News

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This is our news page and will contain information about our publications, exhibitions, projects, misadventures and romantic misunderstandings

October 22nd 2014

We’ll be launching our Torquemada issue at the Golden Threald Gallery Belfast on October 23rd at 6pm and at Void Derry on 25th October at 7.30pm. We hope to see you there. Abridged 0 – 36: Dis-Ease exhibition will run in the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry from November 06th – December 01st.

September 15th 2014

Abridged 0 – 37: Torquemada: Pavel Buchler, Sandra Hoyn, Brenda Bullock, Laura O’Connor, Dylan Brennan, Benjamin Hiller, Afric McGinchey, Jana Romanova, Kate Dempsey, Angela Carr, Lizz Murphy, Ray Givans, Gerald Dawe, Maeve O’Sullivan, Gráinne Tobin, Roisin Kelly, Niall McCabe, Rachel Long, Denise Blake, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Shlomit Migay, Deirdre McKenna, Clare McCotter, Laura Mullan, Aoife Mannix.

May 27th 2014

We’re Haunting the land at the moment. 0 – 10: Haunted was launched at Void, Derry with Haunted by Kelly Richardson opening the same evening. It’s on until 18th July so go see! If you’re quick you can still see Haunted Part 1 at Millennium Court, Portadown, running until 31st May.

 

April 29th 2014

May is a very busy month for us. Our Haunted show by Kelly Richardson at Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown runs until 31st May whilst the second part of the Haunted project has Mariner 9 opening at Void Gallery Derry on May 24th. Each is accompanied by Abridged 0 – 10: Haunted

 

February 14th 2014
Abridged 0 – 13: Mara
Michael Ray, Clare McCotter, Adam Steiner, Colm Scully, Paul Murphy, Mark O’Flynn, Kathleen O’Neil, Gerard Beirne, Helena Nolan, Simon Hawarth, George McWhirter, Barbara A Morton, Anne Carly Abad, Howard Wright, Maria Bennett, Padraig Regan, Lynda Tavakoli, James Meredith, Zoe Murdoch. More news soon.
January 03rd 2014
Happy New Year. 2014 is our tenth anniversary year. We have plans. More news soon.
October 30th 2013 
Abridged 0 – 34: In Blue will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast at 6pm on Thurs 7th November 2013. We hope to see you there. In Blue features:  Seamus Murphy, Maeve O’Sullivan, Jean Noviel, Joanna Grant, Peter Branson, Jeanette Lowe, Majella Haugh, Margo Ovcharenko, John Saunders, Zoe Murdoch, Ruth Stacey, James Meredith, Howard Wright, Ceara Conway, Kathleen McCracken, Sarah James, Brónagh Corr-McNicholl, Rachael Mead, R. Joseph Capet, Alannah Robins, Patrick Mullan, Jane Clark, Sue Morgan, Matthew Sweeney, Alastair Phillip Wiper, Bill Wolak, Clare McCotter, George Bolster, Lizz Murphy, Linda Anne Atterton.
July 10th 2013
One of us will be curating ‘Tomorrow’s Almost Over’ at Void, Derry, N. Ireland for anyone in that area or visiting. See  http://www.derryvoid.com/ for details. We’ll have lots of other news very soon.

 

March 25th 2013

Abridged 0 – 29: Primal: Edgar Martins, Lynda Tavakoli, Lynn Rothwell, Mark Goodwin, Sarah Usher, Stephen Murray, Cecilia Danell, Vivian Jones, Beth MacFarlane, Jan Harris, Stephanie Conn, Rebecca McGetrick, Dominic Connell, Kevin Graham, Aoife Mannix, Orla Fay, Mhairi Sutherland, Emma Must, Ruth Stacey, Eleanor Rees, Gail Mahon, Róisín Tierney, Martin Boyle, Ann Egan, Ian Clarke, David Andrew, Luke Prater, Belinda Loftus, Enda Coyle-Greene, Peter O’ Neill, Moyra Donaldson. Launch at the Golden Thread Gallery,

Belfast, Thurs 04th April.

Abridged 0 – 33: Undercurrents featuring Conor McFeely’s ‘Weathermen’ project: Weathermen draws upon a number of sources including an interest in key countercultural figures from history. A key reference for this work is “the weathermen” a clandestine revolutionary party in the USA in the 1960s and 70s for the violent overthrow of the US government and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. They famously aided the jailbreak and escape of Timothy Leary. Leary will be present in the work in the form of voice recordings, and local weather conditions will manifest themselves through the use of passages from cult fiction works including the opening paragraphs of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. These are used as points of entry into alternative narratives. Formally this work is a series of new works incorporating short sequences of video and sound. The work on show is a condensed version of a larger project to be shown later this year at Artlink, Buncrana, County Donegal.

February 07th 2013
Tonight! Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast @ 6pm Abridged 0 – 28: Once A Railroad launch.
We’re in Lugano in Switzerland from the 22nd February. Details below:
Feburary 1st 2013
Abridged 0 – 28: Once A Railroad Launch
Thursday 7 February 2013
Daniel Seiffert, Gerard Beirne, Ceara Conway, Michael Casey, Rachael Mead, Afric McGlinchey, Nadege Meriau, Clare McCotter, Zoe Murdoch, Olive Broderick, Ruth Le Gear, Howard Wright, Geraldine Timlin, Brian Kirk, Jason Roycroft, Mark O’Flynn, Aiofe Mannix, Arthur Broomfield, Ethna O’Regan, Antony Owen, Dougal McKenzie, Gerard Smyth, Steve Sharkey, Kelly Richardson, Simon Perchik, Sue Morgan, Victoria J. Dean, Stephen Sexton, Bernadette Bradley, Celeste Auge, Jan Uprichard. Hope to see you there! Two covers to collect…and free scratch and sniff cards from Jan Uprichard.
also
This Must Be The Place
7 – 23 February 2013
Curated by Sara O’Gorman
 
In This Must Be The Place four artists reflect on the visual, philosophical and symbolic representations of the landscape and the transformative power that humans have on the physical environment.  The act of viewing, be it nature, built-up areas or the things that surround us, is an experience that is partially determined by our culture.
The works in this exhibition explore how places and objects can instigate memories of past events: providing visions of the future, as both spatial forms and as contested discursive sites for remembering.
The artists are Jamie Buckley (Ger/NI), Justyna Gruszczyk (Pol), Barbara Knezevic (Ire) and Gavin Murphy (Ire).
Opening 7 February 6pm – 8pm

2011/12 news archive

03rd October 2011

November will see the launch of abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust & Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare. More details very soon.

09th October 2011

Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust launched at 6pm Thursday 03rd November 2011,  at the Golden Thread Gallery, Gt. Patrick Street, Belfast. More news soon… 09th October 2011 Abridged at the Festival of Britain. Poem from our Magnolia issue by Geraldine Mitchell.  

October 17th 2011 Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust:

Shlomit Migay, Geraldine Mitchell, Clare Samuel, Maeve O’Sullivan, Therese Mac an Airchinnigh, Frank Sewell, Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, Simon Jones, Simone Haack, Jessamine O Connor, Miriam de Búrca, Kate Braverman, Moyra Donaldson, Howie Good, Ackroyd & Harvey, Fernando Smith, Sarah Stevens, David Mohan, Eleanor Bennett, Kate Dempsey, Seamus Harahan, Janet Smith, Giles Newington, Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier, Christopher Barnes, Jason Lee Lovell, Kelli Allen, Kathleen McCracken, Heather Gray, Gerald Dawe, Theo Sims, Nicholas Bielby, J. S. Robinson, Helena Nolan, Jenny Keane, Simon Evans.

The issue will be launched in Golden Thread Gallery, Patrick Street, Belfast @ 6pm, Thursday 03rd November 2011. Hope to see you there…

October 22nd 2011 

Desire and Dust has gone to print. We’re rather pleased with the result. Hopefully you will be too. Join us at the launch at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 6pm Thurs Nov 3rd and collect a copy….

October 25th 2011

Now that Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust is at the printers we can concentrate on Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare. For those wondering about the numbering system see our FAQs. Anyway here’s another hint of 0 – 20:


We should have Desire and Dust in our hands by the end of the month and very excited we are about that. More news very soon.

November 05th 2011

Thanks to everyone who came to the Desire and Dust launch. We had a great time. We hope you did too. Watch this space for more news.

November 10th 2011

Desire and Dust is now available at most of Belfast’s galleries plus the Linen Hall and Central Libraries as well as Bookfinders cafe. Copies will be made available in Dublin from tomorrow. Alternatively simply download an issue from this website. It’s free and easy. As they say. We’ll have news on Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare very soon.

November 16th 2011

Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare Exhibition launch X-PO Clare 27.11.11. More Details Soon. Abridged 0 – 25: Silence Submission Call 03.12.11. We welcome Susanna Galbraith to the Abridged fold.

November 22nd 2011

Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare with Deirdre O’Mahony opening at the X-PO, Kilnaboy, Clare on Sun 27th November 2011 from 12 – 2pm. Exhibition runs until December 16th. An Abridged publication, 0 – 20 will be available in Clare and Derry and a pdf will be available as a free download on this website soon.

November 29th 2011

The 0 – 25 Silence Submission Call will be made very soon. Watch this space and our Facebook page. 0 – 20 is available as a free downloadable Pdf on the Abandoned Clare page. The exhibition runs in Kilnaboy, Clare until 16th December. We’ve become aware that Google Chrome is causing some difficulties in terms of layout when viewing this site that aren’t occurring with Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari etc. We’ll try and rectify this as soon as we can.

November 30th 2011

Abridged 0-25: Silence Submission Call

To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat. Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Closing date for submission is Jan 14th 2012.

…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…

December 02nd 2011

We’re still investigating the Chrome formatting problems. It seems to be a case of Chrome not recognising particular fonts. It is irritating in that it looks like we’ve been lazy with our formatting. At any rate the proper formatting can be seen with IE8, Safari etc.  The exhibition 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare is on at the X-PO Kilnaboy  until 16th. December. The Pdf is available as a free download from this site.

December 20th 2011

Well, 2011 as been an Abridged year so to speak. We’ve been busy. 0 – 22: Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun, 0 – 23: Desire and Dust and 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare (in that order) were published. Clare saw our second exhibition. We finally got around to producing our website and making the issues available as free Pdf downloads. The website has proved very popular. We thank you for all your support. 2012 will see us continue apace. 0 – 25: Silence will be out in Feb/Mar and 0 -26: Rust will surface in May/June. We’ve other projects planned which we’ll announce when the time comes. Watch this space. We’ll put the early issues of the Abridged and its precursor the ‘Chancer’ on the website in the early new year. At least the copies that we still possess.  We’ll do our best to obtain the copies we don’t. We wish you a happy Christmas from Abridged HQ.

January 04th 2012

Happy New Year. Lots of Abridged activity in 2012. We’ll keep you posted. Don’t forget the Abridged 0 – 25: Silence submission call ends on 14th January.

To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Closing date for submission is Jan 14th 2012.

…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…

January 10th 2012

A review of  Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare in the Irish Times:

A number of photographers are focusing on abandoned homes and workplaces, applying a documentary style that allows the true narrative to shine, writes AIDAN DUNNE

CAMILO JOSE Vergara’s benchmark project American Ruins , published in book form by Merrell in 1999, is a sequential photographic documentation of abandoned, decaying and disappearing tracts of urban North America. Not America of the dim distant past, but America now, in our own era.

It’s a brilliant, pioneering example of what might be called the archaeology of modernity. Vergara’s images vividly demonstrate that when economic activity fluctuates, so do populations and the entire architectural infrastructure they inhabit – an infrastructure that so easily creates the illusion of permanence.

This fact is also evident in another more recent work, The Ruins of Detroit , by two French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Jeffre, published by Steidl at the end of 2010. Over the previous five years the two visited Detroit, as the car industry there continued a long period of decline, recording the staggering scale of decay, not just of the industrial landscape but also of the wider municipal, commercial and cultural fabric of the monumental city.

Two recent Irish publications can be seen in the light of these renowned exemplars. Deirdre O’Mahony’sAbandoned Clare (Abridged) and David Creedon’s Ghosts of the Faithful Departed (Collins) both consider local instances of dereliction and decay.

Abandoned Clare,   which has a magazine format, comes under the umbrella of Abridged, an ambitious “art/poetry initiative” based in Derry and active since 2004, with some 23 projects notched up to date, with Gregory McCartney as project co-ordinator.

O’Mahony’s photographic exploration of abandoned sites in Co Clare, together with a short introductory text, forms a compelling portrait of small-town and rural Ireland at a particularly testing time.

It is not an exercise in nostalgia, though there is inevitably an elegiac quality to some of the stories that emerge, such as that of Paddy Cahir from Rinnamona, whose repertoire of practical and craft skills was truly exceptional.

We see his stone-built workshop, inside and out, at Kilnaboy in images that concisely convey a wealth of information about a time, a way of life, an individual, a family and a community. Several unoccupied houses are depicted, in varying stages of dereliction. There are the remains of a co-operative mushroom farm at Tubber, and a lace-making factory, pre- and post-demolition, at Ennistymon. Abandoned schools indicate a dwindling population.

O’Mahony, an artist whose projects are generally site-specific, set out not to lament “a lost utopian past but to stimulate, provoke and provide evidence of other ways of doing things”. Set against such symbols of economic decline as photographs of a closed travel agents and a ghost estate, this suggestion may seem a little perverse, but it is borne out by the work.

The photographs show a world in transition, as detailed by Vergara, referring to the historical layers underlying what we see now. They also confront us as questions about what might form, in O’Mahony’s words, “a sustainable future for rural communities”.

She first exhibited the photographs in X-PO in Kilnaboy last year, a venue she established in 2007 to cater for cultural and social activities and projects of several community groups . Abandoned Clare, she notes, elicited an extraordinary response from its local audience, so the project doesn’t end with the publication but will continue. The original photographs and a related archive can be seen at X-PO.

More lavish and conventional in form and presentation, Ghosts of the Faithful Departed is a substantial, handsome hardback. It has its genesis, Creedon writes, in his chance discovery of an abandoned house when he was a passenger in a car driving through rural Co Sligo. “For no reason, I asked my friend to stop the car.” He found the house was being used as an animal shelter. Upstairs, amid remnants of occupancy, he discovered a pink dress still hanging in a wardrobe.

The experience set him on a two-year quest to find and photograph the interiors of similarly abandoned dwellings. Often they contained remnants of their prior inhabitants, not just furniture and the ubiquitous picture of the sacred heart, but personal items such as clothing, cardboard suitcases, letters and souvenirs.

Each house enshrines a story or, rather, some fragments of a story. Often the story relates to emigration but not in the obvious sense. Instead, Creedon sees the departed occupants as having been, mostly, those left behind, or returned emigrants.

Hence a foreword by Dr Breda Grey, who has compiled “an oral archive of interviews with people who had stayed in Ireland in the 1950s”.

Creedon is a fine professional photographer with a conventional pictorial aesthetic (he currently features in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London). Ghosts of the Faithful Departed contains many strong images of dilapidated interiors, yet there is a distinctly theatrical quality to the framing and lighting that often gives the photographs the feeling of being commercial assignments. Is there any harm in tending towards a pictorially contrived rendering of the past? The book will probably strike a chord with quite a wide audience and has the potential to be popular.

Yet it’s interesting that the work of Vergara, Marchand and Jeffre and, in Abandoned Clare, O’Mahony, doesn’t try to ratchet up the emotion of the subject matter at all. In fact they consistently step back and aim for a high level of pictorial objectivity. In this they exemplify and reflect a major strand of modern and contemporary art and documentary photography.

And despite this, in allowing the subject matter to speak for itself, as it were, leaving it free from the emotionally expressive aspirations of the photographer, they don’t drain their material of emotion.

The emotion is still there, but we are freer to make multiple interpretations of the images, to read them as looking to the future rather than as being consigned to a closed narrative of a distant past.

Abandoned Clare by Deirdre O’Mahony, published by Abridged is available at X-PO, Kilnaboy and from deomahony@gmail.com and abridged@ymail.com

January 20th 2012

Thanks for all the submissions we received for 0 – 25: Silence. The response was very impressive. We’ll get back to everyone eventually. If you don’t make it into this issue remember that 0 – 26: Rust will have its submission call in March. We’ll have more details soon. Watch this space and our Facebook and Twitter pages.

February 06th 2012

As we are aware that many people want to discover more about Abridged contributors we’ve linked as many to their respective websites as was possible. We can’t vouch for how up-to-date these sites are but at least it’s a start. If you are a contributor and we haven’t a link to you or have an out-of-date link let us know at abridged@ymail.com and we will rectify that. We should say again that this site is best viewed with anything rather than Google.

February 12th 2012

Silence is falling very soon. Abridged 0 – 25 will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast on Thurs 1st March. Contributors for this issue are Mark Janssen; Darran Anderson; Aoife Mannix; Jennifer Trouton; Graham Nunn; Aileen Kelly; Nuala Ní Chonchúir; Katie Holten; Giles Newington; Colin Darke; Matt Kirkham; Mark O’Flynn; Jan Harris; Stephen Porter; Sara O’Gorman; Peter Goulding; Mary McIntyre; David Mohan; Ethna O’Regan; Sheri Kocher Campbell; David Calcutt; Fergus Jordan; Matt Hetherington; Michele O’Sullivan; Skye Loneragan; Olive Broderick; Pavel Buchler; Moyra Donaldson; Zoe Murdoch; Eve Golden Woods; Brendan O’Neill; Vivien Jones; Lynda Tavakoli; Benjamin de Burca. More news soon.

February 21st 2012

Abridged 0 – 25: Silence will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Gt. Patrick Street, Belfast on Thursday 01st March 2012 @ 6pm. Come a long and say hello. There’s the new issue to be had, exhibitions to see and a fun time for all. Well we’ll have fun. Hopefully you will too. The new issue contains: Mark Janssen; Darran Anderson; Aoife Mannix; Jennifer Trouton; Graham Nunn; Aileen Kelly; Nuala Ní Chonchúir; Katie Holten; Giles Newington; Colin Darke; Matt Kirkham; Mark O’Flynn; Jan Harris; Stephen Porter; Sara O’Gorman; Peter Goulding; Mary McIntyre; David Mohan; Ethna O’Regan; Sheri Kocher Campbell; David Calcutt; Fergus Jordan; Matt Hetherington; Michele O’Sullivan; Skye Loneragan; Olive Broderick; Pavel Buchler; Moyra Donaldson; Zoe Murdoch; Eve Golden Woods; Brendan O’Neill; Vivien Jones; Lynda Tavakoli; Benjamin de Burca.

Also for your entertainment:

Interplanetary Revolution

Drawing inspiration from the 1924 Russian propaganda animation of the same name, Interplanetary Revolution is a project that will include at least two new simultaneous group exhibitions and the installation/reworking of another. Looking at failing/ed ideologies; notions of otherworldliness and the uncanny; and revolutionary critique, Interplanetary Revolution will be an opportunity to collapse a few assumptions and undermine previous relationships.

And

Patria Interiore / Inner Homeland

ALESSANDRO CANNISTRÀ | ILARIA LOQUENZI | EMILIANO MAGGI

STEFANO MINZI | LUANA PERILLI | MOIRA RICCI | ALESSANDRO ROSA

BEATRICE SCACCIA

curated by Manuela Pacella

For an exhibition in the Project space of the Golden Thread Gallery, a group of eight young Italian artists will confront the issue of “Inner homeland” – a quote from volume 5 of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Prisoner.

Amongst the many themes of À la recherche du temps perdu, nostalgia and involuntary memory are explored, and these themes have also been prevalent in the works of many Italian artists. Since 2001, Italy has seen many works that have investigated notions of shared memory and a common past, such as the documentary Un’ora sola ti vorrei by Alina Marazzi.

The artists that have been invited to participate in this exhibition can be divided into three groups. Firstly, those who are working in an explicit manner on the subject of memory, both private and collective, such as Stefano Minzi, Luana Perilli, Moira Ricci and Beatrice Scaccia. Secondly, those who approach memory obliquely, such as Ilaria Loquenzi with her participatory works and Alessandro Rosa’s universal linguistic codes, and thirdly,  Alessandro Cannistrà and Emiliano Maggi whose works reference ancestral and archetypical memories.

The exhibited works are across a range of media including: photography; video; painting; engraving; and installation and includes original works specifically designed for this exhibition by Cannistrà, Loquenzi, Maggi, Rosa and Scaccia.

March 12th 2012

‎0 – 25: Silence will be available from Belfast galleries and arts centres this week and in Galway and Dublin very soon. We should say again that this site is best viewed with anything other than Google Chrome.

Abridged 0 – 26: Rust Submission Call

The passage of time makes abrasive records on steel flesh. The air whips our iron bodies and breaks our sense of power.  Steel razors are muted and frayed under time’s persistent grind, objects of strength peppered with the omnipotence of rain, of wind. Our illusions of permanence are skeletal. Crumbling ghosts in an obedient return to earth. People, objects, things rot on the periphery. Take comfort in the crowd. Backward glances leave us unnerved by a sinister image, grey carcasses seeping with orange reds. Tattered forms, broken, fragile, finished. There is an eerie resemblance, a premonition perhaps. Nature is adamant, an absolute presence, a confirmation that we are merely passing through. We are a small movement, temporary occupants. How insignificant are our industries, our wars, our structured societies, our manufactured supremacy. The body electric fails and falls. Rust is our mutability. Rust is our diminution. Our dominion. The natural translation of colour. The evolution of the elements.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Rust issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Deadline for submissions is 21st April 2012. 

…there’s a voice in the distance quiet and clear saying something that I never ever wanted to hear….

Abridged is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

 March 17th 2012


Abridged 0 – 20 Abandoned Clare with Deirdre O’Mahony opening in Limerick City Arts Gallery as part of the Tense exhibition. Abridged 0 – 31: Crash. Postcards from over the Edge. June 2012. More News Soon.

April 01st 2012

Abridged 0 – 25: Silence is now available from Galway Arts Centre if you’re in that direction. Here’s a couple of photos from Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare in Limerick:

For any of you on the European mainland one of our favourite bands, And Also the Trees and contributor Simon Jones are touring. Well worth seeing.

The Abridged 0 – 26: Rust Submission Call is still open and we’ll have news of Abridged 0 – 31: Crash in the very near future. We’ll have more announcements very soon.

May 18th 2012

We’re in the midst of Abridged 0 – 26: Rust and will let everyone know the whys and wherefores very soon. 0 – 31: Crash will also appear in the not too distance. Watch this space and the facebook page for details. Abridging Galway: we’re delighted to announce that our Project Coordinator/Editor is the curator for the 2012 Tulca visual arts festival (www.tulca.ie) in Galway. We hope to see you there in November.  Other projects are in the pipeline. We’ll keep you informed. This page is best viewed with anything other than Chrome.

June 08th 2012

Abridged 0 – 26: Rust – David Hepher, Gerald Dawe, Graham Nunn, Joanna Karolini, Kristin Abraham, Maurice Devitt, Gerard Beirne, Barbara Morton, Dan Harvey, Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, Afric McGlinchey, Shelley Tracey, Gráinne Tobin, Rachel Mc Donnell, Joanna Grant, Vanessa Gebbie, Gerald Yelle, Conor McFeely, Sarah Mixtapes, Benjamin Norris, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Anne-Marie Glasheen, David Calcutt, Moyra Donaldson, Aideen Barry, Dan Shipsides , Joyce Parkes, Annette Skade, Denzil Browne, Brian Kirk, Elizabeth Welsh, Theo Sims, Blaine O’Donnell, Kimberly Campanello, Becky Kilsby. More News Soon.

Abridged 0 – 31: Crash – Maria Campbell, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Dawe, Olive Broderick, Maria McKinney, George Shaw, Gerard Smyth, John Beattie, Denzil Browne, Abridged. More News Soon.

You can now view the website properly in Google Chrome.

The Abridged Project Coordinator will be curating the 2012 Tulca visual art festival in Galway, Ireland in November 2012 so we’ll be out in force there. Pencil it in the diary. Should be interesting…

June 25th 2012


We’re in this. Abridged 0 – 31: Crash – Abridged/Maria Campbell; Denzil Browne/Paul Muldoon; Maria McKinney/Olive Broderick;   George Shaw/Gerard Smyth; John Beattie/Gerard Dawe. Cards will be randomly distributed through the Inishowen 100 route. You can see the entire set from 30th June to 8th July in the Tremone Bar, Carrowmenagh, Donegal, Ireland. Worth seeing if you’re around the area. Details below and from Artlink. Pdfs will be available as a free download from this website from 08th July. Apologies for the delay in 0 – 26: Rust. Technical difficulties as they say. We’ll have more news of that soon. It’ll be worth the wait. Thanks for your patience.

July 04th 2012

The first two cards of the Abridged 0 – 31: Crash project are now available here as a free Pdf download.

July 05th 2012

The third card of the Abridged 0 – 31: Crash project is now available as a free download.

July 06th 2012

The fourth card of the Abridged 0 – 31: Crash project is now available as a free download.

July 07th 2012

The fifth and final card of the Abridged 0 – 31: Crash project is now available as a free download.

July 30th 2012

For anyone who’s interested. The Open Submission Strand of Tulca, 2012, Galway, Ireland:

Tulca 2012

Deadline: 13 August 2012

TULCA 2012 Open Submission is open to Irish and international artists working in all media in direct response to the curatorial concept. Tulca 2012 is to be curated by Greg McCartney whose curatorial focus is on, in the widest sense landscape.

Whether its arrogance, over-confidence or simply complacency we tend to take our personal landscapes for granted. Until there’s a sudden seismic shift and we’re left wondering what went wrong and who exactly is to blame. Tulca 2012 will be all about landscape, progression/regression, in essence change. It is about psychological landscapes as much as the physical geography. An interest in landscape is at its heart an interest in people and how they react to transformation. The rationale behind this year’s Tulca is a response to the current economic circumstances in Ireland and Europe and the sudden revisions this has caused. It isn’t necessarily about the current climate per se but is rather intended as a meditation on the micro and macro, how these interact and the influence one has on the other. The interest is in how artists have responded to macro shifts in society, be it social, economic or political by often focusing on the micro or individual, the seemingly insignificant but ultimately all important details. Tulca 2012 is intended to offer audiences the opportunity to evaluate the present, reflect on where they find themselves and experience work which whilst resonating with their own experiences offers potential new paths to be considered.

Pre-existing work or proposals for new work will be considered for acceptance. Proposals for work that is of a live/ temporary/ experimental nature or engaged or situated in non-art contexts in Galway city are also welcome. Apply:

To apply please e-mail applications that include a concise artist’s statement, artist CV, Project proposal (if applicable that does not exceed 500 words), examples of previous work (no more than 10 images). Videos to be sent as links to youtube or similar (no more than 2). Proposals accepted by email only. Our email address is tulcafestival@gmail.com. Please put TULCA OPEN SUBMISSION in the subject box

Further Information & Submission of application Email: tulcafestival@gmail.com

Tulca 2012 Deadline: 13 August 2012 @ 5pm

Selected Artists will be notified via e-mail on 17th & 18th of August 2012.

July 30th 2012

Abridged 0 – 26: Rust will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast on the 24.08.12. More news soon.

August 10th 2012

Abridged 0 – 26: Rust
Launch
Golden Thread Gallery
Friday 24th August 2012 @ 6pm
David Hepher, Gerald Dawe, Graham Nunn, Joanna Karolini, 
Kristin Abraham, Maurice Devitt, Gerard Beirne, Barbara Morton, Dan Harvey, Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, 
Afric McGlinchey, Shelley Tracey, Gráinne Tobin, Rachel Mc Donnell, Joanna Grant, Vanessa Gebbie, Gerald Yelle, Conor McFeely, Sarah Mixtapes, Benjamin Norris, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Anne-Marie Glasheen, David CalcuttMoyra Donaldson, Aideen Barry, Dan Shipsides , Joyce Parkes, Annette Skade, Denzil Browne, Brian Kirk, Elizabeth Welsh, Theo Sims, Blaine O’Donnell, Kimberly Campanello, Becky Kilsby. 
We are reluctant to acknowledge Rust. We are reluctant to see it and reluctant to face it, letting it consume the space framed in our sightline. So we push it to the edges, and avoid the contradiction of our control that is Rust. The waste of our existence is pushed to the edges of our cities. We see them on the periphery, dark figures cloaked in the brittle residue of deterioration. The human world is rusting; people, places, things, rusting and rotting on the periphery. Our backward glances leave us unnerved by the sinister image of grey carcasses seeping with orange reds. Tattered forms, broken, fragile, finished. There is an eerie resemblance. A premonition. We know this eroding virus, it is routine enough to name. Rust is in our skin, the passage of time making abrasive records on steel flesh. The air whips our iron bodies, breaking our sense of power. Steel razors are muted and frayed under time’s persistent grind, objects of strength peppered with the omnipotence of rain, of wind. Our fickle illusions of permanence are skeletonised. They become ghosts of crumbling orange in an obedient return to the earth under nature’s tyranny. The body electric fails and falls. And nature is adamant in its weight, a hard and physical heaviness. An absolute presence. Rust, an elemental weapon of mass demoralization, confirms the unutterable reality that we are merely passing through. In the context of nature we are a small movement, temporary occupants. Rust forces us to dispute the significance of our industries, our wars, our structured societies, our manufactured supremacy. They are fossilized dreams, unnatural fossils flaking to dust. Rust is our mutability. Rust is our diminution. The natural translation of colour and state. An evolution of the elements.

 Also opening that night:

CAUTION Sinéad O’Donnell

Belfast-based artist and curator Sinéad O’Donnell presents the culmination of a two year project commissioned for the Cultural Olympiad to coincide with the London 2012 Paralympics.

Over the past two years Sinead has travelled to the USA, Peru, Canada, Kurdistan-Iraq, Japan and Lebanon, working with artists in each of these very different countries on an ambitious collaborative project exploring the nature of ‘invisible’ disability. Sylvette Babin (Montreal, Canada), Mariel Carranza (Los Angeles, USA/Lima, Peru), Paul Couillard (Toronto, Canada), Poshya Kakl (Erbil, Kurdistan-Iraq) and Shiro Masuyama (Tokyo, Japan) have been invited by Sinéad to collaborate

August 20th 2012

Please note the Abridged 0 – 26: Rust launch is now on Thursday 23rd August @ 6pm in the Golden Thread Gallery, Gt. Patrick St., Belfast at 6pm. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. We hope you can make it.

September 11th 2012

We’ve had this website online for a year or so. We’re pleased to note its popularity and the continued growth of the magazine. We have lots of plans for the rest of 2012 and for 2013. Firstly the 0 – 28: Once A Railroad submission call (see below) has just been made. Secondly we are doing very interesting things in Galway between 09th and 23rd November for the Tulca festival. More about that soon. There will be at least three Abridged magazines published. We will also be planting gardens….Thank you for your continued support.

Abridged 0 – 28: Once a Railroad explores the destruction of the dream. The world that exists where ‘reality’ is presented as something to aspire to, something other than the real; where every emotion is public and quickly perishable, where expectation has replaced hope and where love and fear are the same thing.

Once we built a railroad and now what is left? What dreams are there still to dream? And the only lines we lay take us up from the void and lead us back down again. Once the future blinded us, strident as a mid-day sun, now the tempered day is old, stooped and shuffles. Once we built a railroad guided by a dream, and what is left? People stark as death, anxious with absence, on crowded paths murky with limitation. No longer hearing the warning whispers or seeing the signals, voided in a theatre of happy endings and perfect fates. Not a future here, so what is left? Burned out stars left to linger in a dusty limbo. Gone are the soft watermarks of the dream.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Once a Railroad issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Deadline for submissions is 19th October 2012.

…forget the many steps to heaven it never happened and it ain’t so hard… 

October 10th 2012
Abridged personnel curating Tulca 2012 in Galway from 09th – 23rd November 2012.  Further details can be found at www.tulca.ie We hope to see you there.
December 07th
Well we had fun in Galway. Tulca was a complete success.  Thank you to everyone who made it so, the artists, the Tulca staff, interns and volunteers. Here’s an Irish Times review. We hope we can do more projects in the future down there. At the moment we’re putting together our Once A Railroad issue. More news soon. Here’s a few pictures of our Tulca 2012 adventures:
First there was dust
Lots of People
Lurking
Preaching
Brigitte Zeiger
 Christine Mackey
Kelly Richardson
Patrick Hogan
Petur Tomssen
Duncan Campbell
Siobhan McGibbon
Locky Morris
Joanna Karolini
Paull Hallahan
Emily Richardson
George Shaw
Clearly and Connolly
December 09th 2012
We’ll be giving a short talk at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast on Thursday 13th December from 1pm – 2pm. It’s very informal. And there’s tea.