NEWS
I am delighted to have been selected as the artist representing Northern Ireland on the Future Artist-Maker Labs, an exciting international programme of art-making, exhibition, and networking.
Future Artist-Maker Labs will include artist residencies in each of the FabLabs during which established international artists will create new pieces of work for display in a major touring European Future Artist-Maker Exhibition scheduled for late 2016 / early 2017.
MCAC is holding a symposium exploring the themes of the exhibition Exhuming the Archive. This event will examine the unstable materials relied upon in contemporary remembering, the bodies that they reconfigure, and how they come to matter. This half day symposium will include lunch followed by presentations from three speakers, Michael O'Rourke, Tina Kinsella, and Rachel O'Dwyer. Matt Packer (Director, CCA Derry~Londonderry) will lead discussion afterwards.
21 January 2016, 1-3.30 PM FREE. Places are limited, to book your free place contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org or call MCAC on 0044(0) 28 3839 4415.
More information about the symposium here
I will be giving an artist talk at MCAC about the concepts, materials and practices through which the artworks that make up the exhibition Exhuming the Archive emerged. On 16 January 2016, 2pm - 3pm
No booking is required but for more information e-mail geraldine@millenniumcourt.
My solo exhibition Exhuming the Archive opened at MCAC on 4 December. Thanks to all who braved the gales, there was a great turn-out. Here are some photos of the opening (with thanks to John Duncan).
"Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Exhuming the Archive’ a new solo exhibition by Belfast based artist Jiann Hughes. An ode to the digital memories we’d rather forget, this new body of work considers the earth as planetary memory storage, containing the haunting remains of dead new media. The installations that Hughes has created memorialise the unstable materials relied upon for today’s memory making. They are kinetic and living monuments to the invisible labours and persistent materials that support our remembering: to the stuff that resists decay, refuses to be forgotten, and refuses to let us forget. This exhibition follows recent work in which she exploited computer code to address the ubiquitous data mining processes of our biocapitalist sensor society. Through these new works Jiann continues to open up the black-boxes of digital technologies to reveal the structures, practices, and materials within our contemporary media ecologies. She strips away the rhetoric that claims a dematerialisation of digital archives to reconfigure the matter of our electronically-aided memories.
Drawing from the earth’s archive as the great bank of relics defying dissolution, Hughes imagines herself as part sculptor, part future archaeologist. She practices a geology of media; just as sculptors draw their material from the earth to study processes of changes and archaeologists may eventually unearth the residue of contemporary culture. Through this practice she explores how media history conflates with earth history: how materials get deterritorialised from their geological strata to be reterritorialised in machines before being returned to the earth marked obsolete. The exhibition toys with the temporal scales of digitality, jurassic times are re-membered while contemporary times expand across future temporalities. This folding of geological time onto itself is defined by the mineral deposits of our ancestors, the growing piles of networked digital devices that have been made to break, and the plastiglomerates and other new materials that are emerging. These new works suggest new relationships, responsibilities, and materialities, offering up potential future epochs now in the making.
The installations make use of accumulated excess, the materials residue from an over developed world. Using the processes of poaching and gleaning Jiann works with these remains to awaken ghosts of the past. Her approach is collaborative; the work is shaped by the material practices of many bodies, from human hoarders to copper cabling to earthworms. The work is executed with characteristic humour and uses methods of interference to gently but firmly expose slits of (im)possibility, otherwise obscured by accounts of technological progress or doom. It is a timely reflection on what comes to matter within the fantasy of the total archive."
As the grandaughter of a miller and a millie, working with David Littler on the Is She Blew? project has been such a treat. It was topped off with sounds, songs and stories of linen-making plus sound responsive video projections by myself + Paul Moore. http://www.ulsterfestival.com/david-littler.htmlwith Robert Martin, Paul Moore, Maurice Leyden, and Brendan Monaghan.
I'm absolutely stoked to have been chosen to receive a Northern Ireland Arts Council ACES award. I'm feeling very grateful for the recognition and excited to be this year's 2015 artist in resident at MCAC.
Is She Blew? A visually delicious exhibition of the sounds, songs and stories of linen.
Documentation of ...like a ball of wool. Belfast City Hall, Northern Ireland, 2014
Documentation of Scrambled Shadows at R-Space gallery, Lisburn, Northern Ireland, 2014
Sizzling babes can be seen at the Royal Ulster Academy of the Art's annual exhibition over the next few months.
Sizzling babes will be screened by Whitty Gordon as part of The Sky in a Room | Deptford X through Harts Lane Studios in New Cross Gate at 6:30pm on 27 September 2014.
Documentation of Feeling into. R-Space gallery, Lisburn, Northern Ireland. 2014
I am delighted to have been invited to partake in the upcoming show at R-Space gallery, entitled 'Lightness'. I will be showing a new work, an outdoor interactive projection in a one off event at the gallery on Culture Night on the 19th September at 7pm.
This exhibition features five artists from Northern Ireland responding to the theme of ‘Lightness’. The exhibition looks at the artists’ different approaches to the materials they choose to work with, the methods of production and process they use to make the work and the messages and meaning they wish to convey using those materials.
The exhibition features exquisite, delicate glass sculpture from Alison Lowry; ethereal uplifting photography from Damian Magee; playful and thought provoking sculpture made from everyday objects from Anne Marie Taggart and interactive multimedia installations from Paul Moore and me.
These little piggies are off to Hungary this weekend... My video work Sizzling Babes was selected to be shown as part of the Color Art Festival in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. The festival takes place on June 13th & 14th.
Other works being screened include:
APOTROPIA >>> K
FATIH BILGIN >>> HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO MIGRATE
ISABEL LAYTON >>> LITTLE BLACK DRESS
JEAN-MICHEL ROLLAND >>> SON ET LUMIERE
JOANNA TAM >>> REDUCTION STUDY (PING PONG)
LEI HAN >>> EPHEMERA SERIES I
LEYLA AKDOGAN >>> THE KING OF SILENCE
MITCH GOODWIN >>> MINERAL MACHINE MUSIC
PAUL O´ DONOGHUE >>> PRETTY IN PINK
RUSSOSKY >>> NO TITLE
SAITO MIKIO >>> VERY LONG DISTANCE
Visual Artists Ireland (VAI) and Digital Arts Studios (DAS) are partnering to offer a day long event focusing on digital arts practice. I will be among five other artists presenting on my practice in the 'Show and Tell' session. The event also features presentations from Barry Cullen and Robin Price, and an afternoon workshop with Barry Cullen on ‘Audacity’ a free and open source audio software application.
The event will take place at the Black Box (11am-2pm presentations) and DAS (3pm-5pm workshop), in Belfast on 5 June 2014.
The exhibition State of Play is opening this Thursday 5th June 6-9pm at Pollen Studios, featuring new work by Helen Lavery, Johanna Leech, Jacqueline Wylie, Andrew Molloy, Sean Campbell, Jiann Hughes.
I was delighted to have been invited to join the Translating Improvisation Research Group at Queen's University Belfast where researchers from many disciples are investigating how improvisational practices, discourses and pedagogies from the musical realm may be translated across disciplines.
Translating Improvisation project is lead by Dr. Sara Ramshaw and Dr. Paul Stapleton. It engages with improvisation as a social practice through an exploration of the possibility of translating improvisational practices, discourses and pedagogies from the musical realm to other disciplines in the humanities. One of the key tenets of this research is the belief in improvisation’s emancipatory promise. Instead of being purely spontaneous, improvisation self-consciously engages with tradition, enabling resistance to oppression and injustice and opening up possibilities for new ways of conceiving community, both locally and at the global level.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
This non-contact, bio-sensing work reveals the magic of a world where our vital signs are secretly measured. When a face is detected the participant’s pulse is read, heart rhythm amplified and manipulated video footage of them displayed. The work considers how exposing this rhythm of life, affects the subject, their heart, and their social interactions.
TICKER TAPED PARADE exposes the increasingly permeable boundaries of the body due to developments in biometric data mining. As an intervention it questions our bodily and social agency, the privacy of our data, and the purpose for which our data is being analysed juxtaposing this concerns with the allure of social connection.