Visual Arts Programme
The Concourse Installation 2005
The Projection Room
20 October - 13 December 2005
The Projection Room, a designated room in County Hall, for screening of video artworks, DVD and film works. This space was constructed adjacent to the Concourse Space to enable an expansion of The Arts Office’s Visual Arts programme. This series of video works will be screened to coincide with the
2006 Concourse Installation Series. The programme includes a selection of relatively recently made video works by seven Irish and International artists. The Projection Room is curated by Clíodhna Shaffrey
SUKY BEST & RORY HAMILTON (UK)
20 October – 8 November
Train Hold Up 2005 / DVD, Duration 1.29 mins.
Suky Best and Rory Hamilton have been collaborating on works exploring cowboy films. They have made a series of hand-drawn animated films based on generic scenes within these narratives. Themes of heroism, the lone stranger putting things right; the anti-hero, cowboys and their leading ladies, and the saloon fight, where only the protagonist and/or his companion (be they horse, tracker
or love interest) are transcribed onto the finished image. All extraneous detail is removed. When a cowboy ties up a horse and walks into a building, the horse and rider are clearly depicted; the building only exists when the rider walks behind a column or railing: the cowboy defines the world around him. Sections where the hero is out of shot are left blank.
ANDREA FRASER (USA) 20 October – 8 November
Little Frank and His Carp 2001 / DVD, Duration 6 mins.
Shot with hidden cameras in the Guggenheim Bilbao, Little Frank and his Carp is based on an unauthorised intervention in the museum designed by Frank Gehry. Inspired by the text of the audio guide as means of packaging corporatised museums’ architecture, their collections and exhibitions. Andrea Fraser is best known for her performance critiques of art institutions, art
publications, art sponsorship, and cultural transfer - think subversive museum docent, She is one of the more prominent artists to raise institutional criticism to the level of art itself.
MARK WALLINGER (UK) 9 November – 16 November
Threshold to the Kingdom 2000 / DVD, Duration 11.10 mins.
Threshold to the Kingdom is set at the arrivals gate at London City Airport. In negotiating the more or less authoritarian or coercive apparatus of the state, which define and control one’s progress from‘air-side’ to ‘land-side’, one is perhaps reminded of a secular equivalent of the progression from confession to absolution. Eventually, all that separates us from the no man’s land and the official terra firma of the state is a pair of automatic doors. This film plays with the symbolism that signals a change in state. The aura of security, the self-consciousness this induces, and the little drama of the final gates opening are amplified and transformed by the soundtrack into an altered state or delivery into the Kingdom of Heaven itself.
ANU PENNANEN (Finland) 17 November – 25 December
Heavy Snowflakes 2003 DVD, / Duration 5.15 mins.
Heavy Snowflakes is filmed in Kirkonummi, a small town 30 Kilometers from Helsinki, when the first snow was falling. Pennanen filmed a portrait of her parents in a landscape, which created a space separating and connecting her with the camera and her subject. Only local cars drive on the road, which is isolated from the motorway by a thin slice of forest and field. You can hear the sounds of the highway and airplanes in the distance. The walking couple are accompanied by a Lutheran hymn, which describes a child’s belief in the existence of a higher authority.
AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN (Ireland) 28 Nov – 13 December
Immergence 2005 / DVD, Duration 14.03 mins.
“In my work I set out to interrupt the ‘believable’ space of the video image, displacing our perception of place and creating a dialogue between internal and external states. Ideas of Exile in its double form inform the work i.e. exile as a physical state of displacement and the work of art as exemplary exile - the image as a form of otherness or ‘being out of’. I see the gap between the real and illusory which video, by its nature, forces us to occupy, as a parallel to the ever-absent present occupied by the exile. It is this gap which I exploit in my video work, the slippage between ‘being in’ and ‘being out of’, where place and placelessness, internal and external, abstraction and representation merge.”
VIVIENNE GRIFFIN (Ireland) 28 Nov – 13 December
I can’t be here right now 2005 / DVD, Duration 2.00 mins.
Vivienne Griffin’s scaled video and slide projections take the form of temporary installations or publicly sited interventions. She is currently in residence in the National Sculpture Factory in Cork and researching for an MA programme in New York.
The Projection Room is kindly sponsored by Cloney Audio www.cloneyaudio.com 
