Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 12pm to 5pm  

Opens 1 October 6-9pm [Late Night Art]

Closes Saturday 31st October

Where to visit? 31 - 35 High Street, BT1 2AB https://www.pssquared.org/projects/weve-moved

About the exhibition:

‘heavy, direct quick’ draws together ideas around power relations, labour, and dance, to consider the social, cultural and political structuring of bodies within the social environment. 

Most of our days, we use our bodies' to generate profit that we do not directly benefit from. However, during leisure activities, when we pursue our chosen interests, we can reclaim our autonomy. Dance is the most visibly ‘free’ form of human movement. This expressive, erratic form of leisure stands in firm opposition to the controlled precision of work activity. Thus, this work focuses on two domains of social practice and reproduction, labour and leisure, where the body is always signalling, suggesting, holding, moving and making in different contexts. 

Movement theory creates a methodology for describing and visualising the movement patterns and actions that are the foundations for human movement. Hungarian dancer Rudolf Laban developed different ways to record dance through notation (Labanotation). This system has been progressed by many other scholars to record the wider field of human movement. It has been used by sociologists like Naoko Abe, to highlight patterns in the movements and postures of commuters getting on and off the subway in France. 

In the workplace, the individual is expected to be a ‘good employee’ who does their work efficiently and positively contributes to the wider work environment. Their performance is monitored, judged and guided by other employees and management. This process of extraction is most evident in manual labour. 

Within leisure however, culture is enacted and produced, generating social experience. John Blacking highlights how “changes in musical style and form have generally been reflections of changes in society”. Durkheim coined the term ‘collective effervescence’, a feeling of intense emotional activation which emerges through collective behaviour, like dancing, which is repeatedly shown to have positive health benefits. 

By acutely focusing on representation of both leisure and labour within the Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive, this work highlights the ways in which humans have always and will always use dance and leisure to follow their intuition and interest, an innate human desire that capitalism, try as it might, cannot rewrite.  

The exhibition is complemented by a Performance Art Workshop. More information and booking details here. 

The exhibition is generously funded by the Fenton Arts Trust and Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and supported by Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. 

About the artist: 

Emma Quin is a self-taught artist and curator based in Belfast, working with collage, sculpture, photography and found materials.

She initiates projects which consider how power is distributed across society, in search of a more equal, shared future. With a background in sociology, her work combines sociological thought and collaborative, artist-led approaches.

She is the founder of artist-led initiative Pigeon Projects and Co-Founder of performance art collective Rehearsal Space. 

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PS2 Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12-5pm 

FREE ADMISSION

Exhibition Location: 

PS2, 31-35 High Street, Belfast, BT1 2AB

For more information about visiting the exhibition: info@pssquared.org 

https://www.pssquared.org/projects/heavy-direct-quick