Jaki Irvine
"Ivana's Answers"
19 January – 25 February 2001

Following her recent presentation of The Hottest Sun, the Darkest Hour at the Frith Street Gallery, Jaki Irvine presents a major new video installation at the Delfina Project Space to open the programme for 2001. Shot on digital video in Prato, Italy during the summer of 2000, this work represents a departure from Irvine’s use of black and white 16mm film, in favour of the technically refined qualities of full colour, laser disc projection.

The qualities of the moving image provide Jaki Irvine with complex cycles and structures through which she reveals broken and often inconclusive narratives. Focusing on human relationships and the human experience, Irvine’s films unravel and lead in certain directions but ultimately decline to reach conclusions. Ivana’s Answers centres on a conversation between two women. As one reads the tealeaves of the other, questions emerge around the nature of perception, memory, desire and estrangement.

Time shifts and folds back on itself as the rhythm of this work and is played out along the unstable boundaries of fact and fiction.

Jaki Irvine was born in Dublin in 1966 and lives and works in Prato, Italy. She studied at NCAD in Dublin and Goldsmith’s College, London. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, most notably in Pandaemoneum at the ICA, London (1996), Now Here at Louisiana in Denmark (1996) and Intelligence at Tate Britain (2000). In 1997 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for Imma Glen Dimplex award. She was resident at the Delfina Studio Trust 1998-2000.