The second day of ‘Dissolutions’ will begin with ‘Telltale Signs & Murmurations’, a programme of films from the North of Ireland curated by Ruairí McCann.
The entity known as Northern Ireland measures around 90 by 90 miles, as the crow flies and when drawn in two dimensions. But when lived and imagined, its shape is a vast and unstable web of pocket dimensions, allegiances and possibilities. ‘Telltale Signs & Murmurations’ is a programme of films from the North that reflects this prismatic view, entangling and contesting notions of public and private space, ownership and ways of perception. It’s a map inscribed with landmarks by Simon Aeppli, Aoife Desmond, Seamus Harahan, Cáit & Éiméar McClay, Katie McFadden and Rabie Mustapha, and the striations of old ghosts, injustices, birds and music.
This programme will be followed by a conversation with featured artists Aoife Desmond, Katie McFadden and Rabie Mustapha led by programme curator Ruairí McCann.
Film Information
Seamus Harahan, tessies, 2001, 16 mins
Aoife Desmond, A Catalyst Sky, 2008, 3 mins
Simon Aeppli, Eden, 2004, 15 mins
Katie McFadden, The Barrel, 2023, 10 mins
Rabie Mustapha, The Cities I Live In, 2022, 10 mins
Éiméar & Cáit McClay, a border of flat stones, 2023, 9 mins
Running time: 64mins
Seamus Harahan, tessies, 2001, 16mins
A film shot in a Tessie Dorman’s shebeen in east Tyrone, a place of exile for thinkers and escapists since before living memory. Since redeveloped, legally licenced, now closed down.
Seamus Harahan grew up in London and East Tyrone and lives and works in Belfast. Harahan is an ex-director of Catalyst Arts Belfast, was an artist in residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2015), received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2009) and represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). He was the winner of the Film London Jarman Award 2015.
Aoife Desmond, A Catalyst Sky, 2008, 3mins
This single roll of Super 8 invites you to experience an unconventional garden as artist Aoife Desmond directs your gaze to the fleeting movements of urban birds amongst the rooftops. Catch glimpses of Belfast city’s changing skyline as a seagull circles to protect its nest. This handheld film is shot from the rear windows, balcony and rooftop of a dilapidated building which at the time was shared by two of the city’s major artist collectives, Catalyst Arts and Queen Street Studios.
This short film edited in camera by Aoife Desmond was made for “Walled Garden’ her multi-layered site-specific work within the exhibition ‘The Garden Show’ at the Catalyst Arts gallery. Catalyst Arts was formed by artists in 1993 in response to what was seen as a cultural vacuum in the city. It continues to be Belfast’s primary artist-led organisation run by a relay of dedicated volunteers. Catalyst Arts is always a gallery, but has also been a 24 hour cinema, a recording studio, a publishing house, a skip, a radio station, a jumble sale, a wrestling ring, a sauna, a distillery, an agnostic chapel, a banquet hall, a darts team, a leisure centre, a night club and a shop.
Aoife Desmond (1974, Ireland) is a Filmmaker, Visual Artist and Performer. In her work she prioritises embodied knowledge and explores materiality, site and human/non-human relationships. She works in response to environmental crisis and rupture with an emphasis on restorative practices. Her films / works have been shown in festivals such as Marienbad International Film Festival Czech Republic, Cork International Film Festival, aCinema Milwaukee, Experiments in Cinema Albuquerque, Cornwall Film Festival, Wildscreen Galway, Tulca Festival Galway, EVA Limerick, ESB Dublin Fringe Festival and galleries / museums such as ICA London, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Temple Bar Galleries Dublin, Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, Crawford Art Gallery Cork, Fragil Gallery Madrid, Galerie Fin Avril, Paris. Whitespace, Bangkok.
Simon Aeppli, Eden, 2004, 15 mins
Eden, in Northern Ireland, shares few of the qualities of its namesake. It exists around the perimeter fence of one of Ireland’s largest power stations. This portrait of the artist’s hometown forms the basis of a video that explores a run down half forgotten place. Focusing on Eden’s residents, the work reveals a place filled with eccentricity, humour and beauty.
Simon Aeppli was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He creates subjective documentary work that explores marginal and overlooked histories from his homeland’s troubled past. His films have been funded by Film London and Arts Council England, and have been screened at festivals and galleries throughout Britain and abroad. In 2019, Simon received an AHRC technē scholarship for part-time PhD study at the University of Brighton for a project called Operation Bogeyman: The Folk Horror Landscape of 1970s Northern Ireland.
Katie McFadden, The Barrel, 2023, 10 mins
In this work of auto fiction an unnamed narrator transverses her memory of a local area. In doing so she unveils the lasting impressions of the past on the landscape, her journey culminating in a particularly horrifying local myth.
Katie McFadden is a filmmaker and artist from Donegal, Ireland. In 2019 she graduated from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology with a BA Hons in Visual Art, and was long listed for the RDS Prize. In 2020 she received the New Irish Creatives grant to produce her film ‘The Flickering Light’ which screened at the Irish Embassy in Berlin. She has exhibited and screened works internationally at the Station to Station film festival, Zollamt Galerie, Galerie HBK Saar, Roheline Saal Tallinn, IMMA, Docs Ireland, most recently her short film ‘The Barrel’ premiered at Belfast Film Festival. She has recently completed a masters in film studies at Queen’s University Belfast and resides between Donegal and Belfast. Her work is often concerned with the idea of landscape as a receptacle for human ideas, allowing the work to reflect on the influence of the past on our cultural memory and identity. Through the medium of film she creates dialogue between the seen and unseen, transforming urban, rural and digital environments into sites for introspection.
Rabie Mustapha, The Cities I Live In, 2022, 10 mins
Newly settled in Belfast, a filmmaker tells his infant twins about his life journey. They see him leaving one violent place for another, longing for places that he will never see again, and hoping they will not carry his curse. Troubled cities travel as fragmented memories in this short film about a man searching for stillness.
Rabie Mustapha is a Belfast based Palestinian filmmaker. He works on creative documentaries that tackle living in troubled places where individual paths are heavily impacted by outside forces. His latest work is the personal short documentary “The Cities I Live In” that is centred around his experience of leaving Beirut in 2020 to become a father in Belfast. In 2018, he directed the short doc The Actor which follows a young Palestinian man trying to leave the ghetto where he lives to follow his dream of becoming a professional actor. He is currently working on a feature documentary that tackles the history of Zionism from an Irish perspective, and a short documentary on a multi-ethnic school in West Belfast
Éiméar & Cáit McClay, a border of flat stones, 2023, Ireland, 9 minutes
A reflection on the Irish Potato Famine forms the basis of this film by artist duo Cáit and Éiméar McClay. During the Famine, the British government instituted laissez-faire economic policies in Ireland. Framed as beneficial, they facilitated the mass exportation of domestic food products and circumscribed the provision of aid. Through analysing the destruction caused by these doctrinaire political decisions, the McClays trouble the notion of famines as natural rather than man-made disasters and provoke audiences to consider the violences and traumas associated with settler colonialism.
Cáit McClay and Éiméar McClay are Irish-born artists currently based in London. Their work analyses the British Imperial project in Ireland, the period following the formation of the Irish Free State, and the cultural, political and economic effects of colonisation. This involves a focus on social institutions—Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes, etc.—run by the Catholic church and the Irish state across the 20th century. Their work has been selected for many esteemed exhibitions and awards.
———————————————————-
This event is screening as part of aemi’s DISSOLUTIONS Festival at The Complex Dublin. Tickets are available for individual days Friday or Saturday (15 euro per day) or for the full weekend (25 euro).
DISSOLUTIONS is proudly supported by Screen Ireland and The Arts Council.
Ruairí McCann is a writer, programmer, illustrator and musician, born and living in Belfast but raised in County Sligo. He’s co-editor of the film journal and virtual cinematheque Ultra Dogme and a contributing editor to photogénie. His writing can be found in MUBI Notebook, Documentary Magazine, Film Hub NI, aemi, Defector, Sight & Sound, Screen Slate, Senses of Cinema, among other publications. He has previously curated programs of radical Irish cinema for Maysles Documentary Center and Spectacle Theater.
