‘No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun: Light, Silver and Land’ by Amanda Rice

‘No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun: Light, Silver and Land’ by Amanda Rice

26.11.20 - 26.02.21 at M8 Art Space

This three-part film moving image work takes the form of a research essay which explores geological materials such as silver and salt, and their subsequent integration as part of thermal solar energy systems and the geophysical spaces they themselves inhabit. The work thinks through both material histories and sunlight as something which is both entangled and interconnected, personal and political. Green energy systems, and in the case of solar energy, is sold to us as immaterial and renewable; but it’s technics are grounded in the extractive and geophysical, de-territorialized and disseminated. The work moves between personal mediations on light and geology, and thinks about sunlight as an elemental, omnipresent and global experience, one which pervades bodies – both human and non-human; also as a global commodity, one which has been subject to the laws of capital and extraction.

‘No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun: Light, Silver and Land’ by Amanda Rice is the fourth project in the new screening programme ‘Dialogue Model: I can’t hear myself without you listening’ for M8 Art Space curated by Edel O’ Reilly.

Artist:

Amanda Rice is an Irish artist (b. 1985) based in London working in moving image and installation. Her work is rooted in an interest in how material culture is circulated and disseminated, with a focus on geological materiality. She is interested in how matter is exchanged within in the world, for example, how rock, mineral, or other lithic materials come to participate in a variety of human constructed systems and interactions. These interests extend to how geological material can become entangled with processes of manufacturing, human labour, global trade, circulations of capitalism to more subjective notions of value and myth bestowed upon artefacts and other lithic things. Her recent research has come to think about the material composition of solar energy systems, and how ‘green energy’ comes to produce similar conditions of production and extraction associated with that of fossil fuels.

She has exhibited with Arebyte Gallery, London, as part of the Wrong Biennale, (2020) ‘Artworks 2019’, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Ireland where she was awarded the Eigse-Hotron Graduate Prize (2019), ‘Drip Dry’, Charlton Gallery (2018) The University College London Art Museum (2017) Still the Barbarians, Eva International Biennial, curated by Koyo Kouoh (2016) (Ireland), Flux Factory (New York) and Eastlink Gallery (Shanghai). She was awarded the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award for 2019. She completed an MA at Slade School of Fine Art in 2018 and was awarded the Edward Allington Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the lmacantar Studio Award.

List of Works:

Death in Geological Time. 2018. Video with audio (04:31)

Chapter 1: Light. 2020. Video with audio (05:42)

Chapter 2: Silver. 2020. Video with audio (07:52)

Chapter 3: Land. 2020. Video with audio (06:16)

‘Dialogue Model: I can’t hear myself without you listening’ 

Olivia Abächerli, Bethany Crawford, Lukas Malte Hoffmann, Amanda Rice & Assem A. Hendawi

‘Dialogue Model: I can’t hear myself without you listening’ is an extended exhibition over four screenings at M8 Art Space featuring adapted projects by four international artists. Commencing in September 2019 and running until December 2020, it shares screen-based artistic research into the philosophical and existential aspects of various developments in the field of electrical engineering such as digital immortality, human-computer interaction, empathic interfaces and algorithmic governance. While the format of the programme is a sequence of multi-channel works by each artist, it is intended as a one extended project with the context and sensibility of each of the screenings interlacing. These feedback loops trace lines of tactile thinking with our simulated selves, synaptic scripts and speculative scenarios.

For further information contact Curator Edel O' Reilly ([email protected])