12/08/2025
Incredible scenes of the 3hrs durational performance by captured by Jean Cleverley at A Collective Archive, curated by , Ugly Duck 2025.
Martin O’Brien, Fading Out of Dead Air (Transmissions for the Necropolis) : A scratchy sound of white noise emanates from a small radio, filling the dark room. A faint voice comes through. It sounds like nothing from this world, as if death itself were speaking. Somewhere else, sickly patients lie in hospital beds in hell. They don’t understand why they are still sick. They listen to the hospital radio, but it doesn’t play their favourite songs. Instead, they listen to the sounds of a life once lived.
Drawing inspiration from hospital radio and stories of ghosts heard through analogue technologies, this 3-hour performance by Martin O’Brien explores the human desire to communicate and record. In a strange and eerie landscape, O’Brien shuffles around, recording and playing half-heard voices and unholy sounds.
Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life-shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected.
