Michael Hanna : Short Films about Learning

In 2017, Lismore Castle Arts presented a solo exhibition by Michael Hanna in St. Carthage Hall which opened on June 4th and continued until July 30th, 2017. In Spring 2015 Belfast Exposed commissioned a programme of archive-themed exhibitions and events produced in response to its collection of community photography. ‘Short films about learning’ is a single channel video installation which juxtaposes a selection of images taken from the Belfast Exposed archive with excerpts from a lecture series entitled ‘Introduction to Psychology’ by Paul Bloom, a professor at Yale University. The work invited the viewer to consider the images, and the subjects they represent, as a series of codes, patterns of learned behaviours and universal tendencies.

Hanna’s work presents audio descriptions of psychological theories including ‘habituation’, ‘the spotlight effect’ and ‘object permanence’ – alongside images taken from the Belfast Exposed archive. Selected imagery includes street scenes, protest marches, masked gunmen and political murals. The rhythm of the speech in the accompanying soundtrack varies throughout from carefully measured statements to free flowing thoughts, with the images timed to mirror this rhythm.

For the presentation at St Carthage Hall, the gallery had been modified to create an immersive installation, which reflects on questions of political power, agency, violence and representation and draws attention to the influence of photography, the archive and the gallery on our understanding of these ideas.

This exhibition was kindly supported by The Arts Council Ireland and Belfast Exposed.