Smoke

Smoke is an exciting exhibition and engagement project from two established international artists. Working in collaboration and with a dryly humorous approach, Masuyama and Kessler have developed twin responses to themes of domestic and urban space, guerrilla interventions and herbal substances. 

This is a two-site exhibition, with video archive of the artists’ street interventions displayed in Threshold, Flax Art Studios’ window galleries on North Street. The exhibition will also tour to Projektraum Viktor Bucher, Vienna, in Autumn 2024. 

About the artists:

Leopold Kessler

Leopold Kessler (1976, Munich) lives and works in Vienna. His work consists of modest and covert gestures, often executed in public spaces that make the everyday extraordinary, and expose the unwritten rules that shape our ideas of what society is and where ordinary people fit into it. 

‘I am concerned with the relationship between the individual and society, with how the gap between personal development and the strictures of living in a community is overcome, or not. I position my interventions in the public between generally useful services and vigilantism’.

Kessler's work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Malmo Konsthall, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, and Secession, Vienna. He was invited in group shows in Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University, Palais de Tokyo and de Appel, Amsterdam. He participated in 3rd Singapore Biennale, 10th Biennale de Lyon and Manifesta 05 in San Sebastian.

http://www.leopoldkessler.net/

Shiro Masuyama 

Shiro Masuyama (1971, Tokyo) is the only Japanese visual artist based in Northern Ireland. He originally studied architecture, which manifests in his work as site-specific interventions which connect people and society. His work ranges from performance to sculpture, installation, photography and video. His ‘outsider’ perspective offers a unique position from which to question how identity is shaped by dominant political forces.

Masuyama’s artistic practice has mainly developed through participating in a diverse range of artist residencies worldwide including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea ; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin ; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin ; ISCP-International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York.

He has had solo exhibitions including ‘Talking to the Animals in the End of the World’(Sapporo International Art Festival 2024), CAI03, Sapporo, Japan (up-coming 2024) ;’ Brexit Sausages’, Cultúrlann, Belfast (2022) ; ‘Coexistence’, National Folk Theatre of Ireland (2019). He has participated ‘BIENALSUR 2021’, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rosario, Argentina and ‘Aichi Triennale 2013’, Nagoya, Japan. https://www.shiromasuyama.net/

This collaboration is sponsored by SIAP - General Art Award, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, Austria. 

PS² is supported by Belfast City Council and The National Lottery through Arts Council of Northern Ireland and project funding from Belfast City Council.