Michelle Hannah: House of Embers
Michelle Hannah: House of Embers
Various site specific locations, GoMA
Friday 3 & Saturday 4 June 2022, 12 – 4pm
“…wonder where the damage goes…”
House of Embers is a new ongoing project by the artist Michelle Hannah, and was presented in GoMA through an expanded sculptural voice, lost museum materiality and disembodied sound.
The ‘House’ is speculatively set in the year 2222, where an unknown invigilator now guards and ruminates amongst the almost empty ruins of the Gallery of Modern Art. What remains in the city, now adapts to the crumbling heat, absorbing a perpetual molten murmur while shimmering towards a queer dystopia in this new Glasgchu. It is a smoking whisper to those that have been passed by with a trace of dereliction, House of Embers unbuilds and excavates the unspoken detritus of what was once Glasgow Lyfe.
Placed subtly throughout parts of the building for two afternoons only, this work plays between presence and absence, collection and disposal; a trace to reference the (mis)use of public museums, Samuel Becketts failed radio play, Gordon Matta Clark’s ‘Splitting’, (Queer) Cosmic Pessimism and the opulent residence of ‘The House of the Faun’, a site that was preserved in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Pompeii 79 A.D.
House of Embers is formed through means of sampling, both in material and sound -collecting remnants of the electromagnetic tones hidden in the sandstone and the debris fallen from the facade of public museums during lockdown. It is temporary, hidden and forever a speculative loop.
House of Embers was commissioned from Michelle Hannah as part of the programme GoMA at 25 supported by an Art Fund Respond and Reimagine Award.
Michelle Hannah is an artist, performing creature, sound maker and photographer.
Currently Leo born & living in Glasgow.
Further Reading
Jack Halberstam ‘unbuilding’
Beckett’s Embers
Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton
Gordon Matta Clark work ‘Splitting’
Sean Street ‘Sound of a Room’
Predictive Coastal Risk Map
M Archive: After the End of the World
Old Futures -Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility
Cosmic Pessimism- Eugene Thacker
Economist Article on Museums and Disasters
Anna Tsing & Donna Haraway: “Tunneling in the Chthulucene”
Kelvingrove Fire