ARTIST BIO
Susan Gogan is a visual artist making works that are concerned with the power inherent in the design of our contemporary cities. She aims to expand our spatial imagination in order to create new ways of thinking about our social and political relationships.
She works primarily in the media of photography and moving image, with her photographic work sometimes being accompanied by light installations to expand the photographic space. Her research is focused in the area of spatial politics and the everyday urban environment. Key influences are the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja, bell hooks, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, David Harvey and Karen Till. Referencing cinema is a core aspect of her practice and part of her development for any project involves identifying aspects of spatial cinematic language and configurations relevant to our lived experiences.
The production of her work is planned and staged and her preparation involves sketching, collage, storyboarding, scripting and rehearsing. Collaboration is a central part of her working process and she is now expanding her practice to include participatory installation, politicised movement and live performance.
SELECTED WORKS
Who Knows That I Live Here With You
2027
Three channel 4K video with surround sound and live performance
Credits
This work was developed in collaboration with theatre director John King, cultural geographer Prof. Karen Till (Maynooth University), writer Finbarr Doyle and movement choreographer Rajinder Singh.
The live performance is created in collaboration with performance director Vlad Gurdis and a group of young people with Creative Places Mac Uíllíam.
Who Knows That I Live Here With you is an interdisciplinary, live performance and visual art film installation work, where we meet a group of young people trapped and under threat by an unseen presence within the house where they live. They become aware of a hidden “monster” permeating their home and destroying its structural integrity. This work is concerned with the profound spatial injustices that produce urban dwellings as a kind of trap or confinement, with a particular focus on housing precarity and hidden homelessness.
Susan’s ambition for this work is to create possibilities for children and young people to be empowered by their unique perspective and ways of interacting with their spatial environment, and to find their own voice in this urgent conversation.
Potsdamer Platz
2020
Moving Image
Credits
Cast: Yannika Frank, Cathal Sheahan and Zoe O’Brien.
Screenplay by Richard Lubell.
Film poster still image by Robert Ellis.
Potsdamer Platz is a moving image work that centres around the re-staging of a key moment in cinematic history from Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), 1987. Moving through both time and space, a young child retraces the footsteps of two characters from Wenders’s film, Homer and Cassiel, around the space of Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin, a place that has historically manifested massive turmoil and societal upheaval and is currently a privately owned icon of global capital. The child, Etta, coexists in both the present and the future. Her movements are a politically active use of space and a central force in the narrative of change, rupturing the dominance of precarious global market forces.
During the early 1990s, while Potsdamer Platz was sold to private corporations and was being transformed from a vast empty wasteland to Europe’s largest construction site, squatters on this land proclaimed a socialist republic, looking to the future they hoped “…maybe everything will be in ruins and people like us will live here again.”* This work imagines the return of Potsdamer Platz into a wasteland, somehow reclaiming the space back from private corporate ownership and creating possibilities for a new beginning.
*(Quotation from Hito Steyerl’s The Empty Centre, 1998.)