Skip to main content
Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Ciarán Mac Domhnaill (he/him)

Parade of Pause (2023)

We present a project proposal that focuses on ideas of time and methodology, adopting the phrase ‘urgency of slowness’, borrowed from artist Celia Pym. Inspired by past Artangel projects, we are drawn to the practice of urban walking and its utilisation of pace and rhythm, which lends itself organically to slowing down.

The idea for the Parade of Pause was born out of the aim to set a rhythm for a shared parading of slowness, deliberately contrasting with the rapid speed of consumer culture that engulfs London as a city. Why Parade? The word’s origins are rooted in the Latin parare, meaning to prepare, parry to stop or halt, which resonates with the idea of slowing down. There is never a distinct, isolated sound that represents the act of parading, rather the sound of a parade becomes enmeshed with the urban circulation of place, its people and objects, creating an asynchronous symphony of everyday life. We have commissioned Lucie Štěpánková (aka Avsluta), a London-based Czech-born electro-acoustic composer and sound artist, to create a soundscape that intertwines field recordings and live improvisations with objects to accompany the parade – setting its pace and rhythm. Playing with various loops to create a polyrhythmic soundscape, Štěpánková explores ecosystemic ideas and our relation to space and one another. 

Our hope is to elicit a powerful response towards the urgency that slowness demands, particularly within the environment we currently find ourselves. Slowness, in this understanding, does not simply want to take the speed out of contemporaneity but allows us to experience our present with all its different speeds and in all its complexity and diversity.

Artist website: https://introspective-electronics.com/


Fellow curators: Camilla Wrabetz, Emma Mo, Gabriella Ackerman, Marianne Tynan, Taeyeong Kim and Yiran Zhu


Image: Lucie Stepankova preforming a live improvisation inside the 4DSOUND sound system, 2023. Image courtesy of Pirelli HangarBicocca.

Ciarán Mac Domhnaill

About

Ciarán Mac Domhnaill is an Irish London-based designer, writer and curator. Ciarán’s practice engages with broadly defined political and societal issues that cover a range of topics, such as queerness, neurodiversity, social structures, identity, inner conflict, empathic design and the use of satire. 


Alma mater 

Royal College of Art, MA Curating Contemporary Art

Glasgow School of Art, MLitt Art Writing

Amsterdam Fashion Institute, BSc (Hons) Fashion and Technology


Recent work:

The Art of Manipulation: Deepfakes and Deep Hierarchies (2023), a collaborative project created by Royal College of Art students Zhenghui Chen, Ciarán Mac Domhnaill, Lily Whitehead and Lyla Zhou.

Glasgow School of Art: Postgraduate Showcase (2022)

'The Disneyfication of the Gloryhole', part of The Yellow Paper, Edition 3, 2022, pp 99-103. A selection of writings by members of the Art Writing Programme at the Glasgow School of Art and other notable contributors. 

Clara Raillard reviews the curatorial project entitled 'Don't Believe Everything Yves Leather Tells You' in MAP Magazine, 2022: 'Landscapes of Rumoured Loneliness'