Lily Dean: Joy land (2.50)
Joy Land is a two-part art piece consisting of a life size wax sculpture/installation with a short film.
Based on traditional Punch and Judy shows exploring themes of political satire, toxic masculinity, and humour in the grotesque.
LILY DEAN is a Central Saint Martin’s Master’s Graduate Living and Working in London. She is a sculptor and filmmaker, focussing on the “gritty-glossy”, the self-coined term which is “camped up, stylised social-realism”. She explores the surreal, grotesque, ethereal and dreamlike in her work.
Shir Handelsman: Recitative (4.57)
An opera singer stands on a lifted platform, singing a Martyr’s wish for redemption. A counterpoint between the human voice and mechanical sounds of machinery moving up and down. The music, taken from one of J.S Bach’s cantatas, is the Recitative Movement which describes the ascension of Christ and expresses the desire to become one with god.
Shir Handelsman: Miracles on the Mountain (6.45)
“Miracles of the Mountain” is a spiritual and religious healing event, held annually in Texas, USA. Following his isolated and estranged stay at a residency program in Norway, the artist uses the voice of Billy Burke, an American Pentecostal healing evangelist and host of this event, in order to observe the village’s desolate, deserted and mountainous landscapes.
Shir Handelsman (1989) lives and works in Tel Aviv and graduated his BFA studies at the Department of Multidisciplinary Art of Shenkar College in 2018
Alexander Isaenko: <Hello world/> (8.30)
The current instability of the climate system impacts ice cores, rises global sea level, causing a danger for human life. At the same time only data code of intelligent machines remains constant in the modern geography.
Alexander Isaenko was born in 1976 in Izmail, USSR. Ukrainian artist who works with various media, including photography, video, text. Lives and works in Odessa, Ukraine.
Deirdre Mulrooney: Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity (7.11)
Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter), emulates Lucia’s magical dance as captured by photographer Berenice Abbott in her iconic 1928 image of the promising young dancer in transformative silver fish costume, inspired by a little-known link with WB Yeats.
Deirdre Mulrooney is a writer, filmmaker, radio documentary maker and dance historian. Films include Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity, Dance Emergency, True North, and 1943 – A Dance Odyssey. Books include Irish Moves, and The Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch (her PhD). She is currently a UCD Creative Fellow.
Behnaz Fahari: Can the Subaltern speak? (1.18)
In her seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” feminist theorist, Gayatri Spivak, asks whether it might be possible for the colonized – the subaltern – to have a voice in the face of colonial oppression. How might we reframe this same question in the context of contemporary digital culture? How could we find a way for the subaltern to speak that would also undermine the power of the oppressor?
This project is inspired by the intriguing historical masks worn by the Bandari women from southern Iran. Legend has it that these masks were developed during Portuguese colonial rule, as a way of protecting the wearer from the gaze of slave masters looking for pretty women. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, they can be seen as a means of protecting women from patriarchal colonial oppression.
In this project two masks begin to develop their own language to communicate with each other, blinking their eyelashes in rapid succession, using AI generated Morse code. The project draws upon a FaceBook experiment where – unnervingly – two AI bots began to develop their own language. It also draws upon an incident when an American soldier used his eyes to blink the word “TORTURE” using Morse Code during his captivity in Vietnam, and stories of women using code to report domestic abuse during the COVID19 lockdown. Here the ‘wink’ of the sexual predator is subverted into a language to protect women from the advances of a predator. This project involves AI, interactive design, and critical thinking.