Ciaran Smyth
Dr Ciaran Smyth is an artist, writer and researcher. In 2004 he completed his doctorate with the Department of Sociology at University College Dublin. His dissertation drew on the work of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, combining their post-structuralist theory of knowledge with an ethnography of community-based psychiatry in the post-asylum era.
In 2008 he co-founded Vagabond Reviews with artist Dr Ailbhe Murphy (1963 – 2024). Vagabond Reviews is an interdisciplinary, socially engaged art and research platform integrating collaborative knowledge production with multimedia / visual arts installations. Over the course of their creative practice together as Vagabond Reviews they entered into dialogue, critical (re)visions and creative collaborations across a range of situated territiries and contexts including community development, new neighbourhoods, urban regeneration processes, institutional networks, public art and curatorial commissions.
In 2021 Vagabond Reviews initiated a research process entitled Emergency Knowledge: An Archive of Spectral Epistemologies. Conceived of as a mode of diagnostic aesthetics, this research set out to create new forms of allyship among and between sites of instability locally and globally where fast modes of know-how have emerged from extended crisis situations. The work culminated in an exhibition entitled Emergency Knowledge: The Missing Archives at The LAB Gallery, Dublin (April – May 2024).
At Patrick Street Studios his work combines archival assemblage with respect to the early career projects of artist Ailbhe Murphy and Vagabond Reviews projects (2007 – 2024), mentoring of socially engaged artists, consultancy / advisory work with a wide range of community and arts-based organisations and research for new work which draws on Jaques Derrida’s notion of hauntology to assemble the imaginary archive Lost Music of the Future. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, catalogue essays and independently commissioned reviews in the field of socially engaged art and beyond.
Artist Statement
As an artistic practice, this work has a distinct preoccupation with the archive as a political imaginary. Across a series of multi-media installations deploying photography, text, found objects, invented libraries and collage, the archive is explored as a mode of bricolage – a means to elaborate on the idea of certain missing knowledges. These archives have been forged in solidarity with situations, communities, neighbourhoods, grassroot movements, activists and other artists with the purpose of capturing, securing and expressing the often-latent knowledges of struggle and survival held within such sites of social antagonism and solidarity. The work, often gallery-based, presents the archive device as a necessity within the cut and thrust of certain social struggles that are by definition hard to archive precisely because they are constructed in the urgency of the struggle. The work is also preoccupied with the idea of lost imaginaries and therefore the impulse to construct new modes of archival practice with a focus on the future as a political imaginary of the unreachable, a kind of register for the not yet.