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

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

 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

Commissioned by Centrale Fies as part of Live Works 2023.
Supported by Mondriaan Fonds Project Grant.

Video Documentation: Roberta Segata

Performance Stillls: Alessandro Sala and Andrea Nicotra

Video Installation.  Circle A 2024 departs from a heavily edited conversation between five strangers in an art bookshop. Their discussion circulates around the term “Anarchy,” including its abstraction and how the word functions in both an imaginary and a real way. It is cut alongside footage from the Las Fallas festival, Valencia, a five-day celebration of fire and pyrotechnics as well as interjections from the late author, social theorist and orator Murray Bookchin, who coined the term ‘Lifestyle Anarchism’. Threaded throughout the film are hundreds of newspaper clippings from an open archive that are sent to the Ryan by his father. The soundtrack of drums, pops and explosions fall in and out of syncopation, providing driving rhythm and moments of rupture. Circle A inserts Anarchy as an aspirational conceit both on micro and macro level into the language of the everyday spectator. If Anarchy is affirmed as a response to order, the film puts full emphasis on the word ‘response’. In other words, the work is a thought experiment on how to begin to undo a system. 

 
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.

Supported by Mondriaan Fonds Project Grant.