This Must Be The Place is a new series of public lectures that takes its title from the 1983 Talking Heads song, a song that was unusual in their catalogue as a love song to place and home. The talks series broadly looks at how contemporary artists have used site and location as frameworks for research, installation and theme. Talks are live and in person and held in the RHA Friends Room on Thursday evenings. The series will feature artist talks by Ciara Roche, Fiona Whelan, Dominique Crowley, Alan James Burns and Michelle Malone and will continue in 2023.
This is the fourth of a series of talks, hosted in person in the RHA Friends room on Thursday evenings at 5.30 pm during October and November.
Artist bio:
AlanJames Burns (pronouns: he/they) is a visual artist producing immersive sensory environments and events with mixed-reality technologies in site-specific locations reflecting on the inner psychological space by giving voices and consciousness to structures and systems. Burns’ artworks are highly collaborative in nature working; with other artists, researchers, specialists, communities, institutions and technicians. Collaborations are a key process in Burns’ practice and underpin an engagement with themes such as psychology, systems and climate concerns. Burns’ experience in producing location-based collaborative projects is demonstrated through projects such as:
“Entirely hollow aside from the dark”, (above image) established in 2016 and ongoing, is a site-specific cave installation exploring key links between the interior landscape of the mind and climate change. This immersive psychoacoustic sound event that personifies caves in delivering an assumed inner dialogue of ‘Earth’ as they struggle with their deteriorating mental health brought on by the human distressing of their body.
Key funders include Arts Council of Ireland, Arts Council England, Culture Ireland, Department of Arts and Heritage, Fingal Arts, Cavan Arts, Creative Ireland, Create Ireland, Arts and Disability Ireland and the European Commission.
For more details on the rich collaborations and funders involved in these projects please visit www.alanjamesburns.com
Image: AlanJames Burns, Entirely hollow aside from the dark, established in 2016 and ongoing, site-specific cave installation, © AlanJames Burns.
