Seamus Harahan
2021There's A Weight On You But You Can't Feel It
Seamus Harahan
There’s A Weight On You But You Can’t Feel It is a new collection of short films made between 2008 and 2018 by Séamus Harahan. While Harahan’s films have taken a number of different forms, this grouping focuses on his observational documentaries, recorded on video cameras shooting through the windows of various places he lived in North Belfast across those years. The films capture found activity, natural and built environments, the animal world and human unpredictability. The visual layer of the films are then married to new (primarily musical) soundtracks which serve to dislocate the films from the realm of pure recording to something more complex and ambiguous, the intersection of inner and outer realities.
There's A Weight On You But You Can't Feel It
Valley of Jehosephat/Version – In Your Mind
Seamus Harahan
Jehosephat is one film shown twice with two soundtracks. It is projected alternately on adjacent walls, the two loops accompanied by two different songs. The Valley of Jehosephat is a roots reggae track by Max Romeo from the late seventies – referring to a biblical valley of judgment. The other is Bryan Ferry’s In Your Mind (1977), which suggests a philosophical quest for personal resolution. The songs accompany footage of the Bloody Sunday Commemoration in Derry. The alternating soundtracks destabilise our reading of the work and force us to re-evaluate / question what it is we think we see, when we realise how the atmosphere is inflected by the different pieces of music.
Valley of Jehosephat/Version – In Your Mind