Lawrence Abu Hamdan: 45th Parallel / Jesse Jones: The Tower

Talbot Rice Gallery announces two new exhibitions to open on June 23, 2023: Jesse Jones and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, with an intervention by Hephzibah Israel.

Jesse Jones’s new film, performance and sculptural installation, The Tower, is the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble (commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017). The Tower conjures the words of women burned as heretics before the first witch trials in the sixteenth century. Jones’s work delves into the lost knowledge of women’s ecstatic visions through the writing and song of medieval female Christian mystics, and evokes the strange, isolated imaginaries of anchorites and hermits along with troubling histories of religious and state incarceration of women.

At Talbot Rice Gallery, working once again with Director Tessa Giblin who commissioned Tremble Tremble, Jones will transform its white gallery into a cavernous, dark environment, combining film, live performance, sculptures and scenography to achieve an expanded idea of cinema and immersive theatre. To celebrate the remarkable achievements of an artist uniting Ireland’s formidable strength in the visual arts, theatre and dance, Talbot Rice Gallery and Edinburgh University Press are delighted to announce the publication of a book that charts the research and cultural analysis of Jesse Jones’ artworks—Tremble Tremble and The Tower and the climates they were born from.

Sited in Talbot Rice Gallery’s iconic neo-classical Georgian Gallery, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s most recent film installation 45th Parallel—examining political grey areas in international legislature—is situated above the University of Edinburgh’s Law School Library. Shot on location in the only cross-border theatre in the world, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House is a geopolitical grey zone that bisects the border of Canada and the United States.

Staged within this unique site, a four-act monologue written by Abu Hamdan is performed by acclaimed Danish Palestinian film director Mahdi Fleifel. Fleifel delivers his lines, from the stage on the Canadian side to empty theatre seats on the American side, as though addressing a court of law. He speaks of the murder of unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national Sergio Hernández. In 2010, Hernández was fatally shot by a US Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa Jr, who was standing on US soil when he fired his weapon. This land-mark legal case was taken to the US Supreme Court. If found guilty, Mesa’s brutal act could implicate US-based military drone operatives who were responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths across the Middle East. The supreme court voted 5-4 in favour of Mesa. 45th Parallel speaks of the absurd, porous, and contradictory nature of borders, and the laws that govern these grey areas often with lethal effect.

In the upper balcony of the Georgian Gallery, Hephzibah Israel presents The Nature of Difference, a series of newly commissioned textual works, produced in collaboration with graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge studio, that poetically explore the nature of translation and what it is to navigate borders. Dr. Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh.

The Tower was commissioned by Rua Red in Dublin as part of The Magdalene Series curated by Maolíosa Boyle, funded by The Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, South Dublin County Arts Office, and Rua Red. It has been further developed at Talbot Rice Gallery with the support of Creative Scotland, Edinburgh College of Art, Culture Ireland and Ron Christaldi. 45th Parallel was commissioned by Spike Island, Bristol; the Toronto Biennial; Mercer Union, Toronto; and the Western Front, Vancouver. Produced by LONO Studio and supported by Arts Council England and JustFilms / Ford Foundation. The exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery is supported by Creative Scotland and Edinburgh College of Art and is curated by Melissa MacRobert.

Forthcoming at Talbot Rice Gallery
The Recent
October 28, 2023–February 3, 2024
The Recent will be an international group exhibition exploring the complications of geological time and the immediate climate crisis. The acquisition of the historic journals and papers of Charles Lyell by the University of Edinburgh in 2019-2020 gives rise to an artistic opportunity to engage with the cultural, scientific and political entanglement of his work; with artists who show us that in order to rescue our ecosystem and increase motivation around climate ecology, we will need to stretch the human imagination to consider much deeper periods of time and human effect.

Stay in touch with us as we explore what the 16th-century University of Edinburgh, together with Edinburgh College of Art, can contribute to contemporary art research and production today and in the future.

Press contact: Sam Talbot, sam [​at​] sam-talbot.com