Sally O’Reilly will be talking about ambiguity, placing it in a historical ground of modernity and then considering its deployment in 20th century linguistics, literature and art, as well as its notable use in management strategy, political rhetoric and the constitution of hyperobjects.
Writer Sally O’Reilly publishes and distributes text in conventional and expanded forms, from art magazines to performance lectures to opera. Her diverse subject matter spans such abstractions as rhetoric and ambiguity, as well as more concrete phenomena such as noses, the history of technology and shopping receipts. This apparently erratic practice is a means to conduct a more thoroughgoing investigation into how knowledge is generated, circulated and expressed.
Besides contributing to several art magazines and numerous exhibition catalogues, she has written the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera House, 2015), a monograph on Mark Wallinger (Tate Publishing 2015) and The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2009). She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11), producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world (ICA, London, 2011), and co-editor of Implicasphere (2003–8), an interdisciplinary broadsheet.