Eamon O’Kane
SOAP questions the normative performativity of gender in contemporary media, ie. the compulsory reiteration and repetition of paradigmatic norms and conventions. The power of performance lies in its ability to transform people’s desires into conformity with the desires of the apparatus of society. Power is legitimised through normative performativity.
Eamon O’Kane (b. 1974) is an Irish artist lives and works in Norway and Denmark. Since 2011, he has been a professor of Visual Art and Painting at The Art Academy, University of Bergen,Norway. O’Kane’s multi-disciplinary practice has consistently been drawn to architectural contexts, whether in his Froebel Studio installation works that explore environments of play, or else in works such as Glass House that presented a scaled model of Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House which was exhibited at California 101 in San Francisco and then at his first museum solo exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sheldon Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. O’Kane has exhibited widely in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M.Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Angelike Nollert, Yilmaz Dziewior, and others. He has been a recipient of the Taylor Art Award, the Tony O’Malley Award, a Fulbright Award, an EV+A open award (Dan Cameron), the IMMA residency in Dublin, the BSR Scholarship in Rome, the CCI residency in Paris, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. He has been short-listed for the AIB Prize, the PS1 studio fellowship in New York, and the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London. He has had over 80 solo exhibitions internationally, including in New York, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, Dublin, Belfast, and Cork. He has participated in numerous biennales including EVA, Limerick, Luleå Biennal, Norwegian Sculpture Biennal, and Dublin Contemporary.
