CineSalon is a quarterly experimental film evening based in Cork City.

The inaugural CineSalon Experimental Film Festival took place in September 2024, presenting a rich programme of shorts, features, talks and live events both in person and online.

CineSalon also plays host to an array of online artist-showcases and screenings.

CineSalon Online Artist #3 - Aisling O Connell

CineSalon is pleased to announce the third CineSalon Online Artist: Aisling O Connell. Each year, CineSalon Online streams programmes of film works by six featured artists. Each programme is available to view free and worldwide for two months. This complete retrospective programme of O Connell’s films is online until June 1st 2025.

Aisling is a Cork City based artist, working mainly with film, performance, text and paint. The existence of her uncompromisingly raw outsider work, which not only conjures a personal universe but forges an equally personal film language to express it with haunting force, was a major inspiration behind starting CineSalon. If even one artist of her calibre and autonomy is working in Cork, it makes a Cork-based platform for celebrating such work necessary. We are therefore especially delighted to be sharing her work not only with local viewers but with online audiences worldwide.

In her words:

In 2015 I saw Patrick Jolley’s film The Door Ajar in The Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

At the time, I was living alone with my children, an outsider to the gallery space. I had no context to explain this experience, it stayed wrapped up silently in that glorious encounter.

The film and the gallery had an inaccessibility and a recognition that committed me to the development of my own visual language.

However saturated with mothering, small relationships, small spaces and domesticity the work can get, the feeling of being an outsider within these experiences is greater.

I hope this peripheral view lends itself to the experimental nature of my work and processes.

I am interested in an active, working, moving image. The editing process is physical and spontaneous, and often there is an urgency to the whole thing.

I am very interested in the notion of the encounter, the body in protest, the body in reconciliation and the body rooted in material.

My work is often a personal interpretation of marginalisation, social isolation and compulsive behaviours.

I am currently working on two longer film pieces, Angel and FutureKing, which I hope will encompass all these things that are important to the work.

Identity (2018)

Early attempts at filmed performance or action using an overhead projector.

Beach (2018), House (2018), Bluebeards Breakfast (2018)

Excerpts of performance-based work, fuelled by violent misogyny, also claiming at the time to be loosely inspired by Angela Carter, The Twits (Roald Dahl), the absurd and the tragic.

The Last Indulgence (2018)

Should have been called the first indulgence. An exploration of material-based editing with paint and a projector. 

Shoot (2018), Which Side Are You On Boys (2018)

Excerpts of performance-based work, rooted in the idea of protest and radicalism, or a futile attempt at.

The gun has gone to ground (2019)

An exploration of mythology, masculinity and materiality, inspired by Valie Export’s Genital Panic, Joseph Beuys and Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and The Crucible.

Legislator (2019)

My first successful spell.

Sodomy Sunday (2019)

A film for anyone who has ever experienced a Sodomy Sunday, which can sometimes last for weeks, months or years without mercy.

Wheel (2020)

Made objects, which had many iterations including reproductive systems, capitalist systems, life and death.

No Small Spoons (2020)

A reflection on social isolation, social rejection and addiction.

Water or Milk (2020)

Part origin story, part view from a room, that nightmarish quality that permeates a ‘home’ from within.

The Heartbreak Diet (2022)

For all the proper pieces of shit out there, The Heartbreak Diet. The idea of your home capital, your intrinsic worth and all your shitty consequence. A personal excavation of worth, value, production and work in the home and in relationships. An attempt at elaborating on the idea of ‘home capital’. A description of an unsettling, habitual attempt at existing within a traditional family unit, the borders always frayed and always exhausted. The protagonist’s participation in The Heartbreak Diet is a completely personal compulsion. This somehow gives way to a lawless, cunning and deeply consequential state of affairs, a real appetite for destruction. It could feel like anything from a tearing in the heart, or a means to an end. Something about a smallness, and what is produced from this.

Chase (2023)

Chase began as a mediation on whether or not to euthanise an aggressive dog, but ended up as another POV, this time rooted in pre- and post-partum depression and psychosis.

121 (collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain, 2020)

A collaborative piece, where rogue footage was expelled and exchanged between myself and Maximilian Le Cain.