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Over the past decade, Kerry Guinan has established a reputation for addressing the economic, technological, and political systems that dominate our society. Working on both hyper-local and global scales, Guinan’s work focuses upon the persistent growth and expansion of labour, property, and technological networks. Using installation, photography, participatory art, and performance, Guinan aestheticises and exposes the alienating implications of these structures.

The linchpin of this solo exhibition at Ormston House is Portraits: a series of three live streamed, durational video portraits. Orchestrated and directed by Guinan and involving complex logistical planning, these one-off, day-long performances feature professional content creators located in three intercontinental sites. The participating sitters are Oleg Repetskiy in Ukraine, Europe; Maimana Ghonim in Egypt, Africa; and Nirvaya Subedi in Nepal, Asia. Each of these performances involves the sitters posing still in their own homes. These ‘living portraits’ are broadcast into the gallery in real time, creating events that punctuate the exhibition. This iteration of Portraits at Ormston House is a development of an earlier staging in 2019 and features some of the original performers, with new technical specifications and stage directions.

A strategy implemented in Portraits and the other works in this exhibition is that of twinning or coupling spatially-disparate entities. The sense of live immediacy conveyed in this work is uncanny and paradoxical, as the subjects are located thousands of miles away. By juxtaposing people or places separated by distance, Guinan sheds light on alienated, socio-economic connections. Spatially-estranged subjects are rendered with a sense of immediacy, drawing attention to binary concepts of expansion and compression, connection and alienation, closeness and distance. This strategy is informed by time-space compression, a concept that is rooted in Marxist geography. Essentially, this idea posits that capitalism’s constant expansion and technological acceleration is capable of sundering the fundamental realities of space and time.

Another significant work spanning continents and time zones, and incorporating live performance and networked technology, is The Red Thread. The first iteration of this work was an exhibition that took place at The Complex in Dublin in 2022. The project consisted of six sewing machines operated remotely – and in real time – by workers in a clothes factory over 8,000 kilometres away in Bengaluru, India. The Red Thread is presented at Ormston House in the form of Anthony O’Connor’s documentary film and a selection of research material and residues from the socially-engaged process implemented by Guinan in making the work.

Grounding the exhibition in a more local context, Guinan’s photographic work Landscapes expresses the urgency of spatial politics in Ireland today. The subjects of the photographs are the highest- and lowest-valued plots of land for sale in Ireland (as of 2018). Displayed in large-scale, the details uncovered within these ordinarily-overlooked landscapes index the artificial and arbitrary value systems that are imposed upon land.

Guinan seeks to harness the potential of aesthetics as a tool for political inquiry. At the heart of this exhibition is a desire to shed light on some of the concealed structures that shape our world, socially and spatially. The hyper-scaled technological and economic infrastructures that constitute and control contemporary society are difficult to apprehend directly. This exhibition guides them into presence, gently suggesting that distance and separation can deepen the significance of human interdependence.