2025
Exhibition Residencies
07/09/2018 - 21/10/2018
My projects take place at a crossroads between conceptual and experimental practice.
Cultural elements are gathered through ongoing research and used as independent materials to create films, editions, or photographic works engaging different levels of recognition, where images are considered within a system of reproduction and distribution.
Procedures borrowed from early photographic and optical devices allow me to deconstruct a specific technical apparatus, developing a deeper understanding of its functional possibilities in a social context.
I often make use of found-footage or archive materials to be readapted into a specific project containing elements of its origin, status, and technical imprint. From these I create films and editions, using operations such as translation, montage, collage or analogy; my projects often necessitate crossing from one media to another – from moving to still image, from written to spoken word, from one formal language to another.
Collaborative and interdisciplinary work are also central to my concerns. In 2016, I founded STEREOEDITIONS, an independent publishing collective for the creation and distribution of artist’s editions.
This photographic and editorial project combines a series of images shot in different locations across Ireland and Europe from 2014 to the present, exploring both the concept of instant photography and the presence of textual elements within images. With a passing reference to Neoplasticism’s publications “De Stijl”, its cover repurposes an Irish country pub window into a self commenting photographic image where the text is integrated as both form and title. Other images use fleeting forms, frozen within the frame and indistinguishably combined with inert taxidermied bodies or minerals in museum collections.
This immersive video gathers three medium specific temporalities to create a perceptive experience that plays on our sense of synchronisation, retinal persistence and flicker perception. The colour is due to a lab procedure that combines positive and negative images on the surface of the same slide.
A diptych of images created solely by analogue means and its digital equivalent are presented in opposite sides of a room, questioning each other’s technique of mechanical reproduction. Project supported by the Emerging Artist Residency Award, Burren College of Art.
MalVuMalDit is an ongoing series of very short videos, exploring the relationship between seen (mal vu, ill seen) and understood (mal dit, ill said). Ambiguity of form and context is employed and then deconstructed using the same image or set. This editing technique draws from early cinematic forms such as the magic lantern or the shadow show, where a sequence of two images induces narrative and/or movement.
Helena Gouveia-Monteiro
Filmmaker, photographer and editor Helena Gouveia Monteiro was born in Lisbon in 1991. She received her MFA from the Villa Arson National Art School in France in 2015 and lives and works in Dublin. She participated in several group exhibitions, screenings and performances such as Altered States, Staunton International Film Festival, PRÁM studios and Prototyp gallery in Prague, Images Contre Nature in Marseille, Traverse Vidéo in Toulouse, PhotoIreland Festival and Halftone Print Fair in Dublin.
In 2016 she co-founded STEREOEDITIONS independent publications and EST experimental multi-media project.
She was recently awarded the Emerging Artist Residency at the Burren College of Art.
Past Residencies