FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

Allan Hughes, video still from Enemy Blue, 2012

Belfast Exposed is pleased to present a major new work by Belfast based artist, Allan Hughes. Enemy Blue is a three screen, synchronised video installation that explores the role of video in relation to propaganda and the remediation of politicised historical narratives. Hughes is interested in the inherent propagandist character of video; the ways in which it causes a transformation of narrative and is itself subject to transformation by narrative.

Enemy Blue conflates material from a number of sources, namely, Edward Hunter’s ‘Analyses of Jane Fonda Activities in North Vietnam’; a Committee report to the United States House of representatives on ‘Misleading Information from the Battlefield: the Tillman and Lynch episodes’ and Gerhard Richter’s published notes on political ideology. The work is developed through the production of a series of purposefully graded video segments entitled Enemy Blue, Chromatic Aberration, Geisterbilder and Blue On Blue.

The exhibition includes a second work, The Voice Of Their Guns, a single channel video with sound presented on a monitor in the front space of the gallery. The Voice Of Their Guns appropriates a recorded communiqué from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The SLA were a radical, left-wing revolutionary organisation based in California in the early 1970s. Their most notorious action was the kidnapping of wealthy heiress, Patricia Hearst (granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper publishing magnate). The featured communiqué forms part of the narrative of that terrorist action, being one of many recorded messages sent to the media to highlight the organisation’s ideologies and to communicate their demands.

The Voice Of Their Guns explores connections between early experimental artists’ film and video and the current wave of 'experimental documentary'. The work employs historical audio records to activate contemporary or appropriated imagery. Through grading and other post-production techniques, a false ‘historical account’ is produced which invites the viewer to closely examine the relationship between image and sound presented through video and the medium’s susceptibility to manipulation and propagandist uses.

The exhibition also includes a printed leaflet, designed by Tonic Design, which features a number of textual references at play in the work.

Artist’s Biography

Allan Hughes is an artist based in Belfast. The last year has seen exhibitions of his work at the Belltable Art Centre, Limerick, where he had a solo exhibition and as a part of Temple Bar Gallery’s “Lights, Camera, Action!”. His work was included in the 2011 Tulca Arts Festival and Rencontres Internationales at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, Pompidou Centre in Paris & the Filmoteca Espanol in Madrid. In 2010 he was awarded the ACNI Major artist award and in 2009 he was the recipient of a six-month Artist’s Residency Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally with work shown in the Mediations Biennale in Poznan Poland, UNOACTU in Dresden, the Ormeau Baths Gallery Belfast and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels amongst others. In 2010 he completed a PhD, "Screening The Voice: synchronisation, authority & objet petit a", at the University of Ulster under Professors Willie Doherty and Kerstin Mey.

Enemy Blue is supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council and Department for Social Development

Exhibition Talks

The artist will give a talk at 6.30pm on 30^th August.

Lunchtime Talks:  There will be an introduction to the exhibition every Wednesday during the exhibition at 1pm

Read exhibition essay by Matt Packer on Enemy Blue here