2020-09-17—2020-09-17
Bassam Al-Sabah, Anne Maree Barry, Laura Fitzgerald, Ann Maria Healy, 1iing Heaney, Ella Bertilsson & Ulla Juske
Curated by Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen
Pallas Projects presents ‘New Irish Video’, a screening of new experimental film and video works by artists from or based in Ireland. The selection of work spans the heterogeneous approaches to the moving image that artists from Ireland are adopting today, from experimental narrative work to CGI environments, envoking the personal, historical, socio-political and the self-reflexive.
The presentation of artists’ film at HDLU is part of ‘Intentional Communities’ an ongoing exchange project between several European artist-run spaces, that has included to date Pallas Projects (Dublin), HDLU (Zagreb), NYLO/The Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Triangle France (Marseille), EKKM (Tallinn), and Onomatopee (Eindhoven).
The Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU), Zagreb, was established in 1868 and consists of visual artists of all generations, with the aim to support and encourage contemporary visual expression. The exhibition program ranges from the experimental to large national and international projects. The basic aims of the Association are: to support and encourage contemporary visual expression, to improve and protect the freedom of visual expression, to organise exhibitions, and to participate in the making of the laws and rules regulating visual arts production and the social rights of the artists.
HDLU annually organises or collaborates in the organisation of approximately 40 exhibitions in its four diverse galleries. HDLU is sited in the famous Meštrović Pavilion, located on a beautiful square in central Zagreb. It consists of three exhibition spaces: Ring Gallery, Barrel Gallery, and Extended Media (PM) Gallery. Karas Gallery, the forth of HDLU’s exhibition spaces, is located on Praska Street by Ban Jelacic Square, Zagreb’s main square.
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Bassam Al-Sabah
Fenced within the silent cold walls (2018)
HD film, CGI, 12:29
The CGI film featuring a recreation of my former home in Iraq, which my family cannot return to. As the film moves through the house, digital images begin to escape from the forgotten TV and computer screens and materialize into living forms. These forces surge out in utter destruction, invading the domestic realm without restraint. We then hear a narration in Arabic from my grandmother where she describes the burning of sentimental objects in the home before fleeing, and digital fabrications of these objects appear before disintegrating.
Anne Maree Barry
Otium cum Dignitate ~ Leisure with Dignity (2017)
HD Video with Sound 23:29
Anne Maree Barry's Otium cum Dignitate ~ Leisure with Dignity (2017) combines her own psychogeographic walking tours of the 'Monto' area in Dublin to create a film that reflects historical events, whilst at the same time presenting a complex portrait of female empowerment. Four characters: Madam May Oblong, Kitty D, Countess Aldborough and The Custom House – a neoclassical 18th century building on Dublin’s river Liffey – establish a dialogue between locality, history, architecture and the independence of women in a specific time.
Laura Fitzgerald
Field Research Continued (2017)
HD video footage on a Moto G, 10:06
This collection of short videos is an ongoing series of works, where the artist constructs narratives on daily walks within her local area. An intensely slow version of Google maps, the artist follows different walking paths in order to spontaneously engage with triggered narratives, which may erupt via events such as: cows breaking out onto the road, sheep crossing her path and passing by graveyards.
Looking at writers such as Lydia Davis, David Barthelme and Italo Calvino, the artist is deploying the small nothingness that exists between events and actions, to look at the notion of an art practice and the contemporary art world coexisting within the everyday.
Ann Maria Healy
When Dealers Are Shamans (2018)
Film with sound, 14:05
When Dealers Are Shamans is a video installation which arose out of collecting discarded medication trays whilst walking around Dublin city. The majority of these trays are the remnants of a drug called Zopiclone, a prescribed hypnotic agent or sleeping pill which is often sold illegally. When Dealers Are Shamans contemplates our desire to occupy a dream state through modalities such as medication. Amidst the North Inner City, the dealers of Zopiclone are shamans giving access points to places where unconscious thought may have become forbidden or repressed. Creating this work Healy partakes in a shamanic journey, to find her own spirit animal, but instead finds a partly lost soul in George the peacock.
Healy examines the vibrations of George’s feathers, which quiver to the speed of 25 'rattles’ per second. The same frequency of moving image. George is not rattling to attract a mate. There are no other Peacocks within his vicinity. It is possible to suggest that he is vibrating in order to increase his own conscious desire to be. Healy sees parallels between George’s hypnotic movements and those akin to the dream states induced by Zopiclone.
When Dealers Are Shamans was created with the support of Cow House Studios, Wexford and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin.
1iing Heaney
Firmament (2019)
CGI film, 12:35
Firmament considers digital space as an extension of the geological world. It looks at the process of replication, simulation and pixelation that natural objects face when translated into a digital space. Emerging technologies such as hyperreal CGI, Google Earth and 3D object scanning have created virtual replicas, causing the nuance, context, and experience of these forms to be altered. Rocks and trees gathered from the Wicklow Mountains and Beara Peninsula meet for the first time as 3D scans in a fabricated environment. They share space and interact with simulated objects. Natural forms warp during conversion, digital mirrors reflect simulated rocks, and pixels emerge from chasms. A digitised wilderness is formed.
Ella Bertilsson & Ulla Juske
Untitled (2018)
HD video, 7:10
Included in a trilogy of exhibitions:
11.9 km Northwest of the City Centre (2018)
Carrier of Memories (2018)
Beyond the Sandy Suburbs (2018)
“There are palm trees everywhere in [this country].”
Ella Bertilsson and Ulla Juske will present a glimpse into Rainy Days in Blanch, a family sitcom recorded in the iconic Blanchardstown Centre (Dublin) in the weeks before its official opening in 1996. Original video recordings and a replica studio set will be showcased in Hobusepea Galerii Tallinn in an exhibition titled ‘11.9km Northwest of the City Centre’. Starring an all-female cast, Rainy Days in Blanch portrays a multigenerational family and their family friend. Each character shares directly with the audience an account of a memory, dream or nightmare. These previously unaired stories speak about house, home, family, and migration, as well as fear, paranoia, displacement and territory.
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Biographies:
Bassam Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance. Themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology are explored through reference to Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to today.
Many of these TV programmes featured imagery of revolution, war and exile, gaining a heightened political meaning within his practice. As successive generations of Arabs have grown up with these anime series, Bassam’s work deals with a feeling of collective nostalgia, an amalgamation of narratives in which fact and fiction, historical trauma and queer possibility intersect.
Bassam Al-Sabah lives and works in Belfast and Dublin. He completed a BA in Visual Art Practice from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2016, and was awarded the RHA Graduate Studio Award (2016-2017) and the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Graduate Residency Award (2018-2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Dissolving Beyond The Worm Moon, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2019); Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset, The LAB, Dublin (2018); and The dust carried me into the watchful summer, Eight Gallery, Dublin (2017). Recent group exhibitions include A Fiction Close To Reality, Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, Pallas Periodical Review, Pallas Projects, Dublin; Futures, Series 3, Episode 2, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Syntonic State, Tulca 18, Galway. Bassamalsabah.com
Anne Maree Barry makes site specific film works, text and photography. Her work addresses connections between memory and loss, geography and sociology. From subcultures to cities, from working with actors and non actors, her concern is to find a common thread that links the past and the present. Barry’s eclectic work is also influenced by popular culture and various music genres.
Her film work has been selected and screened at international film festivals and cultural institutions, such as the Irish Film Institute, The Dublin International Film Festival, Darklight Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, Indie Cork, Les Rencontres Internationales, Tampere Art Museum, Dublin City Gallery’s The Hugh Lane and TULCA ’15.
In 2017, Anne Maree presented ‘Leisure with Dignity’ at The LAB which established a dialogue between locality, history and the independence of women at a specific time. Residences which assisted Barry in creating site specific film works are the Fire Station Artists Studios, HIAP Helsinki International Residency Programme and the Liaison of Independent Film Makers of Toronto. Upcoming screenings and projects include The Women’s Museum, Aarhus and VISUAL/Theatre, Carlow. Annemareebarry.com
Laura Fitzgerald is an artist working in video, drawing, sculpture and writing. She is currently on a 3 year residency award at the Fire Station Artists' Studios in Dublin. Recent and upcoming shows include 'HEADCASE' at the RHA Ashford Gallery (February 2020), and the 39th EVA International (September 2020), and 'NO PITY!' at Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna (March 2021).
Fitzgerald was shortlisted for the Golden Fleece Award in 2020 and awarded the Wexford Emergent Award in 2019. She will present a new body of work at Wexford Art Centre in 2022. She will exhibit her video piece Portrait of a Stone, in the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery in November. Fitzgerald is working towards a solo show at the Crawford Gallery in June 2021. laurafitzgeraldfrominch.com
Ann Maria Healy’s work expresses itself through video, sculptural and textual form. Her practice is concerned with reoccurrence, the power of history and narratives embedded within the human psyche. She seeks to co-opt the embodied meaning of material in order to unpack and subvert it. She is drawn to narrative that is connected to place and object, often acting in an absurd manner, the work seeks to employ mysticism as a tool to reconsider our present moment.
Selected exhibitions include ‘Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2019-20. ‘When Dealers Are Shamans’, Pallas Projects, 2018. ‘Futures: Series 3 Episode 1’, Royal Hibernian Academy, 2017. Previous residencies include Cow House Studios, Wexford, 2015 and The Banff Centre, Canada, 2014. Healy is an MFA graduate of The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, 2014 and a recipient of the Irish Arts Council, Visual Artist Bursary Award, 2019. annmariahealy.net
1iing Heaney is a visual artist experimenting with 3D modeling and animation from Bray, Co. Wicklow. She received her BA in Fine Art Media & Visual Culture from NCAD in 2015. With a focus on the material nature of digital life, her work explores geological timescales in parallel to human technological intervention. 1iing uses print, drawing, sculpture, simulations and 3D scans to consider the future of nature. 1iing has taken part in both group and solo exhibitions. Selected shows include solo exhibitions, Terrestrial/Satellite in 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway (2018) & World Geometry in MART, Dublin (2016). Group shows include Geological Cake, Burren College of Art Gallery, Co. Clare (2017), HIVE, Steambox Gallery, Dublin 8 (2017), Dancing Girl Emoji, Delta Sorority, Online (2016) and The stretch is better than the case, Upominki, Rotterdam (2015). 1iing has received support from the Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award, Burren College of Art (2016) & Wicklow County Arts Office (2016 & 2019). She also facilitates workshops using the 3D software Blender in Block-T, Dublin. 1iing.com
Ella Bertilsson (SWE/IRE) and Ulla Juske (EST/IRE) moved, separately, to Dublin during the years of the Celtic Tiger, and ultimately met in 2013, during their time as MFA students in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Since then the artist-duo (SWE/IRE & EST/IRE) have been using conversation as the generative ground for their multidisciplinary work; sourcing inspiration from films, music, news items, oral histories and interviews; and producing work that uses storytelling, symbolism, staging and sound to produce a mood of absurdity, disquiet and unresolved suspense. This atmosphere is fuelled by the tension in the telling of the narratives, which can indicate something unsaid, be it by verbal feint, communicative noise, distraction or omission. Thematically, the work matches questions of domesticity with questions of memory and personal history, moving to remind the viewer of the associated essences, realities, and dissonances. blockt.ie/ellaandulla
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