excursion into time-reversal, but it's difficult to put your finger on what exactly is awry. The result is a perplexing and intriguing 12 minutes spent very near Vada indeed.
There is an element of humour in Hill's work, but more out-and-out humour is evident in several other pieces, including Tacita Dean's Woody Allenish The Story of Beard, which culminates in a bizarre pastiche of Manet's Dejeu ner sur l'herbe, and Anneka A. de Boer's Black Pianino, which features a horse dancing the tango.
FISCHLI and Weiss's Der Lauf der dinge (The Way Things Go) is a hypnotically engrossing 30 minutes of sustained mishaps, which recalls something of the aimless, destructive anarchy of childhood.
Somewhere near Vada is overall an unmissable, outstanding show in which, vitally, Irvine manages to communicate her own enthusiasm for the work. Her interest in Clavell's notions of home and finding a place was partly inspired by her own circumstances.
An NCAD graduate, she represented Ireland in the 1997 Venice Biennale. "I live in London, but my partner is Italian, and I'm currently working on a project over there, and I also have things going on in London, so I spend a lot of time travelling between London, Italy and Ireland. But I feel comfortable in all of those places. Sometimes I'm not even sure I ever left home at all."
