228 Lashes is a project that uses the friction between text and object, language and identity, function and autonomy to trigger counteractive thinking. A major aspect of the project comprises of a theoretical essay Two Hundred and Twenty Eight Lashes in a once off print edition of 228, the edition number referring to a particular punishment. The whole edition will be displayed as a sculptural object where the individual essay booklets will be free to the viewers, initiating for the project a type of internal critique. The text approaches concepts relating to ideological ownership and surface politics, taking its starting point from implosive debates surrounding the implied identity category of two teenagers publicly executed in Iran in 2005. The appropriation of real, forgotten and unstable identity is a strategy that runs through the artist’s previous practice, a feature that in 228 Lashes confuses the space between poetic exploitation and cultural engagement. The two objects accompanying the text, the circular light-box sculpture Safe Semiotic and the gallery light alteration Monument to Aesthetic Justice / Justification, necessarily become mere emblems of ideas contained in the text, potentially creating an uneasy tension between the art object and the information it is intended to contain. The Two Hundred and Twenty Eight Lashes essay will only exist in printed form, as all digital traces will be deleted, removing the information from instantly reproducible electronic formats. While the project explores issues relating to communication and identification in the context of cybernetically affected culture, the production process seeks to create questions suggested by current trends in contemporary art production, in particular the contrasting of symbolic, abstracted and informative modes of communication.
Berlin based artist Padraig Robinson (1985) is a 2008 Fine Art Sculpture and Combined Media graduate from Limerick School of Art and Design. In 2011 Robinson will begin postgraduate research at the Dutch Art Institute (NL), funded by the Irish Arts Council. 228 Lashes is a project funded by Kildare County Council 2011, previous awards include an Irish Arts Council Bursary 2009, and a Horwath Bastow Charleton Graduate Travel Bursary 2008. In July 2011 the solo exhibition IDEOLECT was presented at the Centre For Endless Progress, Berlin, previous group and solo projects have been exhibited in Germany, Turkey, Ireland and the USA.