Vaari Claffey and Todd Sekuler
Buried with the Machine
A programme of screenings and performances featuring Rebecca Barten, Matt Calderwood, Jem Cohen, Megan Conery, David Crowley, Brian Dillon, Amelia Durac, Mikala Dwyer, Liss Fenwick, Barbara Hammer, Brian Hand, Bea McMahon, Jasmine Parsley, Elizabeth Price, Elisabeth Subrin, Nathan Truesdell, and Yuyan Wang.
The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely
7–10pm, Saturday 5 September 2026
The Clearing ends with a screening programme at The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, from 7–10pm on Saturday 5 September 2026.
Book tickets to attend here: RSVP
An evening of ghosts tinkering with machines, Buried with the Machine emerges through a reflection on the circumstances of the death of Vaari Claffey’s Great Grandfather, Tinahely native, Timothy Cleary. Described in his obituary as a ‘scientific machinist’, Cleary was an innovator who died in an explosion at his saw mills in 1930, resulting in the burial of himself and his machine, which has not been dug up, til now. The programme explores our (sometimes dangerous) relationship to machinery as it veers towards hybridity; the proclivity to meddle to the point of glitching, and the attachment of the living to the non-living.
Co-curated by cultural anthropologist and film-programmer, Todd Sekuler, the film programme will be accompanied by interventions and amuse bouches served up by artists, researchers and writers. If the comedic is, in the words of Henry Bergson, the ‘mechanical encrusted upon the living’, this programme looks at the identity crisis and tragedy that can result in the living becoming encrusted upon the mechanical.
Information for attendees
Buried with the Machine takes place on the evening on Saturday 5 Setpember from 7pm–10pm at the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, Y14 XO99.
Biographies
Vaari Claffey is an independent curator living in Dublin. She teaches at NCAD, Dublin. She has initiated a number of curatorial platforms including Gracelands, Magnetism at Hazelwood, IsolationTV and Dirty Solutions. Her practice involves working closely with artists to commission and stage experiential projects across a variety of media, aiming to produce a particularly dynamic relationship with the audience. These projects range from low-key, self-performed moments to large-scale exhibitions and public art commissions. Known for her innovative and experiential projects, Claffey’s practice involves collaborating closely with artists and other practitioners to conceive and stage large-scale exhibitions, performance/screening events, filmworks and outdoor artworks.
Todd Sekuler is Oberassistent in Popular Cultures at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. He holds a Master in Public Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a PhD in European Ethnology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses broadly on the intersections of memory, health, and politics, with postdoctoral work on criminalization and AIDS activism. Sekuler has co-curated several cultural events, including the "arcHIV" and "HIVstories" exhibitions at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, and is co-founder of the European HIV/AIDS Archive. Ongoing research focuses include HIV/AIDS art and activism, queer kinship, and alternative forms of knowledge production and ethnographic practice.
Rebecca Barten is an experimental filmmaker and collage artist who has made poetic/conceptual works in both 16mm film and video which engage themes of radical otherness rooted in highly edited explorations of cinematic metabolism. Often, Barten’s films are living documents of the creative process of their own making. Along with David Sherman, she coined the term “Microcinema” in 1994, co-founding Total Mobile Home Microcinema in San Francisco and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson AZ. Her films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award 2025), Antimatter (Victoria BC), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque NM), Cosmic Rays (Chapel Hill NC) and San Francisco Cinematheque. Barten currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
Matt Calderwood was born in 1975 in Co. Antrim. He started making installation, sculptures and video works in 1998. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include: Matt Calderwood, HS projects, Howick Place, London (UK) 2017-18; More or Less There, 1961 Projects, Singapore, 2017; White Noise, Farbvision, Berlin (DE) 2016; Exposure, De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill on Sea, (UK) 2014; Paper Over The Cracks, BALTIC 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, (UK) 2013; Matt Calderwood, Dynamo Arts Association, Vancouver, (CA) 2012. Notable group exhibitions include: Generation Loss, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, (DE) 2017-18; Idea Home, MIMA, Middlesbrough, (UK) 2017; Precarious Balance, CoCA (Centre Of Contemporary Art), Christchurch, (NZ) 2016; More Konzeption Conception Now, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, (DE) 2015.
Jem Cohen is a New York based filmmaker who, across a career spanning over three decades, has made dozens of films in various formats, building a strikingly original body of work that reflects the spirit of independent filmmaking in its original sense. These sometimes dreamily impressionistic, sometimes arrestingly gritty films defy conventional categorisation, and shift easily between narrative and documentary modes. Cohen is well known for his collaborations on music videos, concert films and feature-length documentaries with a range of musicians including Fugazi, Patti Smith, the Ex, Jonathan Richman and REM. Equally powerful are his experimental films of urban landscapes, shot in various locations around the world but predominantly New York. Many of these films have the feel of scrapbooks or diaries, drawn from a personal archive of the hidden images and sounds of modern city life.
Megan Conery is a Dublin-based artist working with sound, textiles and moving image. They produce experimental ambient music as Covers Blown.
David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there. After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. As a curator, Crowley’s major exhibitions include The Poster Remediated, Warsaw International Poster Biennale exhibition, Cold War Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008–9 (co-curated with Jane Pavitt); The Power of Fantasy. Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland at BOZAR, Brussels, 2011 (with Zofia Machnicka and Andrzej Szczerski); Sounding the Body Electric. Experimental Art and Music in Eastern Europe at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012 and Calvert 22, London, 2013 (co-curated with Daniel Muzyczuk).
Amelia Durac is a vocalist and violinist who plays with the Dublin six-piece band Child of Prague.
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism (all published by New York Review Books), as well as The Great Explosion (short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, frieze, and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for the Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.
Mikala Dwyer is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. Since the mid-1980s she has developed an internationally recognised sculptural, performative and installation practice that explores ideas of shelter, childhood play, modernist design, personal biography, magic and the occult. Dwyer has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. She has participated in the Sydney and Adelaide Biennales. In 2012 Dwyer’s solo show Panto Collapsar at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, continued to tour various venues around Ireland. She was included in Face up: Contemporary Art from Australia at Hamburger Bahnhof and Verso Süd at Palazzo Doria Pamphilj curated by Franz West. She is the recipient of numerous residencies, scholarships, grants and awards. Dwyer’s work is held in public collections throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Liss Fenwick is an Australian artist working across photography, video, sound and material processes. Born on Larrakia Country in the Northern Territory, they work between Larrakia Country (NT) and Naarm (VIC). Fenwick’s practice explores speculative relations between more-than-human worlds and settler culture, foregrounding socially critical representations of land, extractivism and colonial inheritance. Fenwick’s work was shown in the landmark exhibition On Country: Photography from Australia at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles. Select solo exhibitions include The colony cares for everyone (PhD exhibition), RMIT Chancellery / Former Magistrates’ Court, Melbourne (2024); Mastotermes, MARS Gallery (2023); Humpty Doom, Hillvale Gallery (2023). Their work has featured in group exhibitions at the Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), the V&A Museum (London) and Midpul Art Gallery (Darwin). Fenwick is a recipient of the Macquarie Emerging Artist Prize and the Fineman Award for New Photography, and their photobook Humpty Doom was a finalist in the Paris Photo–Aperture First Book Award (2023).
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, CA and died in 2019 in New York, NY. She is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema, with a career spanning fifty years. Working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, women’s health and aging, and global political struggles. Guided by her urgent need to document communities rarely represented in mainstream cinema, she asserted that “radical content deserves radical form.” Using documentary and found footage, her works are characterized by her robust experimentation with montage, superimposition, and overexposure. Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, 1993, and 2019 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne. She is the author of 'Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life', published by Feminist Press, 2009. In 2017 Hammer’s paper archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The same year she established the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant.
Brian Hand is an artist based in Carlow, Ireland. He also lectures and is head of sculpture and expanded practice at NCAD, Dublin. Hand’s art practice is broadly concerned with creatively exploring and researching events in the past. Hand makes temporary public work and time-based installations often in site-specific locations. He has a deep interest in post-colonial historiography and the limits of historical representation. In the past, he believes, we can find alternative images that disrupt the naturalness of the present. He has made work addressing art and politics through researching secret societies, prisons, suffragettes, the archive, the great famine and the invention of the Irish Wolfhound. As a writer Hand has published essays for artists such as Anne Tallentire, Noel Sheridan, Daphne Wright, Dennis McNulty, Colin Darke, and Dorothy Cross. Hand was a founding member of collaborative art groups: Blue Funk, The Fire Dept.,147, Entre Chien et Loup and most recently Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeall.
Bea McMahon uses many different media including sculpture, performance, song, dance, moving image and installation, often working in collaboration with others. Trained in mathematics and mathematical physics, she navigates through conceptions of reality and their corresponding appearances in the outside world. Recent collaborations include Crickets a TV series shot in various locations including Treignac Projet and Kunstverein Aughrim (ongoing); Another Shot at Love, a romantic comedy commissioned for the 40th EVA biennale in Limerick, 2023; live performance with lip-synching pop group Dina from Egypt in I’ll be your Mirror, Hugh Lane Gallery, 2023 and pop-video-smash-hits magazine launch at Framerframed, Amsterdam 2024. Recent exhibitions include God, a two-person exhibition with Conor McFeely, The Complex, Dublin; solo exhibitions Animal Farm, Paper Biennale, Museum Rijkswijk, The Hague, 2024; Sequins, with Maaike Schoorel at Shimmer, Rotterdam, 2023; Floppy Forest at Treignac Projet, 2021; and group shows Ad Ampio Respira, Artopia Gallery, Milan 2022; Under Bat Hill at W139, Amsterdam 2021.
Jasmine Parsley (she/they) is an artist from Virginia, USA, now based in Berlin, whose practice examines how place can be read, deconstructed, activated and reimagined through vegetation. They hold a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of the Arts Berlin, and approach architecture as a performative practice with transformative potential – one in which bodies gather and linger, creating ephemeral architectures which open up new ways of encountering the everyday and overlooked. Food, spontaneous vegetation and the externalization of the kitchen in public space are central to their work, connecting social, political, and ecological questions. Parsley’s practice spans walks, workshops, happenings, dinners, performances, and writing. Since 2023, they are part of the collectives Kontaminiert Werden and Bündnis Feuer und Flamme.
Elizabeth Price is an artist who uses digital and reprographic media to explore existing art and design objects, collections and archives. In 2012 Price was awarded the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition HERE at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. She was featured in the British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (touring 2010 – 2011). She has exhibited in group shows internationally, and has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, UK; Chicago Institute of Art, USA; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; Index Gallery, Stockholm; Musee D’art Contemporain, Montreal: Artangel, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; GoMA Glasgow and the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. In 2012 she won the Turner Prize and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists. In 2013, she won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award with the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford. Throughout her career as an artist, Price has continued to work in academia, and is presently Professor of Film and Photography in the School of Art, Kingston University, UK.
Elisabeth Subrin is a filmmaker, artist and writer, producing narrative and experimental films and film/video installations. She teaches courses in screenwriting, directing, moving image art, and women's film and video art history. Subrin is a Guggenheim, Sundance, Rockefeller and Annenberg Fellow, and a 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in France. Prior to teaching at Temple, she taught at Harvard University, Amherst College, Cooper Union, Bennington College and the Yale University School of Art MFA Program and was Distinguished Visiting Graduate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received an MFA in video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art, where she received the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Nathan Truesdell is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker from Clark, Missouri who has been nominated for an Academy Award, a PGA Award, an IDA Award, was selected for the inaugural “DOC NYC 40 Under 40” list, and won a Cinema Eye Honor for Cinematography. His directorial work includes the award-winning Balloonfest, The Water Slide, When the LAPD Blows Up Your Neighbourhood, The Art of Making Money, and It’s Coming! He was the Camera Department Head for three seasons of the HBO series How To with John Wilson. He produced and co-DP’ed the Tribeca winner Ascension (2021). He produced documentaries such as We Always Lie to Strangers (SXSW, 2013), Caucus (Hot Docs, 2013), Convention (LAFF, 2010), Peace in the Valley (Sundance, 2016), and co-produced The Gospel of Eureka (SXSW, 2018). He was a cinematographer on Dope is Death (True/False, 2020), Deprogrammed (Tribeca, 2015), and was a cinematographer and editor on Killing Them Safely (Tribeca, 2015). He also served as art director for the narrative film You’re Next (TIFF, 2011).
Yuyan Wang is an artist and filmmaker. She graduated from Le Fresnoy—National Studio of Contemporary Arts in 2020 and from the Beaux-Arts of Paris in 2016. Wang’s work oscillates between film and installation, often taking an immersive perspective. Her work has been included in major group exhibitions including 15thGwangju Biennale (2024) and the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: Still Present! (2022), alongside presentations at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, e-flux Film & Video, and in film festivals including the Berlinale International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and MoMa Doc Fortnight.
This screening programme is part of The Clearing, a major new public project by Dublin-based curator and producer Vaari Claffey. It unfolds across an exhibition at Kunstverein Aughrim, a live event at Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival, and a screening programme at The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely.
Buried with the Machine is a Stone Soup collaboration with the Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely. The Clearing is supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Vaari Claffey is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.