Join us for a screening of Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, by Jesse Jones; House of Women by Michelle Williams Gamaker; and Objet d’énigme by Chiara Caterina at the Light House Cinema, Smithfield Square.
In partnership with Light House Cinema, we are delighted to present a screening of Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, by Jesse Jones; House of Women by Michelle Williams Gamaker; and Objet d’énigme by Chiara Caterina at the Light House Cinema, Smithfield Square on Tuesday 26 May at 6pm.
The screening will be introduced by film curator Alice Butler, who will also mediate a post-screening Q+A with artist Jesse Jones.
Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon (2025):
Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon by artist Jesse Jones is a cartographic operatic film work based on the life of three women: Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th century painter, St Catherine the Christian Martyr, and Hypatia of Alexandria. Taking its inspiration from The Gentileschi painting of 1616, “Self Portrait as St Catherine the Martyr” Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, explores how the mirror has been used as a device of self-representation and a powerful tool of feminist cinema. The film includes a score composed by Irene Buckley, starring Colombian American singer Stephanie Lamprea, and featuring the music of Francesca Caccini and text drawn from the poetry of Christine de Pizan.
Objet d’énigme (2026):
Doors, keys masks, empty rooms—objects spinning endlessly, fragments of an unknown dream or mysterious clues from an unsolvable puzzle. Their repetitive motion suggests a hidden logic, yet the clearer these images become, the deeper the mystery grows, leaving us suspended between reality and illusion, presence and disappearance, revelation and uncertainty.
House of Women (2017):
In House of Women, the artist recasts the role of a silent, dancing girl named Kanchi in the film Black Narcissus (1947). The coveted role was played by a seventeen year old Jean Simmons, who as a white English actor wore dark makeup and a jewel in her nose to become the “exotic temptress” of Rumer Godden’s novel of the same name. In her video, Williams Gamaker auditions only Indian expat or first generation British Asian women and non-binary individuals living in London. Unlike the original role, in House of Women the Kanchi of the 21st Century speaks. Shot on 16mm film, the four candidates, Krishna Istha, Jasdeep Kandola, Tina Mander and Arunima Rajkumar introduce themselves to an anonymous reader under the glare of the studio lights. This was the first film in the artist’s Fictional Activism series, and the first instalment of her Dissolution trilogy (2017-19).
Location: Light House Cinema, Market St S, Smithfield, Dublin 7, D07 R6YE
Map link HERE
This film programme is part of Hugh Lane Gallery’s Explore & Learn offsite education programming during the gallery’s period of temporary closure.
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Jesse Jones is an artist based in Ireland. She studied for her BA in fine art at the national college of art and design and Ma in IADT Dublin. Her practice is multi-platform, working in film installation, performance and sculpture. Using a form of expanded cinema she explores suppressed archetypes and myth as feminist potentialities. She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017 with her installation “Tremble Tremble”. She has had solo presentations at Guggenheim Bilbao, Artsonje Seoul, Talbot Rice Edinburgh, Hugh Lane Gallery and Spike island UK. Kunsthalle Gent has commissioned her work “Syllabus” as part of the permanent exhibition programme. Her work Tremble Tremble is held in Hugh Lane Gallery’s permanent collection.
Michelle Williams Gamaker, is a London based artist filmmaker. Through an interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she proposes critical alternatives to colonial and imperialist storytelling in early 20th-century British and Hollywood studio films. Leaning into the magic of cinema, Williams Gamaker explores cinema history by using the tools of cinema against itself to sabotage the casting process and recasts characters as fictional activists. Williams Gamaker is developing her first feature, Majestic City with screenwriter Elan Gamaker and Producers Samm Haillay and Sophie Mathisen. She is a Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths University and is also a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2022-2025).
After completing a degree in film studies in Rome university and a diploma in cinematography Chiara Caterina attended a post-degree in Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. She develops films and moving-image works that explore hybrid and unconventional narrative at the border between experimental cinema, documentary forms, and visual art. Her latest short film Objet d’énigme [Object of riddle] premiered in the Tiger Short Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2026.
