22/05/25—07/06/25
Reuben Brown—€URODANC€
Opening:
6–8pm Thursday 19th June
Exhibition runs:
Friday 20th June – Saturday 5th July
Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Reuben Brown—€URODANC€, the fourth exhibition of our 2025 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.
€URODANC€ explores the shifting terrain of club-spaces of the past, present and imagined future, where the dance floor becomes both sanctuary and spectacle, resistance and release. Through moments of belonging, betrayal, break-up, revenge, recovery and renewal, it delves into how the sensory experience of clubbing, its sounds, sparkling lights and pulsating rhythms, mirrors the emotional contours of queer love, longing and loss.
There is a quiet intimacy in these encounters, a subtle yet profound connection between dancers, where the club transforms into a site where emotion lingers and connection, though fleeting, feels boundless. At the heart of this is Eurodance: a genre defined by its infectious melodies, ecstatic vocals, throbbing baseline and anthem-like choruses. Its emotional excess embodies the fleeting joyand lingering ache of queer romance, offering a sonic language for the ecstasies and heartbreaks that shimmer and dissolve beneath the strobe.
€URODANC€ debuts In the dusk we are shadows made of light, but we dance in the echoes of the summer, an experiential film that immerses the viewer in a saturated sensory landscape of light, sound and movement. In the dusk... is structured around a love poem composed entirely from fragmented Eurodance lyrics, romantic declarations, promises of forever, and fleeting goodbyes, cut up and reassembled into a tender, multilingual monologue. Echoing the pan-European appeal of the genre, the film draws on the genre’s linguistic and emotional excess, where English, Dutch, Spain, Romanian and more converge into a shared language of desire and euphoria. These splinters unfold through sweeping lasers and shifting sonic textures, evoking the disorientating intensity of club encounters, and the emotional afterglow they leave behind, drawing the viewer into a suspended state where memory, fantasy and rhythm drift and merge. It is both devotional and dissolving, less afilm than an encounter.
The exhibition also features a series of sculptural interjections, sound pieces and video works that contribute to a fractured, multi-sensory narrative, one that reflects both the impermanence of queer histories and the collective affect of the dance floor. These interjections operate materially and atmospherically, using airflow, light, vibration and surface to blur the boundaries between the viewer and the space they inhabit. Quiet mechanical gestures, subtle soundscapes and sudden confrontations with colour or heat, suspended between play and discomfort, nostalgia andestrangement, they distil the heightened states of attention, vulnerability and euphoria that definesqueer nightlife. A ritualistic undercurrent runs through these gestures, calling back to ancient sonic practices and the Neolithic origins of dance music, where sound and space were intimately entwined in early communal rituals. They also speculate on the future of clubbing, particularly in Ireland, where the evolution of nightlife culture reflects wider social transformations. Together these works conjure a space where desire becomes ambient and memory is held not in chronology but in sensation.
Accompanying the exhibition is a series of pamphlets created as part of Reuben’s ongoing research project club [construction]. These pamphlets are created using unorthodox DIY publishing techniques, and function as process-driven art objects which critically examine and address the gaps in queer historical archives, engaging with this absence by offering an intimate, alternative form of documentation. The pamphlets encourage reflection on often overlooked ephemera such as flyers, zines, stories, tickets, speculation etc, providing a space for deeper engagement with these marginalised narratives.
The series includes Lavender and Glittered for the Occasion: A Series of Journal Entries, Images and Speculative Writings, a pamphlet that covers the reader in glitter if it’s mishandled and SWEAT-SLICKED, HEAVY AIR, CHEMICAL MEMORY, printed on paper infused with amyl nitrite and male pheromones, each capturing distinct emotional registers that resonate with broader themes of love, loss and fleeting connections. The series also features a collection of printed transcriptions from interviews and conversations conducted during this research, and a proposed method to archive assorted club-ephemera. Presented alongside these pamphlets, €URODANC€ also features a table of archival materials and sources that have informed the ongoing research, as well as notebooks kept by the artist over the course of the project. €URODANC€ invites visitors to delve deeper into the contexts and histories that shape the work, engaging with queer narratives that often slip between the cracks of mainstream documentation.
Biography:
Reuben Brown [he/him] (b.2001) is an emerging visual artist, club-creative and curator based in Belfast, N.Ireland, specialising in interactive and experiential installation, filmography and performance art. His artistic practice is transdisciplinary in nature and reflects thematically on; the theatrics of rehearsed masculinity and the pageantry of practiced maleness, the ephemerality and potential of space, and fragile histories of queer nightlife. He is a member and studio-holder at Flax Art Studios; Belfast. He is also the founder and creative-director of “club [construction]” - a visual arts collective and research-led project exploring queer (and queer adjacent) club-spaces of the past, present and the imagined future.
He has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally including several notable solo-exhibitions and curatorial projects in Belfast, Dublin and London. In March 2025, he presented his debut international solo-exhibition “White Knuckle Forever” at Culterim Gallery in Berlin; Germany. His artistic practice has been supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council.
Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.