Daniel Jewesbury
About Daniel Jewesbury
Daniel Jewesbury is an artist, a writer and researcher, and a curator. In recent years Daniel’s art work has primarily involved 16mm film and video installation, photography, text, and performance.
Daniel's research interests, explored through artmaking and through critical writing, include:
- the role of art in enabling social cleansing: how public art enables civic branding, gentrification and displacement;
- the complexity of contemporary urban regeneration: how neoliberalisation removes processes of urban privatisation and deregulation from democratic oversight, and how opaque these processes typically are for citizens;
- the materiality of artists' experimental moving image work, from the point of view of the artist themselves: how time and space are constructed through filming and editing, and the material properties of colour, light and sound;
- questions of desire and power in visual art: museums and art collections as 'perverse' places, which privilege structures of sexual violence, looking and desire.
Daniel was born in south London in 1972 and studied Fine Art (Sculpture) at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) in Dublin between 1992 and 1996. Upon graduating Daniel moved to Belfast, where he studied for a PhD in the Media Studies department of the University of Ulster between 1997 and 2001. Daniel’s was the first piece of part-practical research completed in the department, and one of the main outcomes was the video installation Mirage, which was presented in his first solo exhibition, at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 2000. The piece was a three-screen, computer-driven video installation, filmed at London Bridge, in Arizona.
During 2024, Daniel has completed two major artistic projects. Landscape with Woman and Monument is a short experimental film, shot in Gothenburg during 2022 and 2023. It offers a surrealistic take of contemporary disempowerment and alienation, at a time of crisis in our privatised, deregulated, perpetually regenerating cities. The film imagines the extremes we are forced to resort to when our collective and individual agency is lost. Where – and how – will we live, when we can no longer cling on to our precarious urban existence?
The film is an attempt to find innovative ways to address specific social and political concerns in experimental, non-documentary film art. Daniel has researched the relationship between individual citizens and our de-regulated, privatised cities, thinking particularly about the growing housing crisis, and the common frustration with ineffective, corrupt political systems. As our cities have turned into financial instruments that are gamed by global corporations, our stake in them has been eroded. Our ability to address this crisis collectively, to think about it together, or even to understand it, is disappearing. Where does all that money come from? Where does it go? And why?
Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is an artist's book, to be published by ArtMonitor at the University of Gothenburg late in 2024. It is the latest part of a project which was first made public as a performance during the major retrospective 'Art of the Troubles', at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, in 2014, but its roots go back much earlier. The departure point for the work is a single figurative sculpture produced during the early years of Northern Ireland’s recent ‘Troubles’, by the Irish artist F. E. McWilliam, entitled Woman in a Bomb Blast. The book sits, somewhat uneasily, between George Bataille’s Tears of Eros, Aby Warburg’s 'Mnemosyne Atlas’, and a pornographic surrealist novella. It asks how to account for the way the sculpture simultaneously compels us to look at it, and repels us, making us feel guilty for doing so; and it explores the way obsession and a certain perverse relationship between artist, artwork and viewer structure not just this work, but all artwork.
Daniel is currently collaborating with composer Ian Wilson to produce a short opera based on the Bomb Blast project, having previously produced live video projections for Wilson's opera I Burn For You, which was a commission by Aldeburgh Music in England. The piece toured the UK in 2015, including performances at Sage, Gateshead and Nottingham Contemporary. The company included internationally respected musicians Phil Minton, Clive Bell, David Toop, Lee Patterson and Attila Csihar.
In 2026, Daniel will present a solo exhibition at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, the highlight of which will be a new film installation entitled The Death of Venus. Its central image is the mythological figure of Hermaphroditos, which originates in Ancient Greece, but was reimagined in Rome and again much later in the European Renaissance. The work explores the persistence of myth and traces connections to the fear, fascination and desire provoked by trans bodies today.
Daniel has worked as a curator and event programmer for many years. In 2010 Daniel curated the exhibition re:public at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, in collaboration with GradCAM, the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, with whom he was a Visiting Fellow. In 2015 he was invited to be one of the selectors of Pallas Projects’ exhibition Periodical Review #5, in Dublin. In 2016, Daniel curated The Headless City for the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway, a major exhibition employing all the visual arts spaces in the city as well as a large number of locations for site-specific projects, including the main hospital and a local army barracks. Many live works took place in public, around the city itself.
Writing has always been a central part of Daniel’s practice: he began publishing criticism while still an undergraduate student, first in Ireland’s art journal Circa, and subsequently in a range of journals and magazines including Art Monthly, Flash Art, and the contemporary photographic review Source, for which he is still a regular contributor; Daniel initiated a regular review of self-published photobooks for Source, which he wrote from 2011 until 2016. He has written catalogue essays for Willie Doherty (including a major text for Northern Ireland’s 2007 Venice Biennale catalogue,) and Duncan Campbell (most recently, a text for the 2013 Scotland at Venice exhibition catalogue), and for many others including Roderick Buchanan and Garrett Phelan. Longer critical pieces by Daniel have appeared in journals including Third Text, the Edinburgh Review and Art & Research and in various books. Daniel was a co-editor of the magazine Variant from 2000 until 2012, and has edited various other publications.
Daniel’s academic research has been published widely, in books and journals, and on topics ranging from film studies, to the material culture and political history of Irish nationalism, to public art and urban studies. In 2022 he co-edited the book Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City with Dr. Feras Hammami and Dr. Chiara Valli.
He was also a prolific contributor to Belfast’s satirical newspaper The Vacuum (though not always under his own name). The highlight of Daniel’s critical career came when he was sued for libel by property developers.
Daniel is a highly experienced public speaker and broadcaster, and has written and presented many pieces for the BBC on both TV and radio. Before joining Valand, he worked at the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, as a lecturer in Film Studies and Fine Art, and previously as a Research Associate in Digital Cultures.
When he’s not making art, writing, speaking, editing, curating or researching, Daniel is an enthusiastic drinker of port (and would like nothing more than to open a bottle with you).