Circle A. 2024
Video installation and performance

Circle A. 2024
Video Installation.
4K
5.1/6 Channel Surround Sound
Full Running Time - 29mins loop
Viewing copy on request
info@eoghanryan.ie

 Installation views. Against The Day @ Edith Russ Haus, 2023. Documentation: Tobias Hübel

Circle A. 2023
Performance
Concept: Eoghan Ryan
With Amina Szecsödy and Tomislav Feller
Drummer: Bernardo Armanni

Video Documentation: Roberta Segata

Performance Stillls: Alessandro Sala and Andrea Nicotra

Video Installation. Enclosed within an oversized circular black theatre curtain, the video installation Circle A places the viewer at the centre of a heavily edited conversation between five strangers, brought together by the artist for an afternoon inside an art bookshop. Their conversation reflects on the word Anarchy, and how the word is mediated through the imaginary and the real, the personal and the political. Cut alongside their conversation are interjections from the social theorist and orator Murray Bookchin, author of the 1995 book, ‘Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism’, as well hundreds of scanned newspaper clippings and footage from the Las Fallas festival, Valencia, a five-day celebration of fire and pyrotechnics. A soundtrack of drums, pops and explosions falls in and out of syncopation, providing driving rhythm and moments of rupture. If Anarchy is affirmed as a response to order, the film attempts to puts full emphasis on the word ‘response’. In other words, the work is a thought experiment on how to begin to undo a system.

Sibgle channel version distributed by li-ma
Comissioned by the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art
Supported by the Grants of the Stiftung Niedersachsen for Media Art 2024 at the Edith-Russ-Haus

 
Performance. If your constantly stuck in the same drama that never ends, it’s not even tragedy. It’s not a good piece of art, it’s just a bad situation!
Three performers wearing tap shoes, work within the constraints of the Circle A symbol sprayed to the floor. They are influenced by a live drummer and a deconstructed sound score, composed of evocative stems that come together and fall apart. The performers develop upon a tight set of actions.  These actions are accompanied by  lesser and greater degrees of agency, so how they interrelate in a system for a live audience becomes somewhat unpredictable. That’s why the performers need to experiment, for 45minutes, eliminating codification from all but one emergent, anticipatory level.

Commissioned by Centrale Fies as part of Live Works 2023.


Supported by Mondriaan Fonds Project Grant.