Welcome Chiara!

We’re very happy too introduce the newest member of the GTG team, Chiara Matteucci! Joining us for three months on the excellent Erasmus scheme for third-level students, Chiara has been in Belfast for a few weeks now, getting to know the city. She is a graduate of DAMS (the famous degree course founded by Umberto Eco) and holds a Master’s in Contemporary Art from the University of Bologna. On her first visit to us here in the GTG, she attended the launch of the Dissolving Histories exhibition, and has written this wonderful review of the show:

Dissolving Histories: An Unreliable Presence is the new exhibition of the Golden Thread Gallery which opened on Saturday 15th February. It was my third day in Belfast when I came to the opening and, believe or not, it was raining! I’d never seen the gallery before that day and my first impression was that the place was warm (probably because I was still wet from the rain), friendly and huge. The two wide corridors with soft lights and the way the artworks have been displayed created a suggestive atmosphere that capture the attention and immerse the spectator in undefined time/space.

The aim of the exhibition is to reflect about the notion of History itself, and the final result is a cohesive space within which different realities and thoughts take place. The four artists involved investigate the concept of History with different media, trying to give their own definition of the notion, inevitably related to their specific backgrounds.

Greeting you at the entrance of the exhibition is the video Dissolving beyond the worm moon by Bassam Al Sabah. The war that has afflicted all the ages is shown through a juvenile eye, like a Japanese Anime series, broadcast in Arab world since the 80s. This surreal work, constantly playing between reality and fantasy, naturally coexists with the ancestral sculpture made by Stuart Calvin, which reflects on the contrary on the eternal necessity of the human being to believe in something transcendent, capable of resolving problems above human’s powers. The way to invoke this unreliable presence is the upside-down sculpture Calvin created that seems, by the way, an archaeological find.

Even the artworks of Liliane Puthod look like some archaeological elements but from a different era: all of them allude to another presence of our contemporary society, capitalism. In her works the notion of History becomes real, tangible and near our age. These artworks indeed reflect society itself in a conceptual way: using industrial materials (e.g. Cool Death) and thinking about the act of consumption of products in our everyday lives.

The desire of collecting goods (in this case memories) is present also in Michael Hanna’s video, which at a first sight could be described as an obsessive and quite random collection of frame videos. Actually, this work reflects about History throughout; a focus on the concept of Utopia suggested moreover by the title chosen: Indoor sunlight.

This rain of images (the reference to Italo Calvino is a must!) is the last artwork of Dissolving Histories: An Unreliable Presence at the Golden Thread Gallery until the 25th of April.”