Join us to celebrate the publication of Joseph Noonan-Ganley’s The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist’s Texts 2012-2024 by Ma Bibliothèque. This evening of readings and performance coincides with the screening of Noonan-Ganley’s Our Bed (2023), on the Living Canvas at IMMA screen from the 31 July until 13 August 2025.
The Cesspool of Rapture is a collection of Joseph Noonan-Ganley’s writing from 2012 to 2024, structured by three themes and contexts that emerged during the process of assembling the texts: STUDIO, UNIVERSITY, and EXHIBITION and includes responses by Simon Watney, Sarah Tripp, and Tom Dillon.
‘Working in my studio, teaching in universities, and presenting art in exhibitions demand distinct and contrasting kinds of labour that do not easily lead from one to the other. Persisting in any one of these areas is premised on the work and learning undertaken in the others. This assembly demonstrates why I continue to move between these, why movement is generative, essential. This book reconstitutes connections that are suppressed by infrastructural, institutional, and psychic compartmentalisation. These texts were not written to be compiled. They collectively comprise their themes, demonstrating diversity rather than synthesis […] Objects host shared encounters: when I visit them, I come into contact with the desires of others, and they become contaminated by mine in the process.’ – An excerpt from The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist’s Texts 2012-2024.
The book will be available to purchase at the event and at the IMMA bookshop. For more information visit Ma Bibliothèque.
Joseph Noonan-Ganley (b.1987) is an Irish artist working across video, sculpture, photography, textiles and writing. In 2000 he attended St. Joseph’s Secondary School in Tulla, Co. Clare, then at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin he undertook a BFA in Painting. Following this Joseph completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Over the past decade he has designed and lectured on art BA, MFA and PhD courses internationally including at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Newcastle University, and Goldsmiths.
Noonan-Ganley’s art explores how identities are collaboratively made in the process of interpreting others, being interpreted by others and the integration of these relationships. He often takes as artistic material the lives and works of bisexual and homosexual men (Joseph Cornell, Charles James, Gareth Thomas). His exhibitions, performances and publications openly manipulate the remnants of these artists, designers, sports people, dressmakers and writers. Materials unearthed from the person’s life and work are remade through filming, sculptural construction and textual experimentation in explicit detail. Themes cluster around embodied labour, biographic authorship and illicit sexuality. The works draw from the literary genre of bio-fiction, feminist bodily experience, theories of sexual dissidence, Materialist and Cinéma Vérité filmmaking.