Catalogue > At random

Enemy Blue explores the precarious nature of the video through a narrative on propaganda and ?friendly fire?. The work conflates material from a number of sources, namely, a Committee report made to the United States House of representatives by Edward Hunter, a U.S. governmental investigation ?Misleading Information from the Battlefield: the Tillman and Lynch episodes? and Gerhard Richter?s published notes on political ideology. The work is an attempt to explore the failure of video to articulate politicized historical narratives. Despite the proliferation of digital high definition technologies our access and experience to the wider world is largely mediated through ?poor? images. Hand held camera-phones, telecined archive material, surveillance footage and low-res streams proliferate the political landscape. In an aesthetic anomaly our relationship to these images define a kind of authenticity or participation in the construction of political realities; that despite their lack of information or detail they become imbued with a semblance of truth. In turn the work identifies the use and control of such ?poor? forms as an aspect of political propaganda. While each dialogue offers it?s position in contrast or opposition to a polarized political position, by implication of its subject, it?s meaning is by turns, entirely reversible.

Allan Hughes is an artist from Belfast based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. His video installation work explores the production of remediated histories through the deconstruction of post-production processes. Hughes? works usually proceeds from research into the sites, documents and apparatus of recorded and remediated histories His works examine the precarious position of subjectivity within the constructed narratives of history and the processes of their representation and reception. Hughes unpacks the processes of remediation and establishes a place that privileges listening and the rediscovery of subjective and heterogeneous positions within these narratives. The last year has seen exhibitions of his work at the Belltable Art Centre, Limerick, where he had a solo exhibition and as a part of Temple Bar Gallery?s ?Lights, Camera, Action!?. His work was included in the 2011 Tulca Arts Festival and Rencontres Internationales. In 2010 he was awarded the ACNI Major artist award and in 2009 he was the recipient of a six-month Artist?s Residency Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally with work shown in the Mediations Biennale in Poznan Poland, UNOACTU in Dresden, the Ormeau Baths Gallery Belfast and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels amongst others.