ARCHIVE: The Known and Unkown World - KCAT

The Known and Unknown World - KCAT was officially opened by curator Benjamin Stafford on Friday 1st May, 2026.

KCAT is a multi-disciplinary arts centre located in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, supporting inclusive arts practices, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2025.

KCAT’s work acts as an inspiration to question a hierarchical taxonomy of the world, and instead places subjects, objects, experiences, in relation to, but also juxtaposition to each other; mixing up and overlapping, influencing and speaking to each other, as in the everyday tumult of life and the world. The artists who are currently or historically part of the studios do what many of the best artists and artworks do; provoke us to see the world anew, or to imagine a new one. These worlds are not the creation of a single vision, but multiple interpretations of the familiar, the local, the prosaic, the fantastical.

The exhibition then, but also KCAT as an entity, could be understood as a modern-day Wunderkammer, not just of interesting objects, but as a view of the world in all its richness and strangeness. There, things are not easily categorised or separated from each other; common songbirds sit alongside five-legged cats, which sit alongside distant countries, rural landscapes, intimate portraits, and science-fiction worlds. They exist in the minds of some of the artists, but the ongoing success and resilience of KCAT shows that with work, dedication, and care, sometimes other worlds can become real.

The exhibition ran until Saturday 27th June, 2026.

Photography by Maks Bondarenko