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Kira O’Reilly

On 19 April 2023 by

Kira O’Reilly (b. 1967) is an Irish artist currently based in Helsinki; her practice is willfully interdisciplinary and celebrates an undisciplinarity, stems from a visual art background. It employs performance, sculpture, biotechnical practices, writing and experimental media with which to consider speculative reconfigurations of The Body in its most expanded sense, across multiple spaces, scales and temporalities, often but not always, working with site, duration and context as generative elements.

The origins of her artistic working are in the profound materiality and mutability of sculpture meeting radical feminist performance art as it emerged from the confluence of visual arts, experimental performance and media art, subcultures and body politics in the early ‘90s. Since then, she has found rich fields of possibility in biological arts with its implicit biopolitics, and the extension into bodily relations as they manifest in ecological considerations, eco-systems and other than human environments.
She makes, writes, teaches, mentors and collaborates with humans of various types, technologies and non-humans of numerous divergences.

Since 1998 she has exhibited widely in contexts from visual art, performance art and live art, to interfaces of art, science and technology, and dance. She presents at conferences and symposia on performance and live art, science, art and technology. She has lectured in visual art, drama and dance departments, and in renegade skools. Fellowships include SymbioticA, School of Biosciences, University of Western of Australia, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham; Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London, and most recently as the Randall International Chair in sculpture/dimensional studies in the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. She moved to Helsinki to lead a pilot master programme in ecology and contemporary performance at University of the Arts Helsinki 2016 – 2018 and has continued to be based there developing artistic projects and collaborations.

The monograph Kira O’Reilly: Untitled (Bodies), edited by Harriet Curtis and Martin Hargreaves was published in 2017 by Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Live in the series Intellect Live. She is a member of the Finland based Bioart Society and co-editor of Art As We Don’t Know It, Aalto Arts Books, 2020 which marked ten years of the society’s activities by speculating into the futures.

Image Kira O’Reilly
Tide Turning, sea defence, 2017
Wake Festival, UK.

Photo credit: Luke Jones