Building societies—architecture in Irish artists’ film

Anne Maree Barry, Fiona Hallinan, Eva George Richardson McCrea, and Dennis McNulty

To coincide with the exhibition The necessity of ruins (Films 2012—2023), artist Gavin Murphy has selected film works by four Irish artists for a special screening and artists’ talk presented in collaboration with aemi and Pallas Projects.
 
Building societies presents – for the first time in Australia – the film work of Anne Maree Barry, Fiona Hallinan, Eva George Richardson McCrea, and Dennis McNulty. The films engage with architecture as subject through a variety of formal and narrative approaches, yet all concern the lived experience of buildings, and explore the forces that drive the development of our built environment, be they colonial powers, progressive modernism, the church, or speculative capitalism.
 

Event

Dennis McNulty's Carbon Dating juxtaposes the margin drawings from American urban planner and author Kevin Lynch's What Time is This Place with an interview with an academic who used to work at the University of East Anglia, a Brutalist campus in Norwich, UK.
 
Anne Maree Barry's Otium cum Dignitate ~ Leisure with Dignity combines psychogeographic walking tours of the 'Monto' area in Dublin to create a film that establishes a dialogue between locality, history, and architecture, to present a complex portrait of female empowerment.

In Eva George Richardson McCrea's Rope, three men sit around a table in the decaying corpse of a building as they engage in small talk about holidays and hobbies, have a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rope, and discuss various aspects of property development.
 
Fiona Hallinan's Making Dust is a portrait of the demolition of Ireland's second largest Catholic Church, the Church of the Annunciation in Finglas West, Dublin. Informed by Ultimology, a practice of looking closely at endings, it invites its audience to think about the life cycles of buildings and materials, what we value, and issues of sustainability in architecture.

Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and curator, and is joint artistic director of Pallas Projects/Studios. The necessity of ruins (Films 2012—2023) runs 27 March – 20 April 2024

Building societies is presented by Composite in cooperation with aemi (Artists’ Experimental & Moving Image) and Pallas Projects, Dublin, and is supported through funding from Culture Ireland and The Arts Council of Ireland