WITH THEIR BACKS TO THE SKY
Various Artists
with expanded cinema programme
19 September – 1 December 2025
Opening: Friday 19 September, 18:00
Closing: Monday 1 December, 17:00
Location: Scenius Gallery, Sligo
Gallery 1 (Adelaide St.): Street-facing installation, viewable 24 hours
Gallery 2: Open Monday–Friday, 10:00–17:00
Admission: Free
About the Exhibition
For Culture Night 2025, Scenius Gallery presented With Their Backs to the Sky, a multi-part exhibition and live event bringing together visual art and expanded cinema. The exhibition took its title from a collaborative documentary film by dir. Erik Nuding, presented in Gallery 2 on opening night with a live musical response. This one-night expanded cinema event formed the conceptual anchor of the exhibition.
Alongside the screening, Gallery 1 presented works by invited artists, extending the exhibition’s engagement with landscape, material and lived experience across different media.
Exhibition Structure
Gallery 1 (Adelaide Street)
Paintings by Marita O’Hanlon and textile works by Nadia Tamerji, exploring material responses to landscape and place. This street-facing installation remained accessible throughout the exhibition period.
Gallery 2
On Culture Night, Gallery 2 hosted an expanded cinema event: a screening of With Their Backs to the Sky (dir. Erik Nuding), with live music performed by Departures in response to the film. This one-night event introduced the thematic framework of the exhibition.
Installation view with visitors, With Their Backs to the Sky, Scenius Gallery, 2025
Expanded Cinema
The expanded cinema programme combined documentary film and live sound, creating a responsive environment in which image and music evolved together in real time.
Erik Nuding – Director & Co-DP
Erik is a UK/American filmmaker who grew up between London and County Sligo, Ireland. At the intersection of slow cinema and sensory ethnography, his work draws attention to the interdependence of life across different species. His debut short film, An Ornithologist’s Daughter, screened at Visions du Réel, FidMarseille and DocsIreland among others. Erik has an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern and has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
Website: withtheirbackstotheskyfilm.com
Instagram: @erik_nuding
Still from the documentary, With Their Backs to the Sky, Erik Nuding (dir.), 2025
Departures
The experimental music trio, comprising a guitarist, drummer and a synthesist, emerged in early 2024 as an avant-garde collective exploring the uncharted territories of sound in unconventional spaces including an airport departures lounge and a handbag factory.
What sets the trio apart is their dedication to challenging the norms of both their instruments and the spaces they perform in. The group’s music can be characterized as experimental, ambient, and often jarring, using feedback loops, synthesized textures, and distorted guitar riffs that evolve organically over time.
Instagram: @departures_music_strandhill
Paul Curley (Drums) and Jan Steiner (Keyboards), Departures, 2025
Exhibition Artists
Marita O’Hanlon
Marita O’Hanlon is a visual artist based in Sligo, Ireland, and a graduate of the National College of art and design (NCAD) with a BA (Hons) in Education and Fine Art in 2023. Her painting practice explores emotional landscapes shaped by light, colour, and the shifting qualities of place.
Her recent work focuses on transitional states, examining surfaces that suggest both stability and fluctuation. Inspired by the rugged landscapes of the west of Ireland, Marita’s paintings invite viewers to engage with the rhythms of nature, offering quiet moments of celebration within its cycles of change.
Instagram: @marita_ohanlon_art
Marita O'Hanlon, Natural Space Landscape, 2025, oil on paper
Nadia Tamerji
Nadia Tamerji is an interdisciplinary Irish/Lebanese artist based in Sligo. She graduated from the Institute of Technology Sligo with a first class honours in Fine Art. Awarded Emerging Artist award by IT Sligo which included a solo exhibition in the Ballinglen Arts Foundation ‘insides out’ (2021). Nadia’s focus is on rituals, skin, fabric and latex.
Her work is informed by experimental printmaking. She does this by taking a specific part of the body to isolate and exaggerate it, particularly the skin. The interest in skin led her to develop research into how the contemporary grotesque may be used as a tool in today’s society.
Instagram: @tamerjinadia
Nadia Tamerji, Grotto, Latex and acrylic, 2021; Photo courtesy Irish Arts Review
Credits
Expanded cinema: Erik Nuding (film), Departures (live music)
Exhibiting artists: Marita O'Hanlon, Nadia Tamerji
With Scenius Gallery
Culture Night 2025