Logical Song at Castlefield Gallery

Castlefield Gallery presents Logical Song, Rowland Hill’s first major solo exhibition. Exploring the aesthetics of 1990s Eurodance music, club culture and local fairgrounds, Hill will transform the gallery into an immersive installation which sits between an attraction and an exhibition. Visitors will be invited to enter spaces that move them from the private and domestic to the theatrical and communal, embarking them upon a destabilising journey through a fantasised past to a darker, speculative future.

A new large-scale video installation will feature moving image portraits of female Eurotrance singers, caught in an ever-evolving chorus of a cappella voices. Adorned with fairground lights referencing religious iconography, the work will create a devotional space that gives presence to the often anonymous women featured as samples in Eurotrance music.

Logical Song will also house an adaptation of Hill’s Fluchtpunkt, an audio landscape of extreme weather sounds — a recurring metaphor for conflict and resolution in 90s dance music — which, today, take on a stark significance. Underpinned by an ominously thudding beat, the exhibition prompts visitors to question the dreamworld of Eurodance and its disquieting rhetoric of utopia and emergency.

Logical Song – Closing Party

1 March 2024 / 6-8pm

Join Castlefield Gallery for the last chance to experience Logical Song in full effect, with smoke machines operating in the gallery. Artists Rowland Hill and Kate Paul will also each read a text that they have written to accompany the exhibition.

No booking is required, just come along.

Rowland Hill (b.1989) creates experiences that play with the artifice, tension and vulnerability inherent to live performance and its stagecraft, sometimes with an unsettling or ambivalent outcome.

She frequently works collaboratively and across a range of media, especially film and video, live performance, installation, sound, collage and experimental event formats. Much of her work deals with absence and presence and relies upon audiences to engage in processes of speculation and imaginative projection, often within an interdisciplinary environment that draws on her background studying and working in theatre, film and music contexts.

In recent years Rowland Hill’s work has been commissioned by Turner Contemporary (Margate), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), Holden Gallery (Manchester) and Ambit publication. She has performed and presented her work at spaces including Raven Row (London), ICA (London), The Koppel Project (London), Splendor (Amsterdam), Videographé (Montreal), and Flux Factory (New York). In 2018 she received the Clare Winsten Memorial Award from the Slade School of Art in London where she completed her MA, and in subsequent years has been awarded a Jerwood Bursary and a Manchester Culture Award.

This exhibition was selected from proposals submitted by Castlefield Gallery Associates by guest selector curator, writer and researcher Stella Sideli, Castlefield Gallery Curator and Deputy Director Matthew Pendergast and Castlefield Gallery Associates Coordinator James Mathews-Hiskett.