The Regeneration Game

This group exhibition brings together work by artists based in Dublin, Belfast, and London/Amsterdam, alongside archive footage from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive, to interrogate housing as one of the defining and persistent socio-political inequalities of our time. Spanning gaming, film, installation, and printmaking, this exhibition and events programme mobilises art as a tool for collective resistance, offering playful yet provocative alternatives to structures of dominance.

Beyond the domestic and infrastructural inequalities facing the wider population, precarious living conditions for artists are entangled with the precarity of their work and workspaces. Through lenses which include cultural stigma associated with material conditions such as damp, increasing instability and scarcity of cultural space, landgrabs and landbanking, each project reflects on an existence which somehow both ceaselessly relocates us, but simultaneously traps us without agency in adolescence. 

NAMACO’s playable 16-bit video game Mega Dreoilín is a radical reimagining of edutainment designed for the demographic of ‘Generation Rent’. Positioning itself as a revolutionary instructional manual, Mega Dreoilín helps players to learn about the bureaucratic land dominance imposed on Ireland by successive waves of colonisers, landlords and global multinationals, as well as the strategies required for collective resistance against these sinister powers, positing that Ireland’s age-old land question is not as complicated as our political representatives would have us believe.

Avril Corroon’s GOT DAMP is an installation that explores damp as 'a crisis of nature in the home' and the experience of the precariat within contemporary Britain and Ireland. The project worked with communities across South East London and the Community Action Tenants Union in Dublin, exchanging with 55 households. Avril provided energy efficient dehumidifiers and support to manage damp, whilst households contributed experiences, ideas and collected 1800L of water in dehumidifiers. The collected water from the dehumidifiers is exhibited alongside a 30min film which was made partially with a thermal camera documenting the lived experience of households who live with damp in their homes and the materiality of damp itself. GOT DAMP was originally commissioned and exhibited by TACO! in London and Project Arts Centre in Dublin. 

Through a series of Open House events, Marta will invite community participation through radical mapping, objects, screenings, and oral history exploring collective nostalgia as a catalyst for change. Alongside the responses she gathers, Marta will embark on processes of drawing, performance, and printing, using this residency period to develop a new body of work.

Delve into archival fragments of housing issues and activism, through the lens of news reporters, documentary and community film makers. The rolling archive and screenings are programmed by Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive and guests throughout the exhibition. 

Play dates

If you are engaged with issues of housing precarity or activism, we will be arranging a series of ‘play dates’ throughout The Regeneration Game where we can share archive material and show you around the exhibition. Please contact jane@pssquared.org if this is of interest.  

About the artists

Avril Corroon

Avril (she/her) works with sculpture, installation, moving image, performance, and social practice to explore situations and sites, especially cities, where precarious conditions and neoliberal ideology have become everyday. Avril’s website 

Marta Dyczkowska

Marta (she/her) born in 1980 in Poland, is a visual artist in Belfast, where she is a member of Vault Artist Studios. Her artistic practice revolves around considering spaces and societal shifts, using remnants of material culture, architecture, memory, and archives. Marta’s website 

Dónal Fullam (NAMACO)

Dónal (he/him) is Assistant Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries, based in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. His research deals with music and art in contemporary algorithmic culture, human-computer creative relationships and intersections between art and technology in general. Dónal’s Instagram

Han Hogan (NAMACO)

Han Hogan (she/they) is an artist with a background in science. They regularly collaborate with other practitioners on projects, which include a radio show celebrating experiments in music and sounds by genderqueer and marginalised communities, and a mobile screenprinting unit which is used as a press for housing activist groups. Han’s Instagram 

About the partners

Belfast Film Festival is an international festival running since 1995 dedicated to screening the best in new, short and classic cinema from all over the world. The Festival proudly boasts a diverse and wide-ranging programme curated by programmers Rose Baker and Jess Kiang whose 2022 programme was described by the Irish Times as “An Invigorating Jolt of Culture.” As well as championing local film with the Irish Shorts competition and NI Independent strand, last year the festival pioneered its International Competition which brought films from all over the world to the festival from Ukraine to South Korea. Film as an experience is at the festival’s core, from site specific screenings to moving image art exhibits. Belfast XR Festival, the virtual reality strand of the festival, is dedicated to showcasing the best of new immersive technology content. 

The Digital Film Archive (DFA) is a flagship Northern Ireland Screen resource, created to ensure broad access to the region’s rich moving image heritage. Spanning over a century, from 1897 to the present day, the DFA (www.digitalfilmarchive.net) is an online treasure trove that chronicles Northern Ireland’s cultural, social, and historical journey. It also features material documenting pre-Partition Ireland, offering valuable insights for audiences across the UK and Ireland, and internationally. With almost 6,000 items freely accessible, the DFA encompasses a wide range of genres, formats, and themes. From rare silent films to contemporary documentaries, from newsreels to home movies, the archive provides a window into some of the lives, stories, and events that have shaped Northern Ireland. Supported by the Department for Communities. 

PS² is primarily supported by: The National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Belfast City Council through the Artists' Studios & Workspace Organisational Grant; and Arts & Business NI Blueprint Investment Grant.

Selected programmes are funded by: Belfast City Council Bank of Ideas, Necessity, Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England, Esmé Mitchell Trust, and project partners including NI Screen and Outburst Queer Arts Festival.