PAST LIVES

Multi-medium installation environment: 35mm slides, super 8mm and 16mm film (digitised), soundscape, 2025

A new commission supported by Yorkshire Contemporary with Bradford Producing Hub for Bradford UK City of Culture 2025.

18 September-19 October 2025, Loading Bay, Duke Street, Bradford.

“For Practice Bradford, Byrne created Past Lives, her first immersive multi-medium environment that invites us to reflect on the past, present and future lives of urban spaces. The installation traces her investigation into a partially derelict site in Shipley - once home to The Branch Hotel and a cinema known by many names (from Princes Hall to Shipley Flicks).

The non-linear expanded cinema environment includes an immersive soundscape created from field recordings and creative audio experiments, and images made with analogue materials (35mm slides, super 8mm and 16mm film), hand-developed and printed with plants collected from the location: stinging nettles, wild grasses, valerian, marsh thistle and hedge mustard.

The looped still and moving images explore different elements within and surrounding this accidentally rewilded site. By playing with size and scale, Byrne disrupts our perceptions of urban spaces. The soundscape conveys the site’s past lives alongside its present, evoking memories and experiences embedded in the landscape. Past Lives creates a dreamlike encounter caught between the human and the non-human, geography and history, the internal and the external, memory and reality.”

Interpretation text by Yorkshire Contemporary, 2025.

EXHIBITION:

18 September-19 October 2025, Loading Bay, Duke Street, Bradford; Curators’ Tour with artists - 11.30am 26 September 2025

PRESS:

The Fourdrinier: FEATURE: Turner Prize & Practice Bradford

“In the body of work that makes up ‘Past Lives’ Joanna Byrne explores topography and history. She makes a specific place that once was the location of a pub and cinema her subject. Using still and moving images Byrne poetically captures this now unused former destination for the locals in the Shipley area of Bradford. It is the urban space that silently witnesses a high volume of heavy goods vehicles that pass daily along a major arterial route in a residential district. It is a non-place, shown by Byrne through the lens of magical realism and imagined as an enchanting, rewilded beauty-spot that has been reclaimed by nature in the absence of human value. In researching photographic practices that promote ecologically safe methods, Byrne has discovered that the very plants growing on the site that she makes her subject could be used to hand-develop her photographic film in the place of harmful dark-room chemicals. Byrne demonstrates how nature gives back abundantly in the quiet backdrop to the hum-drum of our existence.” (Charu Vallabhbhai, November 2025).

TSOTA: OUR TURN: Practice Bradford Showcases New Artists – Review

“Joanna Byrne’s installation uses photography, moving image, sculpture, and field recordings to explore a post-industrial site in Shipley. Framed by a black curtain, it creates a contained, immersive space. Just outside the curtain, a vintage television loops footage of lorries and traffic passing the site – highlighting its overlooked place in the modern landscape.

Inside, a projection of plants from the site is cast onto the left-hand wall. A second projection illuminates a concrete slab, casting shifting shadows of plant life, across its warm yellow surface – its texture deepened by the soft, rhythmic clicking of the slide projector. A second retro television mirrors the one outside, playing quiet, intimate footage of the plants and wildlife growing there. The contrast shifts focus from industrial present to the vitality of in-between spaces – sites of ecological persistence common in Bradford. Byrne’s installation is both homage and intervention: using film footage to honour the cinema that once stood, while revealing the quiet abundance hidden within sites of urban decay.” (Millie Lacey, September 2025).

Yorkshire Contemporary: OUR TURN: Practice Bradford

Joanna Byrne: Past Lives - Feature on On8Mil