Seamus Harahan & Miriam de Búrca "AWingBigCell"

Spencer Brownstone Gallery

poster for Seamus Harahan & Miriam de Búrca "AWingBigCell"

This event has ended.

"AWingBigCell" is a new multi-screen video installation by Irish artists Seamus Harahan and Miriam de Búrca, based upon footage recorded at the site of the notorious H-Blocks at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Location of mass internment without trial in the 1970's, and the 1981 Hunger Strikes, the prison was finally closed in 2001 as the Good Friday Agreement's prisoner release program, and ongoing ceasefires by the paramilitary groups at the center of the country's 30 year conflict, rendered it part of history.

As the current fate of the prison remains embroiled in political arguments for demolition or preservation as monument to conflict resolution, Harahan and de Búrca have gained access to the site and recorded film and video footage that is edited into a three-part, three-channel projection. We see imagery taken from the side and rear windows of a van as it passes through the prison compound, its split-screen format reflecting the respective footage of the two artists. The film then moves inside the prison buildings, through the cells, hospital, and surveillance rooms, much of it having the ghostly appearance of being suddenly abandoned in mid-use. Finally, the footage explodes into a fragmentary series of clips, orchestrated over the three projections, where any purported objectivity to the artists' camerawork finally dissolves in a phenomenological head-spin of details, glimpses, and half-caught impressions.

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from June 17, 2008 to July 19, 2008

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