Sam Keogh

Ireland, b. 1985

Sam Keogh works with installation, sculpture, performance, drawing, and collage. In recent work, installations facilitate performances and aim to produce an intimate encounter with the audience through the grotesque extrapolation of recognizable images, figures, or myths, from Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, to a two-thousand-year-old Irish ‘bog body’, to the myth of Medusa. For this edition of EVA International, Keogh has produced a large-scale mixed-media installation that will provide a set for a series of live performances, resembling a TED talk or a sales pitch. Taking the form of a spaceship’s control panel, Control Panel evokes complex and alien technologies of the near future, and explores subjects related to techno-masculinities, Silicone Valley-esque complexities, and fetishes of the future.

Sam Keogh’s recent solo exhibitions include: Eurocopter EC135, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany (2016); Four Fold, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015); Mop, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2013); and Terrestris, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Dark Water: Dead of the Night and A—Z, Dilston Groove, London; Hmmm, London; and Something to Be Scared of II, Syndk, Cologne (2017).

(Text: 38th EVA International catalogue)