A MOMENTARY COHABITATION: KIRA O’REILLY MEETS ANOTHER SPECIES

I first met Kira O’Reilly under a dead pig. Or rather, encountered, as she was lying silently, naked underneath an un-named porcine carcass in Laura Godfrey-Isaacs’ HOME project in Camberwell. The pig had no name, just a number, and had been acquired from an abattoir, a place of death, for a performance of an encounter between dead and live flesh. inthewrongplaceness (2005) was an intense, one-to-one encounter with the artist. I had not had any warning of what I was going to find behind the closed door in HOME, separated from the cosy atmosphere of friends drinking wine in Laura’s house. There had not yet been the media storm that accompanied the second showing of the work in Tract, at Penzance; and the lack of a seedy Soho-style entrance, as there was in Cornwall, left me completely unprepared for the spectacle of Kira coiled with the corpse of a pig. There were many unanswered questions after seeing inthewrongplaceness, but for me, as a curator, preparing an exhibition which became known as Interspecies, my first question to the artist was: ‘Why not a live pig?’