No Longer Peripheral

SCREENING 1

aemi is an Arts Council-funded initiative that supports and exhibits moving image works by artists and experimental filmmakers. A key objective is to develop audiences for artists’ moving image in Ireland through regular, curated programmes of both Irish and international work. aemi also operates as a resource organisation by offering key supports to artists in the production, development and exhibition of moving image work. aemi seeks to develop a strategic approach for the national and international dissemination of moving image works by Irish and Ireland-based artists and works in partnership with a diverse range of organisations, festivals and individuals. aemi was founded in Dublin by Alice Butler & Daniel Fitzpatrick in 2016.

For ‘No Longer Peripheral’ aemi is presenting the Irish works featured in the two programmes touring to venues around Ireland and the UK in 2019 in partnership with access>CINEMA. These programmes - ‘Delirious Rhythm, 1936-2017: Films selected by Vivienne Dick’ and ‘To train the whole body as a tongue’ curated and including work by Sarah Browne - have travelled to Belfast and Glasgow for screenings with LUX Scotland and AMINI. Drawn from both programmes, the works screening for ‘No Longer Peripheral’ are Saoirse Wall’s Sticky Encounter (2016), Sarah Browne’s Report to an Academy (2016), Moira Tierney’s American dreams #3: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (2002) and Vivienne Dick’s Two Little Pigeons (1990). aemi is delighted to welcome Glasgow-based Irish artist Saoirse Wall to participate in the artist- led panel on ‘Contemporary moving image cultures in Ireland, Northern Ireland & Scotland’.

SCREENING 2

LUX Scotland is a non-profit agency dedicated to supporting, developing and promoting artists’ moving image practices in Scotland. Working at the intersection of the contemporary visual arts and film sectors, core activities include public exhibition and touring projects, learning and professional development for artists and arts professionals, distribution, commissioning and production support, research and sector advocacy. From our offices based in Glasgow, we work with a growing network of national and international partners, including museums, contemporary art organisations, film festivals and educational institutions, to deliver our programme. One of our current priorities is the establishment of a new distribution collection of artists’ moving image based in Scotland. Established in 2014, LUX Scotland is a part of LUX and receives support from Creative Scotland.

For ‘No Longer Peripheral’ LUX Scotland is presenting the 2018/19 Margaret Tait Award commission by Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry (2019), which seeks to challenge conditions of racialised abjection and find new methods for refusal. A chief linkage in this refusal is the sonic cosmologies found in Kamau Brathwaite’s research on tidalectics and Christina Sharpe’s work on ‘the weather’. Sharpe positions ‘the weather’ as a lens to understand the inescapable conditions within the afterlife of slavery, while Brathwaite’s theories of tidalectics expose the performativity of sound, revealing memories of transoceanic life. between a whisper and a cry speaks of memory, trauma, tensions between the land, the sea and the weather, which reveal the precarity and privilege of geography.

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AMINI is an artist-led initiative for the promotion and critical discussion of artists’ moving image in Northern Ireland. The organisation grew out of a desire to create a discursive culture around the medium of Artists’ Moving Image within Northern Ireland, which would nurture and support artists working in the medium through exhibition and discussion. AMINI was set up in 2015, by Jacqueline Holt and Michael Hanna.

For ‘No Longer Peripheral’, AMINI is presenting a new moving image work from artist Emily McFarland. Curraghinalt (2019) is a video fragment in a series bearing witness to the ecology of a particular landscape. Recorded continuously by McFarland since 2018, it traces ongoing conversations in the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone. The single-channel video, which utilizes documentary forms, dislocated sound, and voices and images that are woven together, explores embodied memory and moments of testimony from individual members of a small rural community of anti-mining protesters based at the Greencastle Peoples Office - a collection of caravans high in the mountains that overlook a valley of farmland. This dialogue, which shifts between shared experiences and personal accounts, converges with wider questions of solidarity, political representation, sovereignty, the circulation of capital, ideologies of capitalism and particular legacies of historical colonialism. It documents a present-day condition that lies at the intersection of the Global and the Local.

This video is part of new work commissioned by EVA International 2020.