Kira O’Reilly Untitled (Bodies)
Edited by Harriet Curtis and Martin Hargreaves
Book design by David Caines
“a sumptuous and wide-ranging examination of the work of an inter- nationally significant interdisciplinary artist. Even before it is opened, the book makes a claim for the startling collisions of image, body, and encounter at the heart of the work … vocabulary gushes up from Untitled (Bodies). While a significant proportion of the book consists of beautifully reproduced photographs, the attention to language is also a key commitment.”
Johanna Linsley, Contemporary Theatre Review, 28:3 (2018), pp 422-423.
Published by Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books in 2017 this publication is the first major survey of the interdisciplinary practices of Kira O’Reilly.
O’Reilly’s works have been exhibited and presented internationally, across many different formats, frames and contexts since 1998, and the publication encompasses that breadth and diversity. Bringing together newly commissioned and other writings by major thinkers in and beyond visual and performance studies, and extensive documentation of the artist’s work from two decades of practice, it navigates through and between performance, biotechnical practices, image-making, and writing.
O’Reilly’s work approaches the uncertain boundaries of bodies as the starting point for enquiry and is distinctly relevant to social themes in the arts. Specifically, O’Reilly asks what kind of societies become possible in collaborations across species, organisms, and bodies. O’Reilly explores these themes through sustained and experimental engagements with politics, biopolitics, change (social, corporeal, chemical, reactive), and the complex relations between the human and the non-human (including the animal, the human-made, and beyond).
Amanda Coogan writes on the body in performance, Shannon Bell considers a feminist political aesthetics in an open body, Tracey Warr explores performances of permeability and messy materialisation, Rob La Frenais discusses the meetings of humans and animals. Other contributors include the artists and writers Marina Abramovic, Franko B, Rebecca French, and Linda Montano.
The book includes interviews, archive material, and Kira O’Reilly’s own writings.
This publication was the fifth in the Intellect Live book series. Intellect Live was a collaboration between Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency. The series is characterised by lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed books that are created through close collaborations between artists and writers and that are the first substantial publication dedicated to the artists’ work.
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Front cover photograph Stair Falling (2010), City of Women Festival, Ljubljana
Photo by Nada Zgank.