MTU Crawford College of Art & Design

BACK to MAAP 2020

Padraic Barrett

MA:AP 2020

Padraic Barrett

My work is a response to the imperceptible forces of surveillance capitalism and its role in the gradual deterioration of the human condition. By placing the naked male figure in a suspended and simulated space in time I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia. 

I have merged performance, film and installation to focus on the impact of a bewildering and constantly changing political theatre. The inscriptive capitalist ideals that are scripted onto the body, as well as the various ways in which strategies of power are stage-crafted, signify a ceaseless search for the threshold between reflection and transformation.

Explorations of technological dispositifs and cognitive processes are probed to convey oppositional forces through a transcendent narrative that initiates a dialogue between sacrifice and rebirth, virtual and natural, the weighted and the invisible. Identification with shamanistic ritual gives me the scope to take on the role of the performer as avatar and facilitates an investigation into the possibility of rebalancing the place of human beings within the natural world.