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is a solo-exhibition, interactive and experiential installation and participatory performance by Reuben Brown at Pallas Projects/Studios; Dublin, selected as an Artist-Initiated Project 2025. €URODANC€ was generously supported by Pallas Projects/Studios; Dublin and White Claw IE. €URODANC€ explores the shifting terrain of club-spaces of the past, present and imagined future, where the dance floor becomes both sanctuary and spectacle, resistance and release. Through moments of belonging, betrayal, break-up, revenge, recovery and renewal, it delves into how the sensory experience of clubbing, its sounds, sparkling lights and pulsating rhythms, mirrors the emotional contours of queer love, longing and loss.
There is a quiet intimacy in these encounters, a subtle yet profound connection between dancers, where the club transforms into a site where emotion lingers and connection, though fleeting, feels boundless. At the heart of this is Eurodance: a genre defined by its infectious melodies, ecstatic vocals, throbbing baseline and anthem-like choruses. Its emotional excess embodies the fleeting joy and lingering ache of queer romance, offering a sonic language for the ecstasies and heartbreaks that shimmer and dissolve beneath the strobe.
€URODANC€ debuts In the dusk we are shadows made of light, but we dance in the echoes of the summer, an experiential film that immerses the viewer in a saturated sensory landscape of light, sound and movement. In the dusk… is structured around a love poem composed entirely from fragmented Eurodance lyrics, romantic declarations, promises of forever, and fleeting goodbyes, cut up and reassembled into a tender, multilingual monologue. Echoing the pan-European appeal of the genre, the film draws on the genre’s linguistic and emotional excess, where English, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian and more converge into a shared language of desire and euphoria. These splinters unfold through sweeping lasers and shifting sonic textures, evoking the disorientating intensity of club encounters, and the emotional afterglow they leave behind, drawing the viewer into a suspended state where memory, fantasy and rhythm drift and merge. It is both devotional and dissolving, less a film than an encounter.
The exhibition also features a series of sculptural interjections, sound pieces and video works that contribute to a fractured, multi-sensory narrative, one that reflects both the impermanence of queer histories and the collective affect of the dance floor. These interjections operate materially and atmospherically, using airflow, light, vibration and surface to blur the boundaries between the viewer and the space they inhabit. Quiet mechanical gestures, subtle soundscapes and sudden confrontations with colour or heat, suspended between play and discomfort, nostalgia and estrangement, they distil the heightened states of attention, vulnerability and euphoria that defines queer nightlife. A ritualistic undercurrent runs through these gestures, calling back to ancient sonic practices and the Neolithic origins of dance music, where sound and space were intimately entwined in early communal rituals. They also speculate on the future of clubbing, particularly in Ireland, where the evolution of nightlife culture reflects wider social transformations. Together these works conjure a space where desire becomes ambient and memory is held not in chronology but in sensation.
Video by Serhii Shapoval via Pallas Projects/Studios
Accompanying the exhibition is a series of pamphlets created as part of Reuben’s ongoing research project club [construction]. These pamphlets are created using unorthodox DIY publishing techniques, and function as process-driven art objects which critically examine and address the gaps in queer historical archives, engaging with this absence by offering an intimate, alternative form of documentation. The pamphlets encourage reflection on often overlooked ephemera such as flyers, zines, stories, tickets, speculation etc, providing a space for deeper engagement with these marginalised narratives.
Artist-Initiated Project s at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.
Artist-Initiated Projects aims to act as an incubator for early careers, and support artists' practices at crucial stages, providing a platform for artists to produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms. The model of short-run exhibitions with a relatively short turnaround time of 3–6 months is an alternative to the normal institutional model, where the process of studio visit to exhibition can take several years. Shorter lead-in times allow the programme to be quick and responsive, reflect what artists are currently making, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.
€URODANC€ features a beautiful essay by James Ó Muirithe that explores the club-space as a powerful site of ritual, community and transformation. James reveals how clubs operate within liminal, in-between realms, spaces where everyday reality is suspended but never erased, haunted by deep histories of marginalisation and resistance. Nightclubs emerge as fluid, neo-tribal sanctuaries where identities are not just performed by fiercely subverted and radically reimagined, all while echoing primal human instincts to gather and dance to repetitive beats.
“The club’s capacity for framing and reframing moves it beyond being simply a zone of ritualised play, nor only an evasion of structure. It is a space where past exclusions, present desires, and speculative futures flicker together under the strobe. Rather than classification it seeks attunement: to the bodies it gathers, the thresholds it opens, the forms it dissolves, and the time it disfigures. Through its own passage states, it dissolves itself and lingers in sweat, dance, and time.”
James Murray [Ó Muirithe] is a writer based in Cork City. He recently completed a Joint Honours BA in Béaloideas (Folklore) and History of Art in University College Cork. Operating through and between two languages, James remains oriented towards global art histories and a critical engagement with the legacies of evolutionary nineteenth-century frameworks within Irish cultural institutions. James is set to continue his academic training through a MRes supported by the UCC Department of Folklore and Ethnology. He was selected for the Frieze New Writers Programme in Liverpool in July 2025.
€URODANC€ also featured a dance/movement response by Nick Nikolou. Their performances trace gestures of release, touch and transformation, drawing from the spirit of queer nightlife and the fragile histories that move through these spaces. They are fleeting, intimate and deeply felt. These moments were unannounced, ephemeral, intuitive and shapes by the atmosphere of Dublin Modular’s Pride Party which was held in the Pallas Projects/Studios Yard on June 28, 2025.
Nick Nikolaou is an Irish-based contemporary dance and queer artist. They graduated with First Class Honours from the MA in Contemporary Dance Performance in the University of Limerick. Their research, since 2020, is around club and queer spaces and their importance on a person’s existence and comfort. For this research Nick worked with mentors Liz Roche, Philip Connaughton, Emma Martin and Tonie Walsh. This led to a very successful solo show called “Anatomy of a Night’’ that premiered in the Dublin Fringe Festival 2022 with great reviews from critics and the community. “Anatomy of a Night” is coming back in 2025 as part of Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Nick has been performing and hosting clubs and events around Ireland.
Nick also co-runs Dublin Modular, an artist-run organisation primarily hosting all types of live electronic music and visual arts meetups, workshops, talks and performances. Their biggest achievement has been the “Hi-Five series” where they curated 5 different and successful events in different venues around Dublin, where they worked as a producer and resident performer of Dublin Modular since 2022 and together they have curated over multidisciplinary events in over 10 different venues around Ireland. Also, Nick is a member of Cabaret crews around Ireland and they support the growth and further development of shows. Nick’s research of queer and club spaces will soon be published.
Dublin Modular Pride Yard Party at Pallas Projects/Studios on June 28, 2025.
Photos courtesy of Órlaith Mac Eoin Manus, via Dublin Modular
Dublin Modular are a queer artist-run organisation primarily hosting all types of live electronic music, visual and performance arts meetups, workshops, talks and performances throughout Dublin City. Their community ranges from young to old and in genre classical to experimental. Although the majority of their events are based in Dublin, members of their community come from all over the Island of Ireland. They are constantly developing; extending their platform to infuse different art forms including dance, literature and photography. They hope to keep this blending of arts continuously growing throughout their future projects.
An Experiential Film by Reuben Brown
€URODANC€ debuts In the dusk we are shadows made of light, but we dance in the echoes of the summer, an experiential film that immerses the viewer in a saturated sensory landscape of light, sound and movement. In the dusk… is structured around a love poem composed entirely from fragmented Eurodance lyrics, romantic declarations, promises of forever, and fleeting goodbyes, cut up and reassembled into a tender, multilingual monologue. Echoing the pan-European appeal of the genre, the film draws on the genre’s linguistic and emotional excess, where English, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian and more converge into a shared language of desire and euphoria. These splinters unfold through sweeping lasers and shifting sonic textures, evoking the disorientating intensity of club encounters, and the emotional afterglow they leave behind, drawing the viewer into a suspended state where memory, fantasy and rhythm drift and merge. It is both devotional and dissolving, less a film than an encounter.
€URODANC€ text-piece* projected, speakers and sound-system, atmospheric soundscape**, custom laser-show, LaserWorld EL-230RGB MK2, Fuzzix F50SL Party Smoke Machine, smoke liquid scented with Calvin Klein CK One, PVC strip door curtain, printed accompaniment.
*37 min 05 sec [loop], 1080x1920px, single channel projection
**37 min 05 sec [loop] soundscape
CNC-machined OSB, softwood timber, steel hardware, industrial castors, recessed flight case handles, utility hooks, oscillating fans, flat-screen monitor on stand, extension cabling, single-channel and dual-channel film series* [loop]
200 x 70 x 70 cm [approx] 1080x1920px