Programme

Selected by artist Paul Rooney
(Northern Art Prize winner 2008)

Memory Awake is a collection of seven short films by contemporary artists which speculate on ideas of social memory. The artists use widely differing methods in engaging with historical remembrance, but their works all share a poetic or subjective approach.

Many artists are currently making short films rather than producing paintings or sculptures. Their films do not always tell stories or involve actors. They are making moving images with verbal soundtracks. These artists are experimenting with the medium and producing a different type of experience for the viewer than that presented in most films made for the cinema or TV. The films are impressionistic evocations, rather than narrative entertainments.

Mario Pfeifer's work has a particular focus on place as a receptacle of the past. Inspired by a book of photographs of industrial buildings from the 1970s, it uses a single dolly shot through one of the buildings, along with voice-over comments by its current occupants, to consider the nature of photography as record.
Lisa Byrne compiles interviews with taxi drivers who reveal, through their direct accounts of violence, the historical scars of the Northern Irish experience.
Allan Hughes’ video, featuring an actress attempting to lip-sync a reconstructed vocal performance of a transcript from Jane Fonda’s Radio Hanoi broadcasts, foregrounds the difficulties involved in reconstructing any historical narrative.

The programme is shown in two parts

Part I
3-16 November
Nelson Bourrec-Carter The Fog Thickens
Rebecca Davies Eric
Allan Hughes Point of Audition

Part II
17 November - 1 December
Valentina Ferrandes The Oyster Effect
Lisa Byrne Taxi III
Mario Pfeifer Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974
Holly Antrum Movement in a Minor Familiar

Images:
Valentina Ferrandes (road); Holly Antrum (violin); Nelson Bourrec Carter (ear-ring)

Dates: 3rd November 2011 – 1st December 2011
Opening Times: Tuesday-Saturday 11am-5pm.
Thursday until 8.30pm
Tickets: Free.
Each part lasts about 35 minutes.
Visitors can enter at any time.