Footsteps are heard on the stairs, but no one is seen descending. Glasses fall in the kitchen and smash over the floor as if they had jumped themselves. The word ‘fading’ is written on the walls in blood or red paint. The wails of the dead can be heard by the living, and the horrors of life are visible to those who no longer endure it. People once walked these halls. Unholy sounds ring out into the night.
Please join us from 2pm on Sunday 1st December for a Winter Gathering, marking the close of Martin O'Brien and zack mennell's exhibition Whistling as the Night Calls, holding space to reflect on queer community, kinship and memory. Martin and zack will have a conversation about their work and collaborative process and then there will be drinks and music, with donations collected in honour of charities working around HIV/AIDS.
About the Exhibition
Whistling as the Night Calls is an exhibition of collaborative photographic works by Martin O'Brien & zack mennell. Shot on 35mm Cinestill 800T film, the images document a series of performance actions which haunt the wind-swept skeletal remains of St Peter’s Seminary, a derelict brutalist college for priests in Cardross, Scotland.
For these new photographs, which extend from their performance making and documentary practices, the pair exhumed strange actions from O'Brien's body of work, situating them inside the concrete ruin, performing for ghosts and searching for more-than-human presences through mennell's photochemical process.
For many years, artists working in time-based media expressed anxieties about photographic documentation, fearing that it codified ephemeral live art into a final, essential shape - an afterlife, a tomb. In seeking the witness of the lost, the forgotten, the quick and the dead, these works by mennell and O’Brien present an alternative perspective on memory, loss and finitude.
Whistling as the Night Calls marks a decade of collaboration and shared practice between mennell and O’Brien, wherein mennell has witnessed, documented, facilitated and performed in much of O'Brien's substantial body of live works. This show is the first exhibition of their collaborative photographs.
The exhibition is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony in fragmented times.
Find out more here: https://futureritual.co.uk/Whistling-As-The-Night-Calls-collaborative-photographs-by-Martin-O