Curated and Produced by Household
Multiple Locations in Belfast
1 – 3 November 2024
Developed through a new international public art commissioning programme, ‘Red Sky at Night’ took place in six unique locations around Belfast during the first weekend of November. The six new commissions were curated and delivered by Household – a collectively-led organisation supporting the production of high-quality art that connects people and place – and funded by Belfast City Council, the British Council, and the Mondriaan Fund, as part of the Belfast 2024 celebrations. The night-time festival saw artists from Palestine, Greece, Poland, Thailand, and Belfast create temporary installations, responding to the city and its sites in Riddel’s Warehouse, the Palm House, Carlisle Memorial Church, Bank of Ireland, 2 Royal Avenue, and the Waterworks Park.

In the Palm House, Bangkok-based artist Kanich Khajohnsri’s installation, POSSESSION, explores customs and rituals in Thailand and Northern Ireland around burial, death, and cyclical notions of renewal, transformation, and the land. Responding to the circular plan of the iron and glass construction, Khajohnsri has suspended a series of infrared photographs of hands and burial sites on translucent fabric in a ‘henge’ formation. Bird-like hooting and warbling sounds ring out among the exotic plants, emanating from speakers connected to open source theremins (coiled around branch and stone constructions) and triggered by approaching visitors. Revealing the invisible through infrared photography and theremins, both sensors of forces below the threshold of human perception, chimes with the notion of phi – namely, the ghosts or spirits in Thai folklore, said to be found in certain trees.
The current limbo-state of the iconic Bank of Ireland building (pending renovation into a new tourist attraction) is the inspiration for Polish artist Zuza Golińska’s intervention, Lament. The work is a one-off performance by members of St Anne’s Cathedral choir, led by choirmaster Jack Wilson, of a reimagined version of the 1993 Cranberries song, Linger, extended to 30 minutes. In an introduction to the work, Golińska invited visitors to consider how one can sing a love song to a building, and the context of the building’s present ‘lingering’ condition. Bathed in green light, the singers performed the new rendition in movements of sustained and overlayed tones, call and response, and punctuated by repeating phrases from the original song. Meanwhile, the porous nature of the building amplified the sounds generated from within and without.

Polish artistic duo, Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim, employ humour in their practice, and their Common Point Exercises focuses on sites of play around the city. Situated in the polychromatic vestibule of 2 Royal Avenue is one of their sculptural forms: a balance beam for children to play on. In the work, two steel beams (one straight, the other bent) are connected by a narrower and more challenging beam. The lines owe their shape to the map of the interface between the Shankill Road and the Falls Road, and the piece is flanked by rolls of drawings made by primary school children in both areas. Further metal constructions, seemingly abstract (all black vertical wavy lines and anthropomorphic eyes) are in fact based on bar chart data showing Troubles-related deaths before and after the Good Friday Agreement, thus continuing a playful approach to serious topics.
In creating her sound and textile-based response, The Sound We Longed For, in Riddel’s Warehouse, Palestinian artist Dina Mimi engaged with people who had experience of incarceration, focusing on how this impacts sensory experiences. A large reproduction in negative of a small relic-like portrait of a family member, worn close to the body in prison, forms a visual backdrop to her sonic piece that blends snippets of song, wind, the tapping of metal on metal, and children’s voices. In an accompanying performance, Mimi takes attendees on a kind of guided meditation, reflecting on everyday sounds. In the context of the ongoing atrocities in the artist’s own country, one considers the sounds we take for granted, which are denied by war: “The sounds of plates and cutlery […] children in the distance, playing on a swing […] the sound of someone calling you by your name.”
A sliver of light over the entrance to Carlisle Memorial Church, vertically bisecting the smoke of a fog machine, creates a portal into the vast space, occupied by Greek artist Leandros Ntolas’s Benign Land. Inside, more smoke billows, illuminated periodically by a revolving spotlight. A huge projection screen before the former altar shows a fictive nocturnal world of shimmering plants, lit from within by a hovering, at times blinding, light, accompanied by a wavering, scraping soundtrack of muffled vocals. A single Xbox controller on a black plinth allows users to navigate eerie, dreamlike scenes – photogrammetric recreations of sites like the Giant’s Ring dolmen, standing stones, dry docks, and indeed, the church itself, filled with swathes of tall swaying grass.

Finally, Belfast-based artist Aisling O’Beirn continues her research into light pollution with Suggestions for Stargazing, a series of neon, visual, and textual provocations and exhortations, which are dotted about the Waterworks Park. Over the course of a night-time tour, O’Beirn asks us to consider insidious issues like light trespass, sky glow, and garish street lighting, as well as the general effects of light pollution on humans, the habitats of nocturnal animals, pollinators and migrating birds, and what we can do via communal activism to fight for the right to the night sky. It is thrilling to be in the unlit park at night – and indeed, in all of the venues, not normally accessible during the hours of darkness.
Catching all six of these responses, which evolved over an intensive two-week group residency, makes for a rewarding weekend, during which themes of heightened perception, hidden presences, other worlds, and a certain degree of mischief, resonate with the time of year, with Samhain, and the thinning of the veil.
Jonathan Brennan is an artist based in Belfast.
jonathanbrennanart.com