Siún Hanrahan is a writer and artist based in Belfast, originally from Galway. She has an honours degree in Fine and Applied Art, and a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. Hanrahan’s work centres upon the nature of our relationship to the meanings we make. This interest is manifest in publications and exhibitions; in contributions to edited anthologies Thinking Through Art (2005), Hyperdrawing (2012); journals such as Leonardo (MIT Press, 2000); conferences such as The World Congress of Philosophy, the AICA Conference at Tate Modern. Exhibitions include: Bread Matters III, West Cork Arts Centre, 2005; Guessing, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2001; Congress Exhibition at the Mueseo di Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 1998; Translating Movement, Proposition Gallery, Belfast, 1997; Invitation, Context Gallery, Derry, 1996. Ongoing engagement with the public role and presence of contemporary art practice: currently on the boards of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast Exposed, and Void Gallery, Derry/Londonderry; member of the editorial panel of Tracey (on-line peer-reviewed drawing journal) and Printed Project (Visual Artists Ireland publication, 2003-2012); curator in ARC (per cent for art scheme, Dublin Corporation and Fingal County Council); Chair of Museum 21, an international symposium organised by Irish Museum of Modern Art (2008).
Through my work I endeavor to both explore and rehearse the idea of ‘dialogical truth’. ‘Dialogical truth’, as opposed to mono-logical truth, implies that a single telling is never adequate; an event, the way the world is, always exceeds a single telling and the multiple tales it requires are often irreconcilable. Exploring this idea sends me through terrains such as ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, and sociology; rehearsing it involves art-writing and creating book works that play with strategies of storytelling and the use of voice to embody dialogical truth telling as a structure and confront its consequences as a practice.
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