Catalyst Arts is an artist-led organisation based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Since its inception by a multidisciplinary collective of the same moniker, a relentless current of co-directors, artists, members, friends, family, and community of contributors have helped build a reputation as a space which embraces experimentation and artistic risk, through its gallery programme, public projects, commissions, the pioneering FIX Live Art Biennale – one of Europe's longest running live art and performance biennials – and various accompanying printed projects. An early exchange with Transmission in Glasgow led to the organisation becoming constituted in 1994, gaining charitable status and allowing it to pursue funding for its programme. This was a seminal step, integrally changing the means by which Catalyst could continue to provide resources and opportunities to artists and members. Following on from its statement of commitment to remain a valve for creative output in Belfast, a relentless relay of overlapping committees continued to get involved on a rolling two-year basis, managing every aspect of the organisation as a collective to deliver the programming.

To allude to the folklore of its murky beginnings in the early 90s through to present day, as it always has a mutable, mythical idea, too slippery to define, passed on by way of storytelling, repeating its mistakes and propelled by

...ART’S FEAR OF ART

(artifobia, artefobia) claustrophobia (closure, enclosure)

FEAR OF CLOSING

FEAR OF CLOSING THE MOUTH….[1]

Catalyst’s ever-changing committee lent itself to a high-paced and multi-faceted programming output, and it quickly developed a community excited by their activations of the city: live events, gigs, screenings, dinners, readings and performances, offering a way private and public spaces could be accessed and altered through artistic use. Unsurprisingly, these affiliations as an aperture to hybridised underground culture were cemented through artist-led exchanges (Transmission in Belfast, 1993), public interventions (Exchange Resource, 1995), music (club curious), experimental film (Cinilingus, 2000; The Max Factory, 2000), punk publications (C-Zine, 2004), time capsules (Art Rebels, 1996-2010), solo shows for emerging new talents (David Shrigley, 1996; David Sherry, 2006), freewheeling tours (On the buses, 1997), residency opportunities (OUTPOST 2015; Artist-at-Sea, 2015), and its most enduring legacy, international live art and performance biennial FIX (1994 - 2015). 

“FIX…. I am thinking of why it seemed like...in the first place… Art and Research Exchange...Alastair MacLennan….you couldn’t walk down a corridor….without tripping over some performance piece...a lot of the first directors….Siofra Campbell...opening up the possibilities ….an experimental platform….. this was going to remedy the lack of...FIX….we used a red cross, first-aid style...I can see that the female sitting at the desk…..Jennifer Dempsey….female...around the stones...Niamh O’Malley...images of the lit figure behind the polythene curtain..Theo was smoking and sawing the leg off his chair ….Just like Catalyst itself….Club Curious...dreamt-up…..[2]

Despite their inherent flexibility and resilience, all artist-led spaces are acutely aware of the precarious situation they operate under on an annual or even daily basis. None more so than Catalyst, where cautionary tales abound and we’ve made a pet of the wolf at the door. While the Catalyst archive remains the proof of its efforts, its memory is short and it will only be defined by what it continues to do. The defining feature of the artist-led space is its commitment to improving the conditions for art, artists and audiences when frustrated by a lack of opportunity. This refusal of complacency, inertia and apathy is at the root of every Catalyst project, no more evident than in the spirit of FIX – now in its 21st year of celebrating live art and performance –seeming to define all that has been great, experimental and exciting about why it all seemed like a good idea in the first place.[3]

[1] Artur Tajber, ‘DESOLAcTION’, Performance, Exchange Resource, exhibition catalogue, 15th November 1995, (Catalyst Arts) Belfast

[2] Dougal McKenzie, (Catalyst Arts Co-director 1994-1996) excerpts from email correspondence with Catalyst Arts, ’ Memories of FIX’ (August 2015) Belfast

[3]Dougal McKenzie, (Catalyst Arts Co-director 1994-1996) excerpts from email correspondence with Catalyst Arts, ’ Memories of FIX’ (August 2015) Belfast