contextgallery

The gallery will host a series of commissions over the coming year where the work will be in place for a minimum of six weeks and a maximum of three months. The lightboxes will be mounted directly outside the gallery, accessible to the public both during and outside of regular gallery hours.

SARA GREAVU

ALLAN HUGHES

BENJAMIN DE BURCA

For any additional information on the commission please contact the gallery at 028 71373538 or email info@contextgallery.co.uk

Sara Greavu lives and works in Derry. She works in a variety of media including video, sound, photography, and sculpture.  She has recently exhibited work in Belfast, Dublin and Washington D.C.

She is on the curating committee of Void Gallery and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Ulster in Belfast.

These works are based on my ongoing documentation of the Halloween carnival in Derry. I am particularly interested in the prevalence of ‘ethnic drag’ or racechanging costumes and in those that depict players in other highly charged binaries or situations of conflict (PSNI officers, IRA volunteers, minstrels, Guantanamo prisoners, KKK, soldiers, suicide bombers, Hamas, harem girls, American Indians, etc). I am interested in the possibility that the adoption of these costumes might constitute a performance of ‘surrogation’, or the filling of ‘cavities’ left by loss in this society as a result of protracted conflict. In these surrogations, alternative roles are adopted and alternative scenarios are played out. These may not be direct depictions of events, but rather relate to the sociopolitical context in the manner of a dream, with distortions, substitutions and discontinuities.

Allan Hughes is an artist based in Belfast and working out of Orchid Studios Recent exhibitions of work have included a solo show at The Golden Thread Gallery and work for the Process Room in IMMA as part of his residency programme. His works have also been shown at the Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; UNOACTU, Dresden; Novisibrisk State Art Museum, Russia, London Art Fair; La Sala Naranja Valencia; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels amongst others. Hughes is currently in the final stages of completing his PhD in Fine Art at the University of Ulster and has work in an upcoming exhibition at the K YU Art Centre in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Further information can be found at www.allanhughes.com

These images are from an ongoing series of photographs I have been making over the last three years. All the images are of car parks, at night, either closed or inaccessible and predominantly empty. The images explore an aspect of the super modern non-place and in the particulars of the chosen images here; the closed entrances to private parking spaces, documented in Dublin while on residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The car park is a site unlike any other in our contemporary architecture and is arguably the last vestigial success of the modernist architectural project: the living utopian project of form after function; a material order of, repetition, homogeneity and inclusive utilitarianism. Fitting that only the car park has survived the failure of this project, the way having been paved for more traditional, pastoral living experiments. For the car park is more than this. The car park offers a psychic connection to the desire for a communion; a meeting place for the sense of imminent possibility. The car park represents an excess of space an extension for the mechanics of modern living waiting in a state of incompletion. It is an afterthought in our design but one that we must not overlook. It is the way in to our architectural psyche, the covered, concealed and private passageways to our thinking, the orificial architecture that is both within and without.