History of the Present

A spacious work that not only avoids predictable representations of the Troubles but gestures entirely beyond representations. It offers an intricate historiography that moves between abstraction and record, attending to commonplace traces and relations, rendering the world around us as melody. In a mesmerising vocalisation, helicopter whirrs are heard as vibrations of the human voice, embodied, not merely symbolic. Sounds amass and permeate – a child’s tape-recorded young language, a poised voice-over, a faint marching band – and surfaces glisten, quietly holding in a shattering noise. Articulating the movement of trauma through and beyond words, and the many resonances inscribed within memory and matter, is part of the work’s poignant way of confronting emotional handovers, conflict, and censorship. (Ilinca Vânău)

Maria Fusco (b. 1972) is an award-winning working-class writer, born and brought up in Ardoyne, North Belfast, now living in Scotland. Her interdisciplinary work spans the registers of critical, fiction and performance writing; she has authored six books, and written and directed four major performance works. Her work has been commissioned by bodies including: Artangel, BBC Radio 4, Film London and National Theatre Wales. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery and The Lisbon Architecture Triennale and an Engender Fellow at the Royal Opera House. She is currently Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee.

Margaret Salmon (b. 1975) is a New York born multidisciplinary artist living and working in Glasgow. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at institutions including Secession, (2023), DCA (2018/19), Tramway (2018) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2011); Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2007) and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007). Her work has been featured in film festivals and major international survey exhibitions, including the British Art Show 9 (2021/22), Glasgow International (2021), Berlin Biennale (2010) and Venice Biennale (2007) London Film Festival (2018, 2016, 2014).

Margaret Salmon: History of the Present (2023), Mm (2017), Eglantine (2016), Bird (2016), Pyramid (single screen) (2014), Oyster (2014), Housework (2014), Gibraltar(2013), Colour Line (2011), study of man in truck based on the story John Told Me (2010), Times Square (2010), The Enemies of the Rose (2010), Hyde Park (2009), Rooms – East New Orleans (2008), Guns Trilogy (2008), Fireman (2008), M 2007 (2007), Ninna Nanna (2007), Ramapo Central (2003), Peggy (2003), M 2002 (2002), P.S. (shot 1998; completed 2002)