Catalogue > At random

The Belfast Exposed photography archive contains over half a million images produced by community groups, amateur and professional photographers over the past 30 years. It represents a valuable historical document recording political, cultural and social change in Northern Ireland over these 3 decades. Since 2001 Belfast Exposed have been commissioning artists to produce work using this archive as raw material, previous artists include Duncan Campbell and Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin. Three Short Films about Learning is a latest project to be commissioned in this series. The work juxtaposes a selection of images taken from the archive with excerpts from a lecture series outlining theories of social and environmental psychology. The lecture series is Introduction to Psychology by Paul Bloom, made available by Yale University through the free online learning platform Academic Earth. The archive imagery includes marches, masked gunmen at funerals, and paramilitary punishments. The rhythm of the speech varies throughout from carefully measured statements to free flowing thoughts, and the images are timed to mirror this rhythm.

Michael Hanna completed his MFA at the University of Ulster in 2012 and recently undertook residencies at the Millennium Court Arts Centre and Digital Art Studios, Belfast. He graduated with BA (Hons) in Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. Hanna was shortlisted for the Converse / Dazed Emerging Artist Award with the Whitechapel Gallery, London. He has been involved in exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Interplanetary Revolutions at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast and Instances of Agreement at the Kao Yuan Arts Centre in Taiwan. Most recently Hanna took part in Multiplicity - an exhibition curated by NURTUREart and shown across four galleries in New York. It was an international survey of artworks sharing an interest in the politics and poetic potential of contemporary urban environments.