Installation Room
For the duration of the hotel, a former bedroom was used as a space for showing art works. A number of artists were asked to respond to the context of this temporary gallery space and to site an appropriate piece of work.
Saturday 31st March – Sunday 1st April
Finola Jones
Steam, (2007) features the artist's on-going explorations of the interlacing patterns of video monitor screens and overlaid sound. The sublime visual beauty of the freezing river and glowing back-lit billowing smoke stacks is heart-wrenchingly underscored by an equally sublime – but half broken by age - rendition of Bellini's: La Sonnambula - Act II, ironically recorded in the sultry heat of Naples some seventy years ago. The only visible signs of life, in the entire scenario are birds – literally freezing their butts off (comically) in what remains semi-liquid, and one in flight, braving the air temperature at altitude. These dots in the landscape provide the only markers of scale. Scattered around the space are further re-iterational images of belching chimineys. The viewer remains uncertain as to the status and meaning of these ambigious images, they have their own beauty, but are they contributing to the global warming of the planet, or are they indeed themselves innocent steam victims of the extreme cold.
Monday 2nd April – Tuesday 3rd April
Mark Garry
Title: "Nothing is as lonely as the sound of lying"
Taking the form of an installation with variable dimensions.
Media: a branch, pink thread, pins and contact.
A delicate installation that combines a number of materials to quietly deal with concepts of trust.
Wednesday 4th April – Thursday 5th April
Pauline Cummins
Title: None of it matters
5 minute looped DVD
Friday 6th April – Saturday 7th April
Stephen Gunning
Transmitter, Berlin.
DVD, 4 mins, 2004.
A film shot during a period spent living and working in Berlin. The abandoned tower block where the film was made had a previous life in the GDR, as an administrative center for social services. The film documents the movements of plastic sheets, which I suspended from the windows on the top floor of the tower building. The lightness of the plastic sheeting means that its movements, generated by the wind are considerably slowed down. The day the film was shot, I set up a pirate radio station to broadcast a soundtrack that I recorded in the stairwell, which features an aural multiplex of rhythms and acoustic noises of the building. These sounds are mixed through a computer and broadcast from an FM transmitter at the top of the building.
Sunday 8th April – Monday 9th April
Cecilia Moore
Wandering through the abandoned flats and belongings of the former tenants of Thomas Clarke Tower sourcing material for the furniture workshops, I was struck by the personal mementos left behind, perhaps with the prospect of many new beginning.
This installation is my response to the past 3 months in Thomas Clarke Tower.
Tuesday 10th April– Wednesday 11th April
Glen Loughran
‘Bingo Politics’
1. Re-constructed bingo blower: Birdcage, fan, table, nails.
2. Bingo balls: Table tennis balls, election portrait stickers.
3. Lotto tickets: Altered prints.
‘If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of a lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ - Kojin Karatani
Thursday 12th April – Friday 13th April
Ciaran Walsh
Orgone Prototype I (Wood, copper piping and fixtures, plastic tubing)
Walsh's work investigates the relationship of individuals to the supernatural through the construction of material objects that make claims to have influence outside of the realm of the physical. For Hotel Ballymun, he will temporarily install a version of Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Cloudbuster, as a manifestation of an earlier utopian progamme of thinking now held in disrepute.
photo by Ciaran Walsh
Saturday 14th April – Sunday 15th April
Sarah Browne / Garreth Kennedy
Episode 306: Dallas, Belfast
9 minute audio loop and text printout
“The future is entertainment, and entertainment becomes the future”
Using a portakabin film set in the Titanic Quarter, Belfast, Kennedy and Browne reenacted a fragment of a script from the hit 1980’s TV show Dallas. Three distinct casts selected by open audition from across the city each brought a different dynamic to this script. This process is enacted against the epic, post-industrial backdrop of the soon-to-be-regenerated Titanic Quarter.
The dialogue used in the original Dallas episode from 1987 uncannily prefigures the more recent jargon of globalisation, touching on issues of de-nationalised industry and foreign investment. The intention is to use this historical fiction as a starting point to reflect on contemporary issues of prosperity, development and choice in the context of Belfast’s ongoing regeneration.
For the Installation Room at Hotel Ballymun, the audio from the piece has been separated from the visuals of the chosen actors and the Belfast context. At once global and parochial, the piece is stripped back to its starting point (albeit coloured with a Belfast accent), and the script played out against the spectacular views of Dublin city from Clarke Tower.
Commissioned through Space Shuttle, initiated by Paragon Studios/ PS2 Belfast, and funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through Lottery Funding and Belfast City Council through Celebrate Belfast 2006. Premiere in Belfast, April 2007.www.spaceshuttle.org.uk
Wednesday 18th April – Thursday 19th April
David (Dobz) O Brien
"Untitled" (after Hemmingway)
"an Awareness of yourself comes from a certain amount of activity and you can't get it from just thinkin about yourself"
-Bruce Naumann-
Hemmingway's The Old Man and The Sea was one of the first books I ever read. There is no deliberate reference to that book, but I believe that it is close to the spirit of Hemmingway himself. I prefer to let the viewer approach this work himself or herself and not to be directed too explicitly. The video takes on an extended character with repeated viewings. Initially, only an occurence over an extended period of time is presented but eventually the action takes on weight with charaters involved in a narrative without definite conclusion.
Friday 20th April – Saturday 21st April
Allanna O kelly
Video work
Title: "A' Beathu"
Duration: 18 mins
Sunday 22nd April – Wednesday 25th April
Owen Boss / Declan Hurley / Alan Higgins
Tumbledowntown
In 2005 the artist Owen Boss and Writer and director, Louise Lowe worked in collaboration with fifteen young people from Roundabout Youth Theatre to create a site-specific, multimedia performance. The fifty minute show was performed three times a night, over seven nights, in an empty flat on Shangan Road in September, 2005.
This work has now been relocated and re-imagined for Hotel Ballymun by the artists Owen Boss, Declan Hurley and Alan Higgins. The work combines installation, found objects and multimedia elements which explore the environment beneath the Hotel itself.
Thursday 26th April – Friday 27th April
Eilis McDonald
"Cloud" (100% polyester hollowfibre pillows, lights, audio loop)
In responce to Hotel Ballymun's proximity to the troposphere, "Cloud" is a large synthetic cloud and sound installation lit with UV and coloured lights. Viewers are invited to sit or lie in the polyester cloud and contemplate their place in the universe.