Building societies: architecture in Irish artists’ film
Selected by Gavin Murphy
Film Screening
Date: Tuesday 01 Oct, 2024
Time: 6pm – 8:30pm
Location: Pálás Cinema, 15 Merchants Rd Lower, Galway
Building societies presents the film work of four Irish artists Anne Maree Barry, Fiona Hallinan, Eva George Richardson McCrea, and Dennis McNulty. The films engage with architecture as subject through a variety of formal and narrative approaches, yet all concern the lived experience of buildings, and explore the forces that drive the development of our built environment, be they colonial powers, progressive modernism, the church, or speculative capitalism.
Dennis McNulty's Carbon Dating juxtaposes the margin drawings from American urban planner and author Kevin Lynch's What Time is This Place with an interview with an academic who used to work at the University of East Anglia, a Brutalist campus in Norwich, UK.
Anne Maree Barry's Otium cum Dignitate ~ Leisure with Dignity combines psychogeographic walking tours of the 'Monto' area in Dublin to create a film that establishes a dialogue between locality, history, and architecture, to present a complex portrait of female empowerment.
In Eva George Richardson McCrea's Rope, three men sit around a table in the decaying corpse of a building as they engage in small talk about holidays and hobbies, have a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rope, and discuss various aspects of property development.
Fiona Hallinan's Making Dust is a portrait of the demolition of Ireland's second largest Catholic Church, the Church of the Annunciation in Finglas West, Dublin. Informed by Ultimology, a practice of looking closely at endings, it invites its audience to think about the life cycles of buildings and materials, what we value, and issues of sustainability in architecture.
Building societies was originally screened at Composite, Melbourne to coincide with exhibition The necessity of ruins (Films 2012—2023) by artist Gavin Murphy, with the support of The Arts Council and Culture Ireland, and presented in collaboration with aemi and Pallas Projects.
Screening Program:
Dennis McNulty, Carbon Dating (2011), 05:35
Anne Maree Barry, Otium cum Dignitate ~ Leisure with Dignity (2017), 23:29
Eva Richardson McCrea, Rope (2022), 14:26
Fiona Hallinan, Making Dust (2023), 45:00
The programme will be followed by a discussion with artist filmmakers, Fiona Hallinan and architectural historian Ellen Rowley. Followed by Anne Maree Barry with Alice Butler from aemi.
Event curated by Gavin Murphy, co-director of Pallas Projects/Studios.
Screening as part of the Architecture at the Edge Festival 2024.