The Breathing Factory

Mark Curran

Opening on Thursday, January 12 at 6pm
The exhibition runs from January 12 to February 11, 2006
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5pm

At 5pm, a discussion on global labour practices will precede the opening.

Welcome to The Breathing Factory: a pulsing industrial production site that complies directly with the demands of the market; a space that changes its production capacity at the drop of a needle in order to maintain the highest manufacturing proficiency. When the production process is forced to conform with the labour demands, the working conditions of the employees must also shift to accommodate the changing patterns of the driving world economies.

The factory’s target, therefore, is to continually comply with this breathing rhythm.

In this current body of work, Curran documents specifically the multinational corporation Hewlett Packard Manufacturing Complex in Leixlip County Kildare, Ireland. The South of Ireland never experienced the Industrial Revolution and yet it is now defined as the ‘most globalized economy in the world’. As one of the most dependent nations on Foreign Direct Investment, Ireland is facing the impact of globalized industrial relations; specifically by being put in direct competition for foreign investment, not with the rest of Europe, but with India and China. The Breathing Factory is a compilation of photographs, digital video, and sound archival material taken over a twenty month period, recording both the transient spaces and the workers within this highly policed conglomerate environment.

Curran’s portraits of white and blue collar workers seem to depict a collective identity; a company’s image in which the employees seem to be packaged along side the product they produce and under the same strict surveillance. Stark minimalist landscapes of corridors and working cubicles mixed with the photographer’s procedure regulations stipulated by HP and testimonies gathered from the workers, emphasize the same impenetrability within this industrial space. Throughout the exhibition, Curran’s critical documentary approach seeks to unfurl some of the issues surrounding globalization and its highly politicized effects on the transformed social and economic environments.

Mark Curran, originally from Ireland, now lives in Berlin. He is an Assistant Lecturer in Photography and has both a Masters of Philosophy (MPhil) through the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, Dublin Institute of Technology and a diploma in Photography from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. His work has been exhibited across Europe in Germany, Ireland, Italy, France, Britain, Belgium and also in Syria. The Breathing Factory is his first exhibition in Canada. A monograph of the work will be published in 2006 supported by Belfast Exposed and the Gallery of Photography, Dublin. He is represented by the van der grinten galerie in Cologne.

The artist would like to thank Culture Ireland for its support.

Dazibao thanks the artist for his generous collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec.