Kelly Studio

An installation by Johanna Leech and Stuart Calvin

Studio 2, featuring a selection of appearances on the Kelly Show. 

The chat and variety show Kelly (1989—2005) provided a meeting place for the neon of host Gerry Kelly’s distinctive signature and glitzy studio decoration and the cathode-ray tubes in our late-twentieth-century box-monitor television sets that transmitted the entertainment; both, to put it simply, are tube-shaped systems that produce coloured light powered by a box of electronics. Preserved by Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive—itself providing an alternative way of restoring the neons as well as the programme—screened in Studio 2 are excerpts from live recordings of Kelly. The low-resolution digitised videos become ghostly shadows of what once happened in this space replaying time and again for you, a live and not live audience. Imagine yourself going back in time and soaking up the atmosphere of a myriad of performances against the glamorous backdrop of the bright neons accentuating the set. Media history was made in these rooms, and now you are part of it, too