Through photographic, moving-image, drawing, sculptural, and text-based artworks, In Living Memory explores the elusive nature of memory and where it resides. 

Works by Niamh Clarke, Kanich Khajohnsri, Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl, John Rainey, Amanda Rice, and Lyónn Wolf in this site-specific exhibition attempt to evoke the spaces and places where activities have occurred; consider how embodied, transient, and resistant acts can be captured and represented; and how objects and materials store and transmit memories and stories across time.

Installed on a billboard next to the building, the work distill in a tumbler by Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl has developed from the artist’s interest in the construction of language and her time spent researching and walking in the local area, interviewing family who live nearby, and her experimentations with audio and sound. The resulting work is a poetic ‘composition’ that connects with sensory memories located in another place and temporality.

Included in the exhibition is an giclée print by Niamh Clarke, Head, Heart, Hand (Black Mountain College Series), which features a text written by the artist stitched to a hand-drawn reproduction of an archival photograph of a Mayday celebration at Black Mountain College. Black Mountain College was a liberal art college based in Carolina, USA, active during the 1930’s to mid-1950’s. It’s radical teaching attracted some of America’s most influential artists and thinkers, and became an incubation space for experimental production. The image explores how collective artistic activity can bring forth new forms of creative and social practice.

Nurturing radical collective organising and imagining is central to Lyónn Wolf’s work and research. Displayed in the window space of The Living House are ceramic sculptures, digitally printed and hand dyed textiles, risoprints and other printed material that have been created as part of De-production, a long-term project that through different artistic strategies questions established understandings of reproduction, ageing and work. Mourning Sickness, a zine produced as part of this project, and more information about De-production, can be accessed here.

A flag mounted to the outside of the building features two concept drawings by John Rainey for a future alternative public artwork that commemorates hidden queer histories of Belfast. Many of the monuments we currently share the city with represent contested, yet established histories. In creating a re-imagined monument to the untold, shrouded, joyful and defiant histories of queerness, these images propose other, more speculative, forms of public remembrance and representation.

HAND is a spectral, textile-mounted image by Thai artist Kanich Khajohnsri visible through an aperture in the building’s door. ‘Kwan’ is a Thai term for people’s spirit that is believed to possess bodies as well as buildings, places and land. It can be visualised as a spiral and is thought to be within our bodies in spiral shapes such as our fingerprints. The artist connects this idea of spirits/forces taking possession of, and existing within, us - and in other, what in the Western world are considered inanimate, ‘lifeless’ objects - with our desire to possess and own. The hand becomes a symbol of this desire, representing both the authority of the person through our use of fingerprints and handprints to identify and mark, and the presence of mystical, ancestral spirit ‘others’.

The exhibition will close on the 14th May with a screening of The Flesh of Language, a film by Amanda Rice which uses alternative forms of knowledge to examine crossovers between human and non-human bodies, and examines an expanded notion of archive in the age of ecological precarity.

In Living Memory is installed on the exterior of a North-Belfast Victorian end-of-terrace house on the Antrim Road. It marks the start of ‘The Living House’, a new collaboration between Household and MMAS architects to inhabit and re-animate the building. Within this new neighbourhood setting and context, alongside MMAS’s socially engaged and community focused architectural practice, Household will create an artist residency space and programme and ‘living archive’ that connects with the creative potential of the domestic and the city’s past, present and future.

A number of the works in the exhibition will be editioned and available to buy via UPHOLD. More information coming soon.

Delivered in partnership with MMAS and supported by Lottery funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Paul Mellon Centre, Belfast City Council & Arts and Business Blueprint programme.

Image credit: Niamh Clarke, Head, Heart, Hand (Black Mountain College Series), 2025, Giclee Print with stitch and carbon transfer text on paper.