PAST LIVES (PRACTICE bRADFORD)

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

A new artistic 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. Preview: 17 September 5:30-7:30pm: booking coming soon

Marsh thistle on 16mm film - developed in nettle

Past Lives - super 8mm developed in nettle

Snail shell on 16mm film - developed in valerian

“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.

EXHIBITION:

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

Curators’ Tour with artists - 12 noon, 26 September: book with Yorkshire Contemporary