The End of Side B : Kieran Boland
Celebrate with the artists: Tuesday 25th November 6-8pm
The End of Side B (2025) unfolds as a monologue for insomniacs at the close of a fictitious community radio graveyard-shift just before dawn. Framed as an atmospheric listening exercise with a trace of absurdist humour, it drifts through a disorienting soundscape where memory, technology, fatigue, and the subconscious intersect at the edges of perception. The monologue slyly proposes to the solitary listener that the soundscape surrounding them is not entirely live but augmented by an unseen background tape playing somewhere in the distance. This “tape recorder at the end of the world” runs for twenty-four hours across two unprecedented twelve-hour-long sides: Side A devoted to daylight sounds, Side B to nocturnal ones. First presented publicly as a sound piece voiced by the artist in 2023 for an overnight radio art project broadcast in Montréal, Canada, the new iteration at MARS—featuring Melbourne-based actor Rebecca Lee Bower as the graveyard-shift radio host—gives visual form to the graveyard shift’s dislocated sense of time.
Kieran Boland is a Melbourne based artist working across video, animation, drawing, writing, and performance that engages a diverse range of actors and participants. A recurring thread in his work is the human voice, considered both as an “immaterial” entity and as a form of bodily residue that can assume an independent, often unexpected afterlife through archival recordings and, more recently, the influence of AI. His practice draws on the visual and aural detritus of everyday life, recognising waste as the flip side of a rapid cycle of innovation into obsolescence—and the underlying reality of contemporary culture.
His work has been exhibited and screened in Australia and internationally, across artist-run spaces and art museums. He has also developed site-specific projects for unexpected or overlooked places, including elevators, telephone booths, garbage areas behind radio stations, cemeteries, and a decommissioned bank. A recipient of several grants and scholarships, he has undertaken five international residencies across Europe, Asia, and the USA. Three of these projects have been exhibited at MARS Gallery: Jestertag (2016), produced during the AIR Artist in Residence program in Krems, Austria (2013); Face Radio Live, produced at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2007) and later included in Drawing to an End (2016); and You Say Phonetic, I Say Fanatic (with Brie Trenerry), developed at the TNUA Taipei Residency and supported by the Kuandu Museum of Fine Art (KdMoFA).
Kieran completed a PhD at RMIT University’s School of Art in 2022 on the self-coined term Smartphonocentrism and is currently a Lecturer and Tutor in Design at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He has previously taught at Monash University, RMIT, and Deakin University Film School. For more info: https://www.kieranboland.com