Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce Fortnightly Features Presents, a rolling exhibition of photographic and video works from Seamus Harahan, Anita Delaney, Pádraig Spillane, Nicholas Keogh, Samuel Laurence Cunnane and Ryan Moffett.

Seamus Harahan
21st March – 2nd April
RECEPTION, THURSDAY, 20 MARCH, 6 – 8pm

Anita Delaney / Pádraig Spillane
4th April – 15th April
RECEPTION, THURSDAY, 3 APRIL, 6 – 8pm

Nicholas Keogh
18th April – 29th April
RECEPTION, THURSDAY, 17 APRIL, 6 – 8pm

Samuel Laurence Cunnane / Ryan Moffett
2nd May – 13th May
RECEPTION, THURSDAY, 1 MAY, 6 – 8pm

The programme opens with Belfast-based Seamus Harahan, an artist who, working primarily with video and sound, aims to maintain an open and intuitive process to the cultural, social and experiential fragments that inform his films. Harahan is interested in film-making that is about looking first, recording before thought, the visual consequence of an absent minded gaze in response to the world. The work assumes the form of experimental documentary, films of found activity, referencing the point where inner and outer realities intersect.

Central to Harahan’s exhibition is the often evolving and ever captivating ‘Cold Open’. The current version of ‘Cold Open’ presents six sequences from a larger series, filmed over a year. Notable are the points of view characteristic of Harahan's style: the camera points either upwards or focuses its gaze downward. When his lens is pointing up, it is usually at a distant feature of the sky or nature, with a sense of freedom from the anxiety that accompanies his CCTV-like scrutiny of youngsters, often bored and idle in slightly menacing gatherings. The opening sequence of this short film features a recording of a well known Irish playwright and his wife. The older couple discuss the husband's drinking habits and public image, against an early morning scene of rain-soaked branches. The mood is easy-going. Later, a group of young teen boys are observed play-acting violence towards each other, or perhaps not play-acting. The music cuts between traditional Gaelic, rock and drum and bass. In the final sequence, a group is gathered around a pram. Once again Harahan, though not unsympathetic to his anonymous subjects, places them in the viewer's mind as possible outcasts from their own society and definitely alienated from the viewer's one.

Seamus Harahan was born in 1968 and received his fine art degrees from the University of Ulster. His solo exhibitions include Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Project Arts, Dublin; MuKHA, Antwerp; ICA, London; Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Third Space Gallery, Belfast. In 2005, Harahan represented North Ireland at the Venice Biennale and in 2009 he received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.