Gregory McCartney / Susanna Galbraith
Dr. Gregory McCartney is founder and project coordinator/editor of the Abridged project. He is also a freelance visual arts curator and exhibitions organiser, and the editor of the Honest Ulsterman, one of Ireland’s most prestigious literary journals. He has curated really a lot of exhibitions, among them ‘A Brand New Darkness’ in Galway Arts Centre and Leviathan in Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, both in 2019. In 2016, he curated ‘Why is it always December?’ a six artist show at MCAC, Portadown. In 2015 he curated, Pieter Hugo, Adrian Ghenie and Olaf Brzeski at the MAC, Belfast plus Jana Romanova, Irina Popov and others at the Void Gallery, Derry. In 2014 he curated Haunted by Abridged/Kelly Richardson in MCAC Portadown and Void Derry. In 2013 he curated exhibitions/public art projects for Void Gallery, Derry plus an Abridged show in Switzerland as well as three Abridged publications and the Derry leg of Colm Cille’s Spiral. In 2012 he curated the 40 artist TULCA visual arts festival in Galway, and an Abridged postcard poetry/art project in Donegal. In 2011 he curated a show at Void, Derry featuring Ackroyd and Harvey as well as Abandoned Clare with Deirdre O’Mahony, at the X-PO, Kilnaboy, County Clare, the latest in the series of Abridged ‘abandoned’ exhibitions plus published three poetry/art Abridged publications. Other projects have included the curation of George Shaw at Void Gallery, Derry and the ‘We the People’ project including exhibitions by Robert Boyd, Kalup Linzy and Wardell Milan, Sharon Hayes and Xaviera Simmons as well as giving early solo shows artists such as Phil Collins.
He was a member of the Void Curatorial Panel and is a former director of the Context Gallery, now CCA Derry/Londonderry.
Susanna Galbraith is something of an editor, curator, researcher, writer, maker or person who works ‘vaguely in the arts’. She came on board with Abridged as an editorial assistant at seventeen. In the nearly-ten-years since she has been increasingly involved with the project and its evolutions, now playing the role of editor & project officer (or something) and probably isn’t going anywhere. Mostly, she researches and develops Abridged themes, writes the ‘editorial’ essays, and curates Abridged ‘Happenings’, as well as sharing the other editorial, curatorial and general muck-in jobs for the magazine and its various ghosts and tendrils. Susanna studied English at Trinity College Dublin and Art History at University of York. She is a past editor of Icarus, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation and Eborakon. Her essays and poetry can be found in various publications including Abridged (of course), Cyphers, The Tangerine, The Lonely Crowd, The Penny Dreadful, The Pickled Body, York Literary Review, Belleville Park Pages, the HU, Her Other Language, A Magazine of Revolution? An Exploration of the Honest Ulsterman, and various other journals and zines. She also currently works with Source Photographic Review as Audience Development Officer and the Verbal Arts Centre as Literary Guide, and is supported by an Arts Council NI SIAP award for poetry. She lives in Belfast.
Some of the things we’ve curated
Photo documentation of some of the exhibitions we have curated can be found below. We’ll add more when we can find photos of them and when we can remember them. We haven’t included many of those at Context because they were Gallery exhibitions that didn’t need a curator’s name. We were only doing our job, as they say. Apologies to who took the photos for not having a name. Most probably Paola Bernardelli for the Derry ones, as well as a lot of artist’s own shots. Anyone else just send me your name and we’ll include it.
