#06 | On Borders and Transgressions.
#06 | On Borders and Transgressions.
Embedded Files
With: James O'Leary
Practice: Kreider + O'Leary
Context: UK
Date: 22.02.2024
Duration: 1h47m
Youtube (Video)
Apple Podcasts (Audio)
Spotify (Audio/ Video)
Castbox (Audio)
Summary and notes on imagination
Summary and notes on imagination
In this episode, in conversation with James O’Leary, we discuss the work of Kreider + O’Leary, and together explore the transgression of boundaries, resistance, and the importance of facilitating the capacity to imagine. At the same time, this is a conversation between Nicosia and Belfast, a parallel look at two fragmented cities and their ways of moving beyond division.
Kreider + O’Leary’s practice could perhaps also be seen as a conversation and entanglement between the spatial and the poetic. Through this approach, they offer new ways of seeing, navigating, and acting in ‘ungovernable’ contexts. Going against established patterns and ways of thinking, requires shifting the perspectives of how we, as researchers or practitioners, approach, see, and connect to spaces; it requires an upturning of the established; and a fertilisation of the communities’ capacities to imagine; it requires to continuously “risk the envisioning of new spaces, new configurations, new dreams”.
The practice
The practice
Kreider + O’Leary are a poet and an architect who collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. Since 2003, they have made work in places such as prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments and more traditional gallery venues across the UK, USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. Their work has been shown at venues including Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts as well as in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Istanbul Biennial. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press (2015), Field Poetics was published Ma Bibliothèque (2018) and their monograph Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (2025).
The person(s)
The person(s)
James O'Leary is an architect and installation artist. His work explores the inter-relationship between human beings and the spatial systems we inhabit. As a practitioner and academic operating between the disciplines of art and architecture, his specific interests include narrative, interactive and reflexive systems in architecture; performative and site-specific practice in contemporary fine art; and the codification and documentation systems deployed in these fields. James is currently Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where he teaches on the MA Situated Practice. His current research involves compiling a Peacewall Archive that documents the history of ‘peacelines’ and defensive barriers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Page updated
Report abuse