The Night Journal
Launch: Saturday 3 October 2026, 7–9pm
The Night Journal is an exhibition considering constructed realities of the night by four, intergenerational artists working in Northern Ireland. These four vantage points feature new and existing work including print, drawing, installation, film and a new text by Michaela Razafima Nash. Written from the perspective of an insomnia-driven walk, the journal encounters the different artists’ worlds in a haze of sodium lit grit and fantasy.
Aisling O'Beirn’s Secondhand Nightscapes are a series of framed drawings of the night sky chronicled every month for a year. Because urban light pollution obscures the view, O'Beirn reconstructs what should be visible, pulling in references to how humans look to the stars to construct meaning—from maritime navigation to astrology, feeling our scale, and seeing through time via light-years.
Wilhelmina Peace brings a surrealist approach to her printing and drawing. Dreamscapes bubble up across the walls, playing with scale, symbolism, memory, internal processing, folded time, and hints of mysticism.
As well as the journal, Michaela Razafima Nash shares gif works documenting a bout of insomnia and a distorted half-waking state connected to living with chronic illness. The slides aim to collapse the delineation of day and night, a blurring when energy levels no longer neatly follow the accepted circadian rhythm.
The exhibition concludes with Brutal Discotèque by Reuben Brown. This new installation and film explores queer club culture and how a city's residual urban space, such as the space under a motorway flyover, can be activated at night to become an improvised dance floor in lieu of built infrastructure.
Reuben Brown is an visual Artist, club-creative and researcher based between Belfast and Dublin. He has recently completed his Master of Research (MRes) Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Recent projects include: In the dusk we are shadows made of light, but we dance in the echoes of the summer at Alexanderplatz Bahnhof Culterim Galerie, Berlin, €URODANCE at Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin and co-created the CCA Window Text It Is & I Am. with Emma Brennan in 2024.
reubenbrownartist.com
Aisling O'Beirn is an Artist and teaches fine art at Ulster University. Her current sculptural work is concerned with exploring space as a physical structure and political entity by making and animating forms relating to observed and theoretical structures being studied by contemporary astronomers and physicists. Recent work has been facilitated by Armagh Observatory and Dunsink Observatory. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and was included in Northern Ireland’s first participation at the 51st Venice Biennale.
aislingobeirn.com
Wilhelmina Peace is a French-American visual Artist currently living and working in Belfast. Her figurative work frequently explores myth, fairy tales and folk lore inspired by Surrealism and eco-feminism. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Cultural Anthropology from Queens University as well as a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art Printmaking from the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University.
wilhelminapeace.com
Michaela Razafima Nash is an Artist and arts writer in NI. She is queer and of multiracial origins including Irish, French and Malagasy (Merina); these facets of her identity often frame her writing and artwork. Amongst others, she has created texts for IMMA Dublin, and Catalyst Arts Belfast. Recent exhibitions include She/Her/They/Them/We for Imagine Festival, Belfast and SAM’S EDEN at CCA.
michaelarazafimanash.com
