Seamus Harahan
Born in London, raised in East Tyrone and based in Belfast since the 1990s, Seamus Harahan’s recent works, including Cold Open and Your Smiling Face, have been selected for international festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan), where he won a jury prize.
Included in Assembly, Tate Britain’s survey of artists’ moving image, his work has also been exhibited in museums and galleries such as Collective, Edinburgh, MuHKA, Antwerp and The Armory, New York.
Seamus Harahan represented Northern Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005 and is shortlisted for the 2015 Jarman Award.
Seamus Harahan presents Fucking Finland, an anthology of film freshly completed for his Festival commission.
With a hand-held video camera and armed with a painter’s eye and a musician’s ear, Harahan’s journey begins in Suomenlinna, an inhabited Finnish sea fortress with obvious parallels to Berwick, and traces a line across to Tallinn, Estonia and then on to Rostock, Germany.
With a hand-held video camera and armed with a painter’s eye and a musician’s ear, Harahan’s journey begins in Suomenlinna, an inhabited Finnish sea fortress with obvious parallels to Berwick, and traces a line across to Tallinn, Estonia and then on to Rostock, Germany.
The ferry connecting Hanko and Rostock becomes a melancholic pop metaphor for the old Iron Curtain era, creating audacious – maybe even insolent – links between places that were enveloped in two different and opposing ideological blocks not that long ago.
The Fucking Finland Series is supported by the Elephant Trust.