Events & Entertainment

Sirius Arts: Aoife Desmond and Maximilian Le Cain

Published

2 years ago

February 1, 2024

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SIRIUS presents films by two Cork City-based artists: Aoife Desmond and Maximilian Le Cain. The events include the screenings of Desmond’s Bury Our Hearts at the Bend of the River (2023) and Le Cain’s Solitaire (2023). Both films premiered at the 2023 edition of the Cork International Film Festival. Desmond’s screening complements her solo show at SIRIUS in the Spring of 2024, featuring her film sirius – harbour’s mouth (2023), commissioned by SIRIUS.

Maximilian Le Cain
Solitaire

SIRIUS
Friday, 2 February
8-10pm
Free; no booking required

Aoife Desmond
Bury Our Hearts at the Bend of the River

SIRIUS
Saturday, 17 February
4-6pm
Free; no booking required

A conversation between the artists and the SIRIUS director, Miguel Amado, follows both presentations. They discuss the artists’ intentions and concerns in making these films, as well as the aesthetics, production, and intellectual frameworks shaping their practice.

Maximilian Le Cain, Solitaire (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist

Maximilian Le Cain
Solitaire

Maximilian Le Cain is a Cork City-based artist who creates a prolific body of moving image outputs, including features, shorts, installations, and performances. Le Cainʼs filmmaking advances a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting, where memory, time, and the unconscious overlap. Solitaire, Le Cain’s latest film, is an unsettling experimental ghost story that explores themes of family, home, identity, and gender as unfixed parasitic entities that propagate themselves through bodies, specifically via the performers Natasha Bourke and Aisling O’Connell, and buildings.
Aoife Desmond
Bury Our Hearts at the Bend of the River

Aoife Desmond is a Cork City-based artist who makes films, installations, and performances. Her work engages with environmental crises through the connection between body and landscape, as well as human/non-human relationships. Bury Our Hearts at the Bend of the River follows three performers, Siobhán Ní Dhuinínn, Kanako Haru, and Desmond, accompanying the River Lee from source to sea. Desmond chronicles multiple journeys on foot and by boat, and captures various site-responsive improvisations by the three performers. Fragments of voice-over in Irish and English situate the River Lee within a broader personal, historical, and political framework.