• COALESCE

    An evolving exhibition, with eight iterations between 2004-2024
    Curated by Paul O’Neill
    Various locations

    COALESCE was a project curated by Paul O’Neill, “an on-going ‘exhibitionary’ project which creates a mutating environment of overlapping painting, video, and text-based exhibitions in constant migration and held at key locations”. To quote the press release, “works and curated projects ‘coalesce’ and co-habit with one other, overlapping and interweaving in the gallery space to create one coalescent whole, yet always as a re-appearance, out of view of the embedded history of its serial mutations.”

    There is a core group of artists, formed by Jaime Gili, Eduardo PAdilha and Kathrin Boehm, and each iteration changes adding artists and layers. Other artists involved in Coalesce through the years include: Ursula Biemann, Esra Ersen, Jakup Ferri, Tod Hanson, Adla Isanovic, Sejla Kameric, Helmut and Johanna Kandl, Willie Mc Keown, Aleksandra Mir, Isabel Nolan, Tadej Pogacar & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E Museum of Contemporary Art, Lawrence Weiner, Jack B. Yeats, Lothar Götz, Marta Marcé, Clare Goodwin, Oriana Fox, Anthony Gross, Harold Offeh, Mark Orange, Marko Raat and Stefan Nikolaev, George Storm Fletcher, Sarah Pierce, Dave Beech and Mark Hutchinson.

    The most recent exhibition in the series, titled Coalescence: Sometime Later, is co-curated by Paul O’Neill at The Showroom with the participation of recurring artists Böhm, Gili and Padilha, who, together with newly commissioned artist George Storm Fletcher, intervene in the architecture of The Showroom to construct a collaborative environment for other artworks and performances. Along with the reappearance of artists from previous editions such as Sarah Pierce, Harold Offeh and Freee Art Collective, artworks co-mingle to provide the stage for a curated series of performance activations by Zein Majali and Vivienne Griffin co-curated with Offeh.

    Coalescence: Sometime Later reflected upon, extended and expanded the spatio-temporality of the exhibition-form as a work-in-progress without a linear narrative nor conclusive statement. Here, exhibition-making was posited as a co-productive practice where an accumulation of agencies, actors and actions transform the gallery into an exhibition as a public stage for possible encounters.

    Iterations curated by Paul O’Neill so far: Coalesce: Mingle-Mangle, London Print Studio, UK, 2004; Coalesce, Palma Dotze-Galeria d’Art, Vilafranca, Barcelona, Spain, 2004; Coalesce: The Remix, Redux, London, 2005; Coalesce: With All Due Intent, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, 2005; Coalesce: Happenstance, Smart Projects Space, Amsterdam, 2009; Coalescence, ADN Platform, Barcelona, 2023-23; Coalescence: Sometime Later, + PDF: Coalesce The Remix leaflet
    + PDF: With All Due Intent. Lawrence Wiener invite