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Film Screening: Joseph Noonan-Ganley, 'Our Bed'

12 — 17 September 2023, Tue–Fri: 11am–6pm; Sat + Sun: 12–4pm

Our Bed, a film by Joseph Noonan-Ganley, will be screened for one week as part of an installation in Studio 1 at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Our Bed is an expansive body of work made over several years. It includes film, writing, performance, participatory readings, sculpture, and photography.

The work retells the famous story of a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes following a plane crash in 1972, previously told in newspaper articles, books, television shows and a Hollywood film. Noonan-Ganley’s film is narrated by the reconstructed voice of one of the players who describes the design, construction and use of the team’s emergency beds inside the fuselage of the wreckage. Images, sound and text from archives, mass media and personal notebooks make space for viewers to cohabit these beds, to partake in the imaginative composition that they create. The protagonist elaborates upon the methods that the boys improvised, drawing on an example: a contemporary alphabet fashioned out of jockstraps. This cliché of homosexual identification helps express the different contexts that the boys find themselves in (bed, plane, book).

By interjecting footage of a live televised rugby match, rain and mud disturb the clean capture and transmission of the game. Streaks from the player’s bodies are animated into muddy smears on the video screen, activating their gestures and blurring the subsequent content for the viewers of this video.

Our Bed was produced with CGI, AI and technical consultancy from Harry Sanderson, and translation by Maria Jose Legelen and Núria Querol. Supported by The Elephant Trust and The Art Department, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Joseph Noonan-Ganley's recent exhibitions and projects include: Loading Bay, National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023), Our Bed, 6 Seville Place, Dublin (2022); Phoenix Art Space Invitation, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, (2022); Sad Mirror, Xero, Kline & Coma, London (2018); Something 3 Be Scared of, no.w.here, London (2018); Amended Plastics, puntWG, Amsterdam (2017). Recent writing and publications include The Cesspool of Rapture, MA Bibliothèque (2019) and Femme Fabrications, Eros Journal (2016).

An artist talk between Joseph Noonan-Ganley and Vaari Claffey will take place 13 September 2023, 6pm. Booking here.

This event is part of the expanded programme accompanying Reflex Blue, an exhibition with Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa and Léann Herlihy. The expanded programme includes artist talks, film screenings, publication and performance. Invited artists are Michael Hanna, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Alice Rekab x Stephen Rekab.

Image description: The viewer is situated very close behind the shoulder of a person wearing a red jacket. Overall the image is dark, as if taken at dusk. The figure's right arm is cropped, and the hand is blurred and caught in action. There is light blue fabric close in front of the figure, with roughly sewn seams visible. A highlighted oval torch-light section sits in the top left of the image and a sentence typed in white font appears in the middle. It reads: 'made a portable bed, a kind of sleeping bag for three'.