Seamus Harahan, Valley of Jehosephat / Version - In Your Mind. Video still. Courtesy of the artist
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
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Harahan's work uses video footage of the urban environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature.
Seamus Harahan (born Belfast, 1968, lives in Belfast) uses his video camera - a relatively accessible and moderately affordable technology - to take hand-held, seemingly amateur footage, the contents of this footage locating Harahan through found activity occurring around him. The main subject is the urban environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature. The light is often unfiltered and the image over-exposed, implying a mode of filmmaking that prioritises recording before thought, the absent-minded gaze.
Music is a vital element in all of Harahan's works, with songs used as soundtracks or informing the composition, title or duration of individual pieces. The artist takes songs from an eclectic range of sources, including reggae and hip hop as well as traditional English and Irish music. The recording style can be equally telling, from scratchy track-intros (Picking Up Change in the King Fu Theatre, 2004) to a John Peel introduction to a live session track (Free as a Bird, 2006). These seemingly disparate musical sources are laid over Harahan's urban footage, often coming with references to war and conflict, including lyrics intending to motivate or comfort soldiers and freedom fighters. The marriage of such lyrics to footage of Belfast, but particularly to images that focus on the minutiae of found activity, strike a balance between a sense of political conflict and an intuitive response to individual human concerns.
In Clonemen (2004), a track by an American rap group accompanies footage of Northern Ireland's hinterlands, over which the British flag constantly reappears, a journey that detours along the M1 to Belfast. Avoiding dogmatic rhetorical devices, the artist manages to suggest not the eye of surveillance, but instead the viewpoint of a fascinated bystander - one whose environment is in a constant state of unravelling (a position echoed in the artist's choice of music). Harahan's work can be interpreted as an open and sophisticated exploration of the shortcomings of social and political representation in general, rather than a lament or protest concerning Northern Ireland in particular.
At the ICA Seamus Harahan is presenting a two-screen video installation entitled Valley of Jehosephat / Version - In Your Mind (2007). In this work the same footage is projected alternately on two adjoining walls, the two loops accompanied by different songs. One is a roots reggae track by Max Romeo from the late seventies - referring to a biblical valley of judgment. The other is Bryan Ferry's In Your Mind (1977), which suggests a philosophical quest for personal resolution. Both songs accompany the same footage of the Bloody Sunday Commemoration in Derry, and Harahan's camera captures marchers, uniformed bandsmen, bystanders, commemorative banners, political murals and graffiti - as well as other cameras recording the event. The alternating soundtracks destabilise our reading of the work, which becomes almost meditative in quality.
Isobel Harbison
Nought to Sixty in pictures: Seamus Harahan
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.