curator(s) in residence [2014/15] - Household collective

PS² cheerfully announces our new curators in residence: the Belfast based Household collective.
They are a group of five curators/ artists including Sighle Bhréathnach-Cashell, Eoin Dara, Ciara Hickey, Alissa Kleist and Kim McAleese. For one year they will use the backspace of PS² for collective and independent curatorial research and programming. Apart from their own work, they are invited to critically interfere and add to the existing programme of PS² and curate a project.
This is now the fourth 'curator(s) in residence' series, which started in 2011 as a three week long research project with 9 artists/curators. It was followed by 1 year residencies of the PRIME collective; and artist/curator Ursula Burke.
So far the experience and impact of the residencies for PS² has been great: the curators organised talks, held peer reviews, developed their own projects and programmes for other spaces; cooked, realised full blown projects for PS², stored their bikes and stirred the place up.
With a group of five now filling the space, PS² braces itself for a whirlwind of ideas and actions.

Curator/s in residence programme

2011  About curating, three week long research project
2012/13  PRIME collective, Alissa Kleist, Tonya McMullan, Charlotte Bosanquet
2012/13  Ursula Burke
2014/15  Household collective, Sighle Bhréathnach-Cashell, Eoin Dara, Ciara Hickey, Alissa Kleist, Kim McAleese
2016/17  Mirjami Schuppert
2018/19  Jane Morrow

Household is a curatorial collective that encourages audiences to re-negotiate how they view and interact with art in urban and domestic spaces. The collective aims to create opportunities to experience new work in unrestricted, non-commercial and non-institutional contexts. 
Over the past two years Household have produced two festivals of contemporary art in South Belfast (Household), staging exhibitions and events in artists’ homes and public venues, and reactivating or reclaiming selected public spaces in the city. The collective curated the 2013 visual arts programme for Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and were involved in The Grand Domestic Revolution GOES ON project at CCA Derry/ Londonderry. They were also recently nominated for the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award.

‘Over the next year, we will be using PS² as our first semi-permanent base to work from. Previous to this, Household plans have nearly always been hatched over chopping boards, pots, pans, and dinner tables in each of our own homes, so we’re very excited (and perhaps healthily trepidatious) to be embarking on this residency where we will have a fixed address to be found at over the coming months. We will be using this opportunity to work towards developing a major new project to be staged across Belfast in August 2015. We intend to use PS² as a kind of curatorial hub; a place to hold meetings, host guests, have discussions, cook dinner, have drinks, and explore new ideas.’