It’s hard to resist a good ghost story.
Galway artist Louise Manifold certainly found that the people of Askeaton, Co. Limerick, really liked her 5-minute video “Phantom.”
“It wasn’t a regular art audience,” she said of those who gathered in the community center in 2009. “But the piece was quite accessible.”
Manifold also got a good response in Brooklyn more recently, where she has just completed a six-month residency at the International Studio Curatorial Program.
At the beginning of her two-week residency with Askeaton Contemporary Arts, she researched a local angle for her piece and came across a Dec. 7, 1913 New York Times report headlined “Many Hauntings in Ireland Told Of,” with the sub heading “Clergyman Who Asked for Ghost Stories Gets More Than He Can Use.”

VISUAL ART:MENTION lycanthropy and it s more than likely people will think of werewolves. A lycanthrope is a human being who shape-shifts into a predatory, wolf-like creature, a transformation triggered, according to mythological convention, by the light of the full moon. Writers have warmed to the theme, but what really gave it teeth, so to speak, was the advent of cinema. The history of popular cinema is liberally sprinkled with stories of werewolves, including, to take one local example, Neil Jordan s dazzling screen version of Angela Carter s  The Company of Wolves.

"Utopia means nowhere or no-place. It is often taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or euology. As a result of this mix-up, another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place. But, strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres. "

In search of Utopia was a recent group exhibition featuring Dorothy Cross, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Louise Manifold, Michelle Browne, Cao Fei and Dennis del Favero, curated by Maeve Mulrennan in the Nuns Island Theatre of Galway Arts Centre from 23 May to 6 June 2009. Coinciding with the Volvo Ocean Race, the exhibition took as its starting point the motion of the race itself. "It can be seen as a metaphor for how we are constantly searching for something better, always moving towards what we see as a preferable situation to what we are currently in."

That, for some years now, the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosity, has been attracting the attention of artists, curators and art historians, may have something to do with its non-hierarchical, encyclopedic approach to the world. Exhibiting side-by-side objects from geology, natural history, archaeology or contemporary art, the Wunderkammer, equating the natural and the man-made, opens up analogical readings unrestrained by modern science categories.

Unnatural esoteric at the Galway Arts Centre presented over two floors suits the Georgian grandeur of the building with its references to the Victorian wunderkammer, the eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities, the precursor to the modern museum. The exhibition carries a narrative structure beginning with documentary-style photographs from The Franke Foundation in Halle, Germany, ranging to sculptural objects where Louise Manifold creates a series of vitrines displaying the curiosities of her own personal wunderkammer. Three video works occupy the stairwell and first floor. The exhibition  develops from the documentary to the interpretative and the work gets progressively stronger and more assured as the viewer moves through the building.

Galway was briefly transformed, with the advent of the Volvo Ocean Race, around the nearly utopian imaginary of a city that embraces strangers. Corporate allusions to ideas and practices that represent the good life - e.g. compassion and hospitality - echoed, even appropriated, the city's historic self-image. Maeve Mulrennan has curated a show within this context. She asks, "Are we in a temporary space, in a fold, holding our breath until we are needed again as a city of welcomes?" Taxonomies of the possible, utopias are good places that are nowhere. In utopia's absence, heterotopias are cultivated, where otherness may be experienced or explored, "spaces of alternate ordering." (1) In the festival's transient space, visitors and inhabitants coalesce into a community of consumers and boat-lovers, if temporarily. Exhibitions are heterotopias as well, where alternate realities, subjectivities and senses of time co-exist. Mulrennan has transformed a vast theatre space into a warren of black boxes, each containing a projection. Sounds resonate, gently vie. Uniting different flows of light and ideas, this heterotopia permits many utopias to co-exist.