REFERENCE LIBRARY 2010–2016
Reference Library 2010–2026
Kunstverein Aughrim
18 September – 20 December 2026
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Reference Library 2010–2026 is an exhibition that showcases the full catalogue of moving image works by artist and filmmaker Jenny Brady. It brings together works dating from 2010–2026, making them accessible to view together for the first time. Brady’s practice examines speech, translation and the structures through which meaning is produced and shared.
Visitors to the exhibition are invited to schedule appointments to come and watch the work at Kunstverein Aughrim. Total viewing time is two hours and fifteen minutes. Works may be viewed individually, chronologically, or within the curated screening programme.
List of works:
The Glass Booth / An Both Gloine (2025)
Ireland & Belgium, digital, 33 minutes
Music for a Solo Performer (2022)
Ireland, digital, 18 minutes
Gather (2022)
Ireland, digital, 14 minutes
Receiver (2019)
Ireland, digital, 14 minutes
Going to the Mountain (2016)
Ireland, digital, 10 minutes
Bone (2015)
Ireland, digital, 11 minutes
Wow and Flutter (2013)
Ireland, digital, 13 minutes
Carve Up (2013)
Ireland, digital, 9 minutes
Technology Autonomous (2011)
Ireland, digital, 6 minutes
As Above, So Below (2010)
Ireland, digital, 12 minutes
Throughout her moving image practice, Jenny Brady is concerned with the unstable relationship between images, language and knowledge. Working through documentary, essay film, archival material, staged situations and found footage, Brady examines how meaning is produced, mediated and shared. Often beginning with apparently factual or scientific subjects, from the build environment and technology, to taxonomy, animal cognition, the body, Deaf history, and interpretation, Brady’s work senses and reveals the limits of seemingly objective systems of knowledge.
A recurring concern is communication and its failure. Brady’s work troubles the gap between what is said and what is understood, thinking into the structures that determine who can speak, who is heard, and whose ‘voice’ is registered. In Wow and Flutter, animal cognition becomes a way of examining the great leaps of thought involved in trying to understand another consciousness; Going to the Mountain considers gesture, movement adn sound as forms of pre-verbal communication; while Receiver and The Glass Booth / An Both Gloine present translation, interpretation and listening as explicitly political, subjective and embodied practices.
Brady’s films are attuned to the politics of looking and representation. She creates disjunture between image, voice, sound and text. Scientific language, archival evidence and authoritative narrative are paired with images that complicate or contradict them. In As Above, So Below, scenes of the city are presented as both evidence and fiction, while Carve Up scrutinises the seemingly stable categories thorugh which humans organise the natural world. Technology Autunomous reveals the slippage between the magic of what technology promises and what it actually delivers. While Bone looks at how language can be used to conceal and camoflage as well as to communicate. Music for a Solo Performer brings together experimental music, medical technologies, synthetic speech and personal experiences of illness, care and mourning, using associateive editing to explore the desire to maintain connection through technological means. Gather, meanwhile, considers the act of filming another artist’s practice as a form of translation, asking what can and can’t be carried from sculpture into moving image.
With orchids and parrots, holograms and children, Brady thinks deeply about meaning and perception. How are thoughts constucted, how is meaning transmitted, and what happens in the gaps where communication, representation and certainty break down? Offering ‘uncertainty’ itself as a productive cinematic condition, Brady’s work creates a space in which alternative forms of knowledge, connection and attention can come to light.
Jenny Brady is an artist filmmaker based in Dublin, exploring ideas around speech, translation and communication. Her films have been presented at LUX, The New York Film Festival, Viennale, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Docs Ireland (with AEMI), This Long Century, MUBI, Essay Film Festival, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, TENT Rotterdam, EMAF, Videonale, Camden International Film Festival, Massachusetts, BFI London Film Festival, Images Festival, Toronto, November Film Festival, London the Irish Film Institute, Project Arts Centre, EVA International, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Whitechapel gallery and Tate Liverpool. Her works are distributed by LUX, an international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them. Previous moving image works include The Glass Booth (2025), Music for Solo Performer (2023)Receiver (2019) Going to the Mountain / Spikes (2018), Going to the Mountain (2016), Bone (2015), Wow and Flutter (2013), Carve Up (2013), Technology Autonomous (2012), and As Above, So Below (2010).
https://lux.org.uk/artist/jenny-brady/
Image: Jenny Brady, still from Wow and Flutter, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Jenny Brady is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.