About

Ultimology* is the study of that which is dead or dying.

The first Department of Ultimology was established by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain in 2016, at Trinity College Dublin. In the academic context, when applied across curricula and disciplines, Ultimology becomes the study of extinct or endangered subjects, theories, and tools of learning. More broadly Ultimology responds to a contemporary environment of anxiety around endings; a time of apocalyptic climate events and turbulent political change, threats of resurgent populism, depleted resources, rapid obsolescence and technological changes that are shifting society.

The Department of Ultimology considers that which is dead or dying across all fields as an entry point for transformative encounter. Working through artistic methodologies, Ultimology presents complex issues in playful and exploratory ways, conducting interviews, workshops, projects and discourse around the question “what is dead or dying?” In this way Ultimology functions as a means of openly grappling with opaque subjects.

The Department of Ultimology is part of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), a research group based at CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, headquartered at Trinity College Dublin. OMG works in critical and creative relation/tension with technology. Working through artistic methodologies, Ultimology is offered as a tool for critical reflection by engineering researchers who work in cutting edge technology, and as a means for those outside of that sphere to gain insight into networks and communications.

* The term Ultimology was first encountered through the work of Ross Perlin, director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), New York.

Kate Strain (left) and Fiona Hallinan (right). Photography by Faolán Carey 2023.

Faculty

Fiona Hallinan is an artist, researcher, filmmaker and, alongside curator Kate Strain, co-founder of the Department of Ultimology, based between Brussels, Belgium and Cork, Ireland. Her doctoral research at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven explores the coming-into-being of Ultimology, the study of that which is dead or dying (death here encompassing both the end of life and the passing into irrelevance, redundancy, or extinction of material and immaterial entities), as a tool for transformative discourse. This project involves instigating gatherings around ‘ruptures’ as case studies; the closure of a canteen, the demolition of a church, the extinction of a plant. This research is informed by gathering knowledge related to rituals of mourning, supported by a monthly reading group ‘On Death’. She is interested in themes of hospitality, traces, thresholds, care and critical pedagogy and often works with food as part of her practice, cooking and organising meals.

She has presented work in a number of international contexts, including at IMMA, Kerlin Gallery, the John Nicholas Brown Centre for Public Humanities at Brown University and Grazer Kunstverein.

Kate Strain is a curator of contemporary art and the founding director of Kunstverein Aughrim. From 2016–2021 she was Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, where she commissioned a rolling programme of seasonal solo exhibitions and collaborative projects by major international artists. In close collaboration with artist Fiona Hallinan, Strain is co-founder of the Department of Ultimology, a research body dedicated to the study of that which is dead or dying. Working alongside Rachael Gilbourne, Strain makes up one half of the paired curatorial practice RGKSKSRG, commissioning, presenting and contextualising contemporary art. Strain previously worked as Acting Curator at Project Arts Centre, a multidisciplinary art centre in Dublin. She is a graduate of History and the History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, holds an MA in Visual Arts Practice, IADT Dun Laoghaire, and participated in de Appel Curatorial Programme at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam and Young Curators Residency Programme at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Strain is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and regularly lectures in curatorial practice, art history and contemporary art.

Collaborators

Ellen Rowley (PhD) is an architectural humanities teacher and writer on twentieth-century Irish architecture. She is Lecturer in Modern Irish Architecture in UCD’s School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, where she teaches architectural history and culture programmes. Her research into Modernism and Irish architecture focuses on themes of Catholic patronage and suburban development, obsolescence and mid-century buildings today, housing and everyday architecture in Ireland, 1940–80. Ellen’s collaborative research project, Evolving Legacies (with Philip Crowe, since 2021), focuses on the adaptive reuse of Catholic buildings in Ireland, most particularly convent buildings and post-1940 parish churches. Her work with artist Fiona Hallinan and the Department of Ultimology on the demolition of Finglas Church has found itself in a film, Making Dust (2023, director Fiona Hallinan). Ellen continues to publish extensively in international and local contexts including her housing monograph, Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition: Dublin is Building, 1930s–1970s (Routledge, 2018). Ellen co-edited the Yale University Press/Royal Irish Academy series Architecture 1600–2000, Volume IV of Art and Architecture of Ireland (Yale, RIA, 2014) and more recently (with Finola O’Kane), Making Belfield. Space and Place at UCD (UCD Press, 2020).

Since 2011, Ellen has led the Dublin City Council and Heritage Council of Ireland research project on the 20th-century architecture of Dublin City. To date the project has culminated in the book series; More Than Concrete Blocks: Dublin City’s 20th-Century Buildings and their Stories; Volume 1, 1900–1940 (FCP, 2016) and Volume 2, 1940–1972 (FCP, 2019), as well as architectural tours and talks. She was consulting curator at No. 14 Henrietta Street, tenement house and museum for Dublin City Council (DCC), and consulting curator of UCD’s jubilee celebration of its 1960s campus. In 2019–20, Ellen was guest editor on RTE Radio One DAVIS NOW radio lecture series on ‘Making Home’ (producer/director, Clíodhna Ní Anluain). In 2017, she was awarded Honorary Membership of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) for her services to Irish architecture.

Heeyun Hwa studied ceramics (B.F.A.) and recently completed an M.F.A. in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. She crafts works with tangible materials derived from conceptual ideas. Her sculpture, research, and installation intertwine with her narratives in a larger context of propaganda, ideology, and social structure. She is especially interested in monuments and symbolic objects (gestures), which portend a spatial discourse for understanding real events. After moving to Germany from South Korea, her work increasingly focused on public interventions and installation, considering monuments and their effects on the public. Her practice explores peace and sociopolitical landscapes, including how political ‘materials’ can be delivered outside of a political context.

Nina Höchtl explores the practice of fiction-making as a political process in art, literature, politics, history, and popular culture, with an emphasis on feminist, queer, post- and de(s)colon/ial/izing theories and practices. This interest is closely intertwined with questions of linguistic, cultural and socio-political processes of transformation and translation, her role as an artist within them and the privileges she may lack or have as a result of gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, education and profession. Together with Julia Wieger she founded the Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps in 2012. Since 2013 she has been part of INVASORIX, a queer/cuir-feminist working group in Mexico City who is interested in songs, video clips, publications and tarot readings as activist and didactic practices. Höchtl is adjunct researcher for the Department of Ultimology as part of a working group established to undertake critical research into Styrian traditions.

Julia Wieger works in art and architecture. Her work is concerned with queer feminist productions of space, archive politics, and history writing, as well as collective approaches to research, knowledge production, and design. She taught/worked/researched at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the IZK at TU Graz. From 2014-16 she was part of the transdisciplinary research project “Spaces of Commoning” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. From 2012-17 she was a member of the board of VBKÖ – an artist run queer feminist art space in Vienna. Together with Nina Höchtl, she founded the working group Secretariat for Ghosts Archival Politics and Gaps in 2012. Wieger is adjunct researcher for the Department of Ultimology as part of a working group established to undertake critical research into Styrian traditions.

Methodologies

Embodiment
Ultimology makes tangible practices, processes, tools and other examples of things that are extinct or endangered. The Department does not attempt to conserve or memorialize, instead producing responses that are living, in the form of new artistic work and commissions, publications and live events.

Negative Space
Ultimology offers the possibility of unearthing discarded practices through examining new ideas. Particularly within the Humanities and Social Sciences, theories and concepts are constantly revisited and re-drawn for new contexts. Ultimology employs a methodology of Negative Space to interrogate what obsolescent concepts may exist in the shadows of contemporary terminology.

Ultimology as a Service (UaaS)
Ultimology can be applied to particular subjects, situations, or processes as a kind of service that allows users to critically reflect on their own practice or discipline. Thinking through Ultimology provides an accessible framework through which to have an in-depth discussion about any field or topic. The question ‘what is Ultimological in your field’ enables the opening up of a complex set of subjects and ideas.

Performativity
Ultimology works performatively, constituting meaning through the embodiment of certain acts or practices. The Department sees performativity as the potential of language, actions (symbolic or otherwise) and speech not just to communicate but to create realities.

Digging
Digging refers to the methodology of performatively embedding oneself in a specific context as a means of reification. Ultimology itself exists through a number of strategic undertakings. Digging also works as a methodology through which to uncover information – searching for answers, and turning up questions.