IMMA celebrates its 30th Birthday,  with the IMMA Outdoors programme This playlist offers a selection of material that reflects on the resonance of the IMMA / RHK  site and history, ecology and engagement with diverse set of communities The emphasis for the programme lies in ideas of civic agency, self-determination, global interconnections, environmental concerns and what it means to be radically public by creating an inclusive meaningful space for all ages to relax, contemplate and enjoy. 
Image Caption: Forerunner, Y O U N G F O S S I L, 2021. Seating Structures - wood, steel, sawdust, dragon's blood, resin, paper, fabric. Commissioned by IMMA for IMMA Outdoors 2021. Supported by Public Service Innovation Fund. Presented with the kind support of OPW. Photography Ros Kavanagh.

IMMA OUTDOORS 2021/22/23

THE DEPARTMENT OF XENOGENESIS

The Department of Xenogenesis (DXG) is a time space enacted by The Otolith Group for convening public online and offline discussions, performance, screenings and exhibitions with artists, filmmakers, theorists and musicians. The DXG takes place in the context of the exhibition The Otolith Group, Xenogenesis and builds upon the exhibition.

Conceived as part of the Department of Xenogenesis (DXG); The Otolith Group present a day of rich discussion and reflections with invited international artists, writers, and thinkers. Audiences and guests are invited to come together to think about complicated notions of time, both metaphysical and planetary, and the temporal impact on the racial, politics, capitalism and technology.

On Friday 27 January, 6.00pm
(Live Streamed)

The event opens with a Virtual Keynote Address – The Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira Da Silva (Academic, Artist and Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia) discusses her book that exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.

On Saturday 28 January, 11.00am – 5.30pm 
IMMA Lecture Room 

The in-person programme comprises stimulating Conversations, Presentations and Artists Talks. International speakers and contributions include: Learning from Ice project with Susan Schuppli (Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture); Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna (Italian philosopher, writer, podcaster); Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future with Bahar Noorizadeh (artist, writer and filmmaker, Goldsmith PHD candidate); The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán (recent participant of documenta fifteen);The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by Boris Ondreička (artist, curator) and others.

Guests will draw on exhibition themes and methodologies of The Otolith Group’s work that includes post-cinematic essayist films, videos and multiple screen installations, that address contemporary social and planetary issues, the disruptions of neo/colonialism, the ways humans have impacted the earth and the influence of new technology on consciousness.

Exhibition Details:

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis, brings together a significant selection of works by The Otolith Group, the London-based artist collective founded in London in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun.

Featuring a cross-section of key works produced by The Otolith Group between 2011 and 2018, the exhibition reflects the artists’ ongoing commitment to creating what they think of as ‘a science fiction of the present’ through images, voices, sonic images, sounds, and performance.

Curated by Annie Fletcher, Director of IMMA.

DXG | The Department of Xenogenesis, Convened by The Otolith Group, 2023

SELF-DETERMINATION – A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
28 Oct 2023 – 21 April 2024 / Garden Galleries, Main Galleries, East Wing
Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is the culmination of a three-year research project focusing on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary perspectives is a key element of this project. IMMA TALKS  are made available in association with the exhibition.  The playlist features the voices of several artists, curators and scholars who critically reflect on the outcomes of the self-determination movements.

Self-Determination, A Global Perspective, 2023/24

Ireland, Feminism, Art - A Gathering

This symposium follows the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. As a sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) was forward looking in combing themes of gender, humanity, relationships, deep histories and religion, with sculptural form and materials of stone, lead, steel and wood. Exploring social, cultural and philosophical shifts of 1920/50s onwards, the symposium opens up new readings on Heron’s work, her modernist vision, past influences and the artist’s enduring relevance in the present. Programmed in collaboration between IMMA and Trinity College Dublin – The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery.

Modern Masters Symposium: Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor, 2024

In association with IMMA Outdoors + Common Ground, IMMA is delighted to host a talk by Professor Gerald Mills as part of the IMMA Outdoors evening programme.  the Mapping Green Dublin partners published its research, to find out more join Professor Mills who presents some fascinating findings and recommendations on the matter of trees and greening issues across Dublin 8.

Track Details:  Lecture + Discussion, Mapping Green Dublin with Gerald Mills and Common Ground,  IMMA Outdoors People's Pavilion June 2021
Mapping Green Dublin is an interdisciplinary research project that combined citizen science, community knowledge and experience, socially engaged arts practice and academia. Professor Gerald Mills will present its research findings and how communities can be provided with and use scientific data to develop local and strategic recommendations and projects and engage more equally with policymakers. Mapping Green Dublin partners focused its research on an area of Dublin that corresponds loosely with the postcode area of Dublin 8, an east-west area extending along the Liffey from the Liberties in the city centre to Inchicore. While the Dublin 8 neighbourhood was the immediate focus of the study, the methodologies adopted can be applied in any neighbourhood looking to develop alternative and inclusive approaches to urban greening.

About Speakers
PROFESSOR GERALD MILLS holds a BA in Geography and History at University College Dublin and completed a research Master’s degree at UCD between 1981 and 1983. This research examined the synoptic origins of precipitation in Ireland during the period 1970 to 1980 and was supervised by Stuart Daultrey. He moved to the USA in 1984 to pursue a PhD and attended The Ohio State University as a PhD student concentrating on the areas of climatology and cartography where he completed a PhD dissertation on the energy budget of urban streets (or canyons) using modelling and field observations. From 1989 to 1997 Gerald taught in the USA, first in Bowling Green State University, Ohio (1989-1990) and then at University of California at Los Angeles (1991-1997). Since 1997 Gerald has lectured in the Dept. of Geography at UCD.

Q+A PANELISTS
SEOIDIN O’SULLIVAN is a contemporary artist and educator. Her art projects are collaborative and focus on people joining together in action to protect and develop an aspect of their local commons. Her practice supports sustainable models within various ecological contexts and addresses issues of land use, lost knowledge, social justice and biodiversity. 

NIAMH MOORE CHERRY is an Associate Professor of Urban Governance and Development in the School of Geography, University College Dublin, Vice-Principal for Teaching and Learning in the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, and an Honorary Professor at the Bartlett School of Planning,

Gerald Mills and Common Ground discuss Mapping Green Dublin

In association with IMMA Outdoors - Collaborative arts practice Forerunner, with founding members Tanad Aaron, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch and Tom Watt, in conversation with Nathalie Weadick.

Track Details: Young Fossil Artists-in-Conversation  with Forerunner on  
1 October 2021,  IMMA Outdoors  People's Pavilion
Collaborative arts practice Forerunner founding members Tanad Aaron, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch and Tom Watt, discuss their project Y O U N G F O S S I L commissioned by IMMA. A conversation with the artists is led by Nathalie Weadick curator of architecture and spatial practice based in Dublin, and director of the Irish Architecture Foundation. Hear directly from the artists who share their ideas and thinking behind Y O U N G F O S S I L; the inspiration behind the materiality and making-process that is so specific to Forerunner’s ongoing practice, and the ways their timely project prompts us to reflect on for wider issues on the politics of housing, ecology, consumption, the environment and indeed challenges of public art commissioning for historical sites such as IMMA / RHK.

About Artists 
After graduating together in 2011/12 and supporting one another in different projects over several years, Forerunner began to work together officially in 2016. Their collaborations include architecturally interrogating Fine Art and specific objects built for, or against a function. In their separate practices, they are interested in the history of art practices and the fabrication and creation process used or deemed usable as an artist. Combined, their practice presents an ambitious interrogation of objects, environments and uses. Working with everyday or commonplace materials lends the works a familiarity while allowing them the freedom to be re-examined in a new and unfamiliar context. This methodology often ends in work whose emphasis is on its production values, be they self-made or factory finished, and a focus on the work’s overall coherent composition.

Over the past two years Forerunner’s work has begun to encompass an interest in Arte Util and a desire to quietly upgrade or criticise by fixing. The artists commonly refer to their exhibitions as tests; tests for the real world, tests for a future context and opportunities to try a different material or technique.

Recent projects include the Future and stuff, TULCA 2020; Architecture of Change, VOID, Derry, 2018; Museum of Mythological Waterbeasts, Ormston House, Limerick, 2018; Misplaced Concreteness, 2018, Grizedale Arts, 2018; Brute Clues, Project Arts Centre, 2016. Permanent commissions exist in Dublin, Belfast, The Lake District, Paris and Japan.

IMMA Outdoors Forerunner in conversation with Nathalie Weadick

In association with Club Chroma Chlorologia by Niall Sweeney, commissioned as part of the IMMA Outdoors programme IMMA invites ShoutOut and Queer Culture Ireland to facilitate a series of workshops that draws on their commitment and ethos to improve life for LGBTQ+ people. 

Track Details: Shoutout & Queer Culture Ireland, Workshop, Then and Now, Know Your Queer History,  IMMA Outdoors People's Pavilion, 07 August 2021. This workshop looks at cross-generational queer experiences in Ireland – to consider how things have changed since the earliest days of the movement, the role of archivists in documenting those changes, and how we might better build intergenerational links. Join a panel of guests who draw parallels between LGBTQ+ lives then and now, what has improved and what has deteriorated for the community as Ireland has changed. This offers us an opportunity to consider queer intersectional spaces today, who they serve, and what a truly inclusive space might look like for the community: one which is intergenerational and accessible to all.
This workshop is presented by Queer Culture Ireland and ShoutOut with invited guests that includes researcher, writer and visual artist Hannah Tiernan, Trans activist and chair of TENI Sara Phillips; Gay activist, and co-founder of the small ‘80s lobby group Gays Against Imperialism Cathal Kerrigan and others.

About Workshop Speakers
ShoutOut is a registered charity working to improve LGBTQ+ inclusion through education. Since 2012, we have delivered nearly 2,000 workshops to some 60,000 young people in secondary schools across the island of Ireland, to combat homophobic and transphobic bullying. We use our on-the-ground experience of speaking with young people to inform all of our training modules. 

Queer Culture Ireland : LGBTQ+ culture, history, and art group Queer Culture Ireland is a group for anyone interested in, working in or studying Irish queer culture, history, art, heritage founded by Judith Finlay and Kate Drinane. Queer Culture Ireland (QCI), in collaboration with Dublin LGBT Pride have also presented the HIV/AIDS exhibition titled ‘The Quilt: Echoes of Memories’ on World AIDS Day, previously collaborating with Dublin Pride in making the exhibition come to life in 2020 and since have hosted the exhibition at several venues. This was co-curated with Dr Patrick McDonagh

Shoutout & Queer Culture Ireland: Workshop, Then and Now, Know Your Queer History

In association with IMMA Outdoors and  Chroma Chlorologia, this bespoke workshop series draws on themes addressed by CHROMA in which to consider how artistic expression in Irish queer history and culture can tell us more about our identity and place in society today as LGBTQ+ people. This art based workshop looks at how art, design, and visual symbols have been used as tools for social change, and their ongoing importance in LGBTQ+ activism.

Track Details: LGBTQ+ Artistic and Activist Tools for Social Change, Online Workshop, Wed 27 October 2021
Revised for an  online workshop, our guests explores representation, education, and where LGBTQ+ stories can feature in curricula and media. Drawing on themes addressed by CHROMA, and to consider how artistic expression in Irish queer history and culture can tell us more about our identity and place in society today as LGBTQ+ people. This art based discussion looks at how art, design, and visual symbols have been used as tools for social change, and their ongoing importance in LGBTQ+ activism.

This discursive workshop is presented by Aifric Ní Chríodáin who will be joined by special guests Hannah Tiernan – visual artist, researcher and writer, Dónal Talbot – photographer and artist, whose works predominantly in portraiture, to showcase and empower the LGBTQ+ community, through representation in art; Alber Saborío – a trans nonbinary artist and sex educator from Honduras and co-founder and co-director of the trans-led art collective gender.RIP.

Explore the rich visual culture of LGBTQ+ communities and activism in Ireland, and join guests who focus on LGBTQ+ inclusion, encompassing an exploration of terminology, theory, fluidity of identity, and social and legal inequalities for LGBTQ+ people in Ireland, as they reflect on a wide variety of queer practices across Ireland that promote and celebrate equality and diversity.
About Speakers
ShoutOut is a registered charity working to improve LGBTQ+ inclusion through education. Since 2012, we have delivered nearly 2,000 workshops to some 60,000 young people in secondary schools across the island of Ireland, to combat homophobic and transphobic bullying. We use our on-the-ground experience of speaking with young people to inform all of our training modules. In addition to our workshops for students, we also offer capacity building training to teachers, youth workers, and any organisations working with young people, e.g. charities, public bodies, or educational institutions. This work is primarily supported by our workplace training and inclusion programmes, aimed at building supportive working environments for LGBTQ+ employees. ShoutOut’s core values are education, inclusion, and allyship. From year to year, the staff and volunteers actively review and refine workshop materials, to deliver the highest quality of LGBTQ+ inclusive education in Ireland.

Queer Culture Ireland : LGBTQ+ culture, history, and art group Queer Culture Ireland is a group for anyone interested in, working in or studying Irish queer culture, history, art, heritage founded by Judith Finlay and Kate Drinane. Queer Culture Ireland (QCI), in collaboration with Dublin LGBT Pride have also presented the HIV/AIDS exhibition titled ‘The Quilt: Echoes of Memories’ on World AIDS Day, previously collaborating with Dublin Pride in making the exhibition come to life in 2020 and since have hosted the exhibition at several venues. This was co-curated with Dr Patrick McDonagh.

Shout Out + Queer Culture Ireland, LGBTQ+ Artistic and Activist Tools for Social Change

This series of talks, convened by NCAD and IMMA, offer a reflection and discussion on archives and material documents, as a way to renegotiate the past and as a blueprint for future action. Participating speakers include Emily Jacir and Bik Van der Pol who will share the ways their work and methodologies overlap with archive-based practices.

Track Details: Creative Futures Academy (CFA) Time, Travel & Re-imagining the Past in Place, Online,  Weds 08 September 2021.
#1: In Conversation with Emily Jacir + Declan  Long
IMMA is delighted to partner on a series Public Talks with international guests, Bik Van der Pol and Emily Jacir, hosted by the Creative Futures Academy, the National College of Art and Design and IMMA.

Both Talks offer an opportunity to reflect on the entangled role that material documents play across different regions and times, both as a way to renegotiate the past and as a blueprint for future action. International guest artists and researchers Bik Van der Pol and Emily Jacir will offer their insight and experience into the way their work and methodologies overlap with archive-based practices. Each online talk comprises an artist’s presentation, followed by a moderated discussion to further explores themes and ideas related to Time – Travel – Past – Place.

About Artist 
Emily Jacir lives in the Mediterranean and is an artist and filmmaker who is primarily concerned with transformation, translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Select solo exhibitions include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016-17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009).

About The Creative Futures Academy (CFA)
The Creative Futures Academy (CFA) aims to support the development of sustainable careers for early and mid-career cultural and creative professionals through a mix of upskilling and reskilling. Through a range of flexible course offerings, the CFA will equip learners with the attributes that they require to thrive and to shape the future of Ireland’s cultural and creative sector.

CFA #1: Emily Jacir & Declan Long, Time, Travel & Re-imagining the Past in Place

IMMA PAST FUTURES is a new heritage podcasts series supported by the Heritage Council Heritage Stewardship Fund 2022 and will be released in conjunction with the National Heritage Week programme in August 2022.  The series is co-hosted by IMMA’s Heritage Researcher and Historian, Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor, IMMA Development and heritage enthusiast. Each podcast explores the site's shared histories and heritage, from gate to gate walk of the site, to featuring unique perspectives from invited guests.

Episode One: Gate to Gate  -  A Land Walk of the Site
Presented by Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor
This gate to gate talk and walk of the land of the IMMA - RHK site - introduces this new podcast series - IMMA Past Futures, by bringing the listener on a journey of the geography of Kilmainham and the iconic landmarks located across the grounds. This starts from the East Gate where rivers of the Camac and Liffey meet, to include the history of the RHK Building and the Garden Galleries, right through to The Meadow's, Monastic settlement,  Lost Priory and the cemeteries of Bully's Acre, concluding at the West Gate and Richmond Tower.

Further Information
The site of the Royal Hospital/IMMA has been of exceptional importance in terms of local and national history from the earliest human settlements in the Liffey estuary. The earliest dated human occupation is dated back to 1950 BCE with the discovery of a Bronze-age cemetery at the eastern gate of the museum in 2006. They will interview key specialists and artists that have developed art works in response to the site heritage and delve into a wide range of heritage phenomena related to the site.Released between August and December the podcasts will encourage our visitors to come to our site and engage more widely with the richness of the local heritage.

IMMA PAST FUTURES is programmed in association with the IMMA Outdoors programme; IMMA’s Decade of Commemoration programme, 100yrs of Self-determination; and extends on the IMMA TALKS series programme.

Acknowledgements 
IMMA Past Futures - Podcast Series
Produced by Sophie Byrne (IMMA Talks)
Research: Barry Kehoe (IMMA)
Presented and Co-hosts: Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor(IMMA)
Guest Editor: Clíodhna Ní Anluain 
Sound + Production: Amy O'Dwyer, Conor Reid (Headstuff.Org)
Supported by: The Heritage Council Heritage Stewardship Fund 2022.

IMMA PAST FUTURES - #1 Gate to Gate  -  A Land Walk of the Site

In association with IMMA’s 30th Birthday exhibition, The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, IMMA is delighted to invite internationally renowned quantum physicist feminist theorist Karen Barad to offer critical reflection on the troubling times and ecologies of our global present.

Track: Karen Barad: Re-membering time/s, for the time-being, 2022
Talk and discussion: Thurs 12th May 2022, 7pm, ONLINE

IMMA is delighted to invite internationally renowned quantum physicist feminist theorist Karen Barad to offer critical reflection on the troubling times and ecologies of our global present. This keynote talk coincides with the final week to experience Chapter One: Queer Embodiment of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now 

Author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the UC Santa Cruz and is celebrated for their theory of Agential Realism. This keynote talk by Barad is a continuum of investigations into the entanglement of matter and meaning, to radically expose the ways in which quantum physics needs to be troubled while simultaneously troubling modernist conceptions of time and being. Barad invites us to observe the mysteries of ‘quantum temporalities’ that in turn present radical political imaginaries for cohabiting this planet more justly, by ‘undoing the future’.

This talk is followed by a moderated discussion with Dr. EL Putnam, a digital artist, who works as Lecturer in Digital Media, Programme Director, MA in Digital Media, National University Ireland Galway.

Presented in the context of Chapter One: Queer Embodiment and Chapter Two: The Anthropocene of The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now


Keynote Speaker: Karen Barad

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad is also affiliated faculty in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad was one of the Co-Founders of UCSC’s Science & Justice Research Center and the Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program. 

Discussion Moderator: EL Putnam

Dr. EL Putnam is an internationally recognised digital artist and a lecturer in Digital Media at NUI Galway. Dr. Putnam’s practice discovers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the body and data; her artworks and performances have travelled to the United States, Europe and beyond. Recent experiments have seen the artist create generative animations using biometric data, such as heart rate and oxygen levels. In this interview, Dr. Putnam shares her thoughts on creativity, education and the materiality of technology.

Karen Barad: Re-membering time/s, for the time-being, 2022

IMMA PAST FUTURES is a new heritage podcasts series supported by the Heritage Council Heritage Stewardship Fund 2022 and will be released in conjunction with the National Heritage Week programme in August 2022. The series is co-hosted by IMMA’s VET Heritage Researcher and Historian, Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor, IMMA VET heritage enthusiast. Each podcast explores the site's shared histories and heritage, from gate to gate walk of the site, to featuring unique perspectives from invited guests.

Episode Two: St. Maighneann with Dr. Edel Bhreatnach
Presented by Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor, Released 11 September 2022.
In this episode of IMMA Past Futures co-hosts Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor invite special guest historian, author and Lecturer in early medieval history Dr Edel Bhreatnach, to discuss the early Christian monastery of St Maighneann, the earliest documented occupation of the site of Kilmainham, where IMMA/ RHK is located. In several manuscripts written well after the death of the Saint that lends his name to Kilmainham, this podcast reflects on St Maighneann as a figure of profound importance and veneration. We have a very brief glimpse into the monastic life of St. Maighneann, the settlement he founded overlooking the ford of the river Liffey at what is now called Island bridge, and is part of the Dublin 8 city district area of IMMA / RHK.

Further Information
About Guest 
Edel Bhreathnach is a medieval historian with a particular interest in interdisciplinary studies that connect archaeology, history and literature. She was CEO of The Discovery Programme: Centre for Archaeology and Innovation Ireland (2013-9) and is a former Visiting Fellow to All Souls College Oxford (2016). She has worked on large-scale projects relating to Tara, a rich landscape of prehistoric and medieval kingship in modern Co. Meath, on the history of the Franciscans in Ireland, and on monasticism in Ireland from the tenth to the thirteenth century. She has published widely on these subjects including her volume Ireland in the medieval world 400-1000AD: landscape, kingship and religion published in 2014 (Four Courts Press, Dublin). She co-edited Monastic Europe: communities, landscapes and settlements (Brepols: Turnhout, 2019).

About IMMA Past Futures - Podcasts
The site of the Royal Hospital/IMMA has been of exceptional importance in terms of local and national history from the earliest human settlements in the Liffey estuary. The earliest dated human occupation is dated back to 1950 BCE with the discovery of a Bronze-age cemetery at the eastern gate of the museum in 2006. They will interview key specialists and artists that have developed art works in response to the site heritage and delve into a wide range of heritage phenomena related to the site. Released between August and December the podcasts will encourage our visitors to come to our site and engage more widely with the richness of the local heritage.

IMMA PAST FUTURES is programmed in association with the IMMA Outdoors programme; IMMA’s Decade of Commemoration programme, 100yrs of Self-determination; and extends on the IMMA TALKS series programme.

Acknowledgements
IMMA Past Futures - Podcast Series
Research: Barry Kehoe (Visitor Engagement Team IMMA)
Presenter & Co-hosts: Barry Kehoe with Stephen Taylor (Visitor Engagement Team, IMMA)
Produced by Sophie Byrne (IMMA Talks & Public Programmes)
Guest Editor: Clíodhna Ní Anluain
Sound + Production: Amy O'Dwyer, Conor Reid (Headstuff.Org)
Supported by: The Heritage Council Heritage Stewardship Fund 2022.

IMMA PAST FUTURES - #2 St. Maighneann with Dr. Edel Bhreatnach

List to artist Patricia Hurl, for a keynote discussion on her major retrospective exhibition at IMMA. The artist is joined in conversation with art historian, writer, and curator Catherine Marshall, together they reflect on the significance of Hurl’s longstanding, socially inclusive art practice and the context for some of the most challenging feminist artworks made by Hurl from the 1980s to today.

Track Details:
Exhibition Preview Talk | Irish Gothic with Patricia Hurl & Catherine Marshall | February 9th 2023, Lecture Room, IMMA.

Exhibition Details: 
IMMA is delighted to present this major retrospective by Patricia Hurl, one of Ireland’s most accomplished artists. Hurl’s work is by its nature political, and traverses the disciplines of painting, multi-media and collaborative art practice. Since the 1970s, she has created work that deals with loss, pain, frustration and loneliness.

The exhibition features over 70 works, mainly drawn from early paintings in which she exposed and upended our standard images of Irish suburban domesticity and bliss. Early works such as Ennui (1985) and Company Wife (1986) demonstrate Hurl’s characteristic use of highly expressionistic and layered brushstrokes that tend to blur distinctions between the figurative and abstraction. This stylistic blend intensifies the visceral qualities and emotion in Hurl’s work painted in spontaneous and instinctive bursts. Her immersive works make use of distinctive palettes that map stages of the artist’s life and mirror preoccupations in her work, such as the muted tones of a marital breakup in (add title figures attached at the feet) or the vivid red responses to media coverage documenting war and violence in works such as Hurl’s ongoing Warrior Series. The exhibition includes a selection of the many sketchbooks and diaries that have always been central to Hurl’s practice and an integral part of her thought process.

Speaker Details:

Originally from Dublin and a former member of Temple Bar Galleries and Studios, Dublin, Patricia Hurl often works in collaboration with artist Therry Rudin. Hurl was a lecturer in Fine Art Painting at the Dublin Institute of Technology and studied at the National College of Art and Design,1975 and at Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design,1984. Hurl currently runs the Damer Gallery in Co Tipperary along with Therry Rudin. In 1984 she won the Norah Mc Guinness award for painting. 

Hurl’s work was recently included in The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now: IMMA 30 Years of the Global Contemporary: Queer Embodiment; IMMA, Dublin 2021 – 2022; Elliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body, 1984 to the present, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Co Louth and Limerick City Art Gallery, 2019 – 2020. Hurl has exhibited in selected group and solo shows and has represented Ireland in symposiums in Atlanta USA, Caversham, S.A. and Zaragossa, Spain. She was a contributor to The Great Book of Ireland. Her work is included in the recent publication Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume V: Twentieth Century, Royal Irish Academy, 2015. Hurl’s work is represented in private and public collections including IMMA; The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon; The Highlanes Gallery and the Collection of University of Limerick. 

Catherine Marshall, 
Catherine Marshall is a curator and art historian. She lectured in art history at Trinity College Dublin, the National College of Art and Design and University College Dublin.  In 2019 she was recipient of the first honorary doctorate in the History of Art from University College Dublin. As founding head of collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art she curated exhibitions of Outsider art from the Musgrave Kinley Collection, exhibitions of Irish art in China, USA and the UK and throughout Ireland with the IMMA National Programme. She co-edited Art and architecture of Ireland, Vol. V, Twentieth Century (2014) and is an active member of Na Cailleacha (NaCailleacha.weebly.com).

Exhibition Preview Talk | Irish Gothic with Patricia Hurl & Catherine Marshall, 2023.

Conceived as part of the Department of Xenogenesis (DXG); The Otolith Group present a day of rich discussion and reflections with invited international artists, writers, and thinkers. Audiences and guests are invited to come together to think about complicated notions of time, both metaphysical and planetary, and the temporal impact on the racial, politics, capitalism and technology. 

Track Details: The Department of Xenogenesis, The Unpayable Debt with Denise Ferreira Da Silva & The Otolith Group | Friday 27th of January, 2023 | Online. 

The event opens with a Virtual Keynote Address – The Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira Da Silva (Academic, Artist and Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia) discusses her book that exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.

Speaker Details:
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and an artist and currently lives and works in Vancouver. She holds the following positions: Professor at the Institute for Social Justice – GRSJ, at the University of British Columbia, Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art, Faculty at the European Graduate School, and the 2023 International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (UMP, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP, LC, & Casa do Povo, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 20212), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022). She is co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (JHUP, 2013) and (with Mark Harris) of Postcolonialism and the Law: Major Works (Routledge 2018) and Indigenous peoples and the Law: Major Works (Routledge, 2019). Her publications include the monograph Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), and the edited volume Law, Race, and the Postcolonial – A Handbook (2015). Her artistic work includes collaborations such as the films Serpent Rain (with Arjuna Neuman, 2016) and From Left to Night (with Wendelien van Oldenborgh, 2014), as well as events and texts which are part of her Poethical Readings practice (with Valentina Desideri). She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people.

The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in London in 2002. Their work and practice are informed by an aesthetic of seeing and listening across media, or ‘seeing in the key of listening’ as they describe, or as ‘science fictions of the present’ in which installations, moving images, sonic speculations, performances, publications, lectures and gatherings explore intertemporality and interscalarity as the challenge of rethinking time in the process of worldmaking. Since 2002 The Otolith Group formed a research-based practice that studies time travel in multimedia formats producing transnational narrative challenges that evoke an expanded relationship to moving image and sound in the age of screens and technocapture.

The Department of Xenogenesis, The Unpayable Debt with Denise Ferreira Da Silva & The Otilith Group

Join The Otolith Group artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in person, for a specially curated series of talks and discussions, featuring contributions by an international mix of dynamic guests. Chaired by The Otolith Group contributors include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Federico Campagna, Susan Schuppli , Bahar Noorizadeh, Erick Beltrán and Boris Ondreička.

Track Details:
The Department of Xenogenesis, Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna & The Otlith Group | Saturday 28th of January, 2023 | Lecture Room.

The in-person programme comprises stimulating Conversations, Presentations and Artists Talks. International speakers and contributions include: Learning from Ice project with Susan Schuppli (Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture); Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna (Italian philosopher, writer, podcaster); Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future with Bahar Noorizadeh (artist, writer and filmmaker, Goldsmith PHD candidate); The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán (recent participant of documenta fifteen);The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by Boris Ondreička (artist, curator) and others.

Guests will draw on exhibition themes and methodologies of The Otolith Group’s work that includes post-cinematic essayist films, videos and multiple screen installations, that address contemporary social and planetary issues, the disruptions of neo/colonialism, the ways humans have impacted the earth and the influence of new technology on consciousness.

Speaker Deatils:
Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His works revolves around the metaphysics of world-building and it mythological resonance. His latest books are ‘Prophetic Culture’ (Bloomsbury 2021) and ‘Technic and Magic’ (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is Critical Fellow at the Royal Academy School in London and Frances A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. He is the host of the literary podcast Overmorrow’s Library, produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. He works at the radical publisher Verso (UK/US) and at the philosophy publisher Timeo (Italy)

The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in London in 2002. Their work and practice are informed by an aesthetic of seeing and listening across media, or ‘seeing in the key of listening’ as they describe, or as ‘science fictions of the present’ in which installations, moving images, sonic speculations, performances, publications, lectures and gatherings explore intertemporality and interscalarity as the challenge of rethinking time in the process of worldmaking. Since 2002 The Otolith Group formed a research-based practice that studies time travel in multimedia formats producing transnational narrative challenges that evoke an expanded relationship to moving image and sound in the age of screens and technocapture.

The Department of Xenogenesis, Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna & The Otilith Group

Join The Otolith Group artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, for a specially curated series of talks and discussions, featuring contributions by an international mix of dynamic guests. Chaired by The Otolith Group contributors include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Federico Campagna, Susan Schuppli , Bahar Noorizadeh, Erick Beltrán and Boris Ondreička

Track Details: 
Department of Xenogenesis, Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future , with Bahar Noorizadeh & The Otilith Group | Saturday 28th of January 2023 | The Lecture Room.

Conceived as part of the Department of Xenogenesis (DXG); The Otolith Group present a day of rich discussion and reflections with invited international artists, writers, and thinkers. Audiences and guests are invited to come together to think about complicated notions of time, both metaphysical and planetary, and the temporal impact on the racial, politics, capitalism and technology.

The in-person programme comprises stimulating Conversations, Presentations and Artists Talks. International speakers and contributions include: Learning from Ice project with Susan Schuppli (Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture); Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna (Italian philosopher, writer, podcaster); Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future with Bahar Noorizadeh (artist, writer and filmmaker, Goldsmith PHD candidate); The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán (recent participant of documenta fifteen);The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by Boris Ondreička (artist, curator) and others.

Guests will draw on exhibition themes and methodologies of The Otolith Group’s work that includes post-cinematic essayist films, videos and multiple screen installations, that address contemporary social and planetary issues, the disruptions of neo/colonialism, the ways humans have impacted the earth and the influence of new technology on consciousness.

Speaker Details:
Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. She is pursuing her work as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in London in 2002. Their work and practice are informed by an aesthetic of seeing and listening across media, or ‘seeing in the key of listening’ as they describe, or as ‘science fictions of the present’ in which installations, moving images, sonic speculations, performances, publications, lectures and gatherings explore intertemporality and interscalarity as the challenge of rethinking time in the process of worldmaking. Since 2002 The Otolith Group formed a research-based practice that studies time travel in multimedia formats producing transnational narrative challenges that evoke an expanded relationship to moving image and sound in the age of screens and technocapture.

The Department of Xenogenesis, Teslaism, with Bahar Noorizadeh & The Otilith Group

Join The Otolith Group artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, for a specially curated series of talks and discussions, featuring contributions by an international mix of dynamic guests. Chaired by The Otolith Group contributors include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Federico Campagna, Susan Schuppli , Bahar Noorizadeh, Erick Beltrán and Boris Ondreička.

Track Details:
The Department of Xenogensis, The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán & The Otilith Group | Saturday January 28th, 2023 | The Lecture Room.

Conceived as part of the Department of Xenogenesis (DXG); The Otolith Group present a day of rich discussion and reflections with invited international artists, writers, and thinkers. Audiences and guests are invited to come together to think about complicated notions of time, both metaphysical and planetary, and the temporal impact on the racial, politics, capitalism and technology.

The programme comprises stimulating Conversations, Presentations and Artists Talks. International speakers and contributions include: Learning from Ice project with Susan Schuppli (Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture); Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna (Italian philosopher, writer, podcaster); Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future with Bahar Noorizadeh (artist, writer and filmmaker, Goldsmith PHD candidate); The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán (recent participant of documenta fifteen);The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by Boris Ondreička (artist, curator) and others.

Speaker Details:
Erick Beltrán (b. 1974, Mexico City, Mexico)lives & works in Barcelona, Spain. Beltrán analyzes and reflects on transversal knowledge constructions and figures, through diverse formats such as publications, installations, diagrammatic displays, or lectures. His work for documenta fifteen, Manifold(2022), is a study of the relationship between unity and multiplicity, and of the forms and images we create to represent that relationship. “It is well-known that the individual is an idea that emerged only recently, about 300 years ago,” says Beltrán. Manifold was inspired by the theories of Furio Jesi, Aby Warburg, & Horst Bredekamp, among others, Beltrán & researchers from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kassel conducted interviews with Kassel residents, who were asked about the image that emerges when thinking about the image of power. The goal was to generate a projection between the interviewee(The unity) and their imaginative and iconographic relationship with forms of power, as mediated by social filters(the multiplicity). The resulting sequence, on display at the Museum of Sepulchral Culture in Kassel, displays the products of this research: a complete set of images that emerged from the interviews as well as the theories and diagrams that explain its relations.

The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in London in 2002. Their work and practice are informed by an aesthetic of seeing and listening across media, or ‘seeing in the key of listening’ as they describe, or as ‘science fictions of the present’ in which installations, moving images, sonic speculations, performances, publications, lectures and gatherings explore intertemporality and interscalarity as the challenge of rethinking time in the process of worldmaking. Since 2002 The Otolith Group formed a research-based practice that studies time travel in multimedia formats producing transnational narrative challenges that evoke an expanded relationship to moving image and sound in the age of screens and technocapture.

The Department of Xenogenesis, Project discussion with Erick Beltrán & The Otilith Group

Join The Otolith Group artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in person, for a specially curated series of talks and discussions, featuring contributions by an international mix of dynamic guests. Chaired by The Otolith Group contributors include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Federico Campagna, Susan Schuppli , Bahar Noorizadeh, Erick Beltrán and Boris Ondreička

Track Details:
The Department of Xenogenesis, The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by/with Boris Ondreička & The Otilith Group.

The programme comprises stimulating Conversations, Presentations and Artists Talks. International speakers and contributions include: Learning from Ice project with Susan Schuppli (Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture); Technic and Magic with Federico Campagna (Italian philosopher, writer, podcaster); Teslaism: Economics at the End of the End of the Future with Bahar Noorizadeh (artist, writer and filmmaker, Goldsmith PHD candidate); The theoretical background of Manifold and The Image of Power projects with Erick Beltrán (recent participant of documenta fifteen);The genesis and work of the artist Suzanne Treister titled: TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival by Boris Ondreička (artist, curator) and others.

Guests will draw on exhibition themes and methodologies of The Otolith Group’s work that includes post-cinematic essayist films, videos and multiple screen installations, that address contemporary social and planetary issues, the disruptions of neo/colonialism, the ways humans have impacted the earth and the influence of new technology on consciousness.

Speaker Details:
Boris Ondreička (*1969) is an artist, curator, artistic director of viennacontemporary, based in Bratislava, SK and Vienna, AT. He co-runs participatory educational platform Class of Interpretation (Prague, CZ). He is former director of tranzit.sk (Bratislava) and curator at TBA21 (Vienna, AT). Amongst many he has co-curated Rare Earth, Olafur Eliasson „Green light—An Artistic Workshop“, Ephemeroptera, Supper Club (all TBA21), The Question of Will, OSF (Bratislava), Empire of the Senseless, Meetfactory (Prague); Manifesta 8 (Murcia, Cartagena, ES), Being The Future, Palast der Republik (Berlin). His artistic projects were presented at Bergen Assembly 2019, Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg), Venice-, Tai-Pei-, Athens-, Kyiv-, Jakarta- biennials; MoMA PS1 and New Museum (NYC), BAK (Utrecht), Smak (Gent), Tramway (Glasgow), Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo (Turin), Le Plateau, Air de Paris (Paris), Badischer Kunstverein (Karslruhe), Würtembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), HMKV (Dortmund); Kiasma (Helsinki); HKW (Berlin); Secession, Mumok, Kunsthalle (Vienna).

The Otolith Group was founded by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in London in 2002. Their work and practice are informed by an aesthetic of seeing and listening across media, or ‘seeing in the key of listening’ as they describe, or as ‘science fictions of the present’ in which installations, moving images, sonic speculations, performances, publications, lectures and gatherings explore intertemporality and interscalarity as the challenge of rethinking time in the process of worldmaking. Since 2002 The Otolith Group formed a research-based practice that studies time travel in multimedia formats producing transnational narrative challenges that evoke an expanded relationship to moving image and sound in the age of screens and technocapture.

The Department of Xenogenesis, TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS with Boris Ondreička & The Otilith Group

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is the culmination of a three-year research project focusing on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War. To offer reflection on how contemporary artists today, reckon with the legacies of this period, this special roundtable conversation, brings together national and international artists to introduce the thinking and making of new and existing works that comprise the museum wide exhibition at IMMA, presenting a timely exploration of our connected historical landscape with the hindsight of a century later.

Track Details: Exploring Revolutionary Histories through the Eyes of Contemporary Artists, 29 November, 2023, IMMA 
Chaired by Annie Fletcher, IMMA director,
In Order of Speaking, Participating Artists include: 
1. Jasmina Cibic - 2. Minna Henriksson - 3. Declan Clarke - 4. İz Öztat - 
5. Larissa Sansour - 6. Array Collective (Emma Campbell / Laura O’Connor). 

Artists share insights into the ways their work engages with movements and ideas of self-determination, offering a range of perspectives on the unforeseen consequences of nation building, imperial rule, and the inter-generational quest for identity, within today’s complex global terrain.

More Details 

SELF-DETERMINATION – A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
28 Oct 2023 – 21 April 2024 / Garden Galleries, Main Galleries, East Wing

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is the culmination of a three-year research project focusing on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary perspectives is a key element of this project.

IMMA has commissioned new works by Array Collective, Jasmina Cibic, Declan Clarke, Minna Henriksson and İz Öztat; alongside co-commissions by Banu Çennetoğlu, and Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. The commissions bring together international artists to critically reflect on the outcomes of the self-determination movements, shedding light on the successes, failures, and unanticipated consequences.

Image Credits: Jasmina Cibic, Beacons, 2023, commissioned by IMMA,  film still, courtesy of the artist.

Artists Conversation: Self-Determination, A Global Perspective, 2023

This special in gallery talk on selected works comprising Self-Determination: A Global Perspective exhibition. Led by IMMA Curator Seán Kissane (IMMA), this talk pays particular attention to artworks from the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) Collection, that is just one of the highlights of this global exhibition initiative at IMMA. 

Track Details: Self-Determination, A Global Perspective with  response by Ukrainian art specialist Dr. Nadia Tymchuk.
30 November 2023 at IMMA. 

NOTE:  This audio is released for research and study purposes. When Talks are recorded in the public setting of IMMA Galleries,  some noise and variations in volume are experienced.

To extend the conversation, Dr. Nadia Tymchuk, Researcher at NAMU, introduces the defining tropes of Ukrainian art, and historical work of featured Ukrainian artists that punctuate IMMA’s museum wide exhibition. This offers comparative viewpoints on the various linguistic, folk, and artistic tenets associated with revolutionary events of Ukraine’s Independence. Questions of self-determination and remaining divisions of the Russian / Soviet Empire are ever more poignant today, where our guest shares views on urgent issues of decolonisation, national identity and the preservation of cultural heritage. 

More Details 
About Speaker
Dr. Nadiia Tymchuk (Pavlichenko), born 1989, Ukrainian. Received a professional education in the field of Cultural Studies at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Bachelor and Master Levels 2006–2012; Postgraduate Studies 2012–2015). Since 2010 has been working as the Researcher at the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU). Since 2017 combines scientific work with work in the field of charity as CEO “Charitable Foundation of NAMU”. In March 2017, successfully defended a dissertation thesis on the history of Ukrainian art market for the degree of Candidate of Culturology (corresponds to the international PhD in Cultural Studies). From that moment along with the work at the museum started as a Senior Lecturer at the Cultural Studies Department and later as Deputy Dean (since 2019) of the Faculty of Humanities at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”.

As an independent curator and art critic participated in different projects, among which the Ogo Art project (2016–2018) devoted to promotion and development of young Ukrainian artists, and number of personal exhibitions. Published as a freelance art-critic at “The Day” newspaper in the section of culture (2019–2022).

Curators' Talk: Self-Determination, A Ukraine Perspective, Seán Kissane & Nadia Tymchuk, 2023

Courtesy of the artist Minna Henriksson (Finland), this audio work is also presented in the Garden Galleries, as part a series of commissioned new works by IMMA for the major IMMA exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, on show until 21 April 2024.

Track Details 
Title: Minna Henriksson, Motherhood / Birth Control, 
Audio Work, Duration, 22 minutes, 2023

Interviewees Featured:
Dr Mary McAuliffe is a historian and Director of the Gender Studies Programme at UCD
Dr. Joseph McBrinn is Reader in Art and Design History, Belfast School of Art, Ulster University
Dr. Angela Griffith, Assistant Professor, History Of Art, Trinity College Dublin
Dr. Róisín Kennedy is Lecturer/Assistant Professor, the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at UCD

About Audio Work
Henriksson examines the prevalent race discourse intertwined with the concept of the nation, centred on male ideals, and at ways in which women’s cause was betrayed during the early years of the Free State. Many women did not stay silent in the face of their increasing oppression. Leftist women’s groups were among those who remained active and vocal after the establishment of the Irish Free State, finding inventive clandestine ways to protest and demonstrate in the increasingly oppressive interwar period. But can we recognise similar protest in artworks of the times? Beatrice Elvery (Lady Glanavy, 1883-1970) is said to have painted, or at least planned a painting, titled Motherhood/Birth Control, depicting two women burying a baby by the light of a kitchen lamp.[i]Dr. Nicola Gordon Bowe in Irish Arts Review Yearbook Vol. 11 (1995)

About Artist
Minna Henriksson
Minna Henriksson (b. 1976, Oulu, Finland, lives in Helsinki) is a visual artist working with a disparate range of tools including text, drawing, painting and linocut. She studied art in Brighton, Helsinki and Malmö. Henriksson’s work relates to leftist, anti-racist and feminist struggles. Her works are often based on extensive archival research and draw from real historical events aiming to bring forth marginalisation and oppression, and to highlight positions of power. Dealing with historical cases she aims to politicise processes in the present that seem neutral and inevitable. A thematic in her work is the ideological nature of history writing itself. Henriksson is also interested in exploring the language of political art and modes of representation. 

Image Credit: Minna Henriksson Limits of the State, 2023 
Pencil Drawing, Commissioned by IMMA

Minna Henriksson, Motherhood / Birth Control, Audio Work, 2023

As part of IMMA's lunchtime talks series, Elaine Hoey presents a curator’s talk and introduction on featured artworks presented as part of the RDS Visual Art Awards 2023 exhibition at IMMA. 

Track Details: RDS Visual Art Awards – Curators Talk with Elaine Hoey, 2024 
Recorded 17 January 2024 at IMMA.

Looking at the featured work of 15 recent graduate artists, Hoey introduces overlapping themes of identity, climate change, migrant issues and everyday living realities of housing crisis, that underpins several artists’ work in this group exhibition.  

About Speaker: 
Elaine Hoey is a New Media Artist with a specialty in virtual reality and interactive art. Elaine creates interactive based installations, appropriating contemporary digital art practices and aesthetics to explore the politics of digital humanity and our evolving relationship with the screen. Elaine is interested in creating new forms of art informed by questions arising from complex social, political and cultural processes. 

Elaine’s work often addresses and critiques themes arising from identity, place and the bio-political body. Her virtual reality works commonly include immersing the viewer in performative and often uncomfortable roles within her digitally constructed worlds. She works through a wide variety of mediums such as, virtual reality, AI systems, video, gaming, installation and live performance, including remote cyber performance. 

Hoey holds a BA and MFA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design. Upon graduating from both degrees, Elaine exhibited at the RDS Visual Art Awards in subsequent years, where she was won the RDS Taylor Art Award 2016, the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award 2017 and the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award 2017. Elaine has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally. 

About Exhibition: 
IMMA West Wing Galleries until 3 Mar 2024 
 
RDS Visual Art Award 
The RDS Visual Art Awards is the most important platform for visual art graduates in Ireland. It provides a curated exhibition opportunity and a significant prize fund of over €35,000, as well as vital exposure for emerging visual artists as they move into early professional practice. 

2023 RDS Visual Art Awards 
The 2023 RDS Visual Art Awards exhibition runs at IMMA from 8 December 2023 to 3 March 2024. The show is curated by Irish artist Elaine Hoey and is exhibited in the West Wing Galleries at IMMA from December 8 2023 – March 3 2024. Exhibiting Artists include: Àjàó Babátúndé Lawal, Anthony Freeman O Brien, Asha Murray, Christopher Mc Mullan, Cian Handschuh, Emily Waszak, Grace Ryan, Jinny Ly, Laura Grisard, Luis Enrique Martín, Nikolas Ryan, Oisín Tozer, Ren Coffey, Saoirse McGarry, Taïm Haimet. 

The team of independent curators appointed by the RDS to conduct the initial longlisting process for the 2023 RDS Visual Art Awards, included Mary Cremin, Eamonn Maxwell, Rayne Booth, Sarah McAuliffe and Aisling Prior. The team visited BA & MA degree shows in Irish art colleges to provide a longlist of 109 artists who were invited to complete an application. A judging panel that included Mary McCarthy, Eithne Jordan, Christina Kennedy, Gary Coyle and Irish artist Elaine Hoey, reviewed all applications. From a shortlisted 26 artists, the judging panel selected 15 exhibiting artists for the 2023 RDS Visual Art Awards exhibition.

RDS Visual Art Awards – Curators Talk with Elaine Hoey, 2024

To coincide with national celebrations that mark St Brigid’s day, IMMA is delighted to partner with Feminist Art Making Histories’ (IRC/AHRC) to present, Ireland, Feminism, Art – A GATHERING. National and international guests come together to discuss Feminist Art Making Histories, with a special focus on the pioneering work and art historical legacy of women artist – activist group WAAG (1987 – 1991).

This historical GATHERING brings together intergenerational, cross-disciplinary and cross-border/s perspectives to probe the shared, yet occluded, cultural heritage of the encounter between art and feminism across the island of Ireland. 

Track Details:
Ireland, Feminism, Art- A Gathering. Recorded 1 February 2024 at IMMA. 

About Speaker:
Professor Hilary Robinson is the UK PI, Feminist Art Making Histories. Since 2017 she has been Professor of Feminism, Art, & Theory, Loughborough University, where she is also Director, Centre for Doctoral Training: Feminism, Sexual Politics, & Visual Culture. She gained BA Painting (Newcastle); MA Cultural History (RCA); PhD (Leeds). At U.Ulster, Belfast (1992-2005) she taught BA Fine Art, MFA, and PhD, becaming Professor of the Politics of Art, and then Head of School. She was appointed Dean, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; and in 2012 Dean, Art & Design, Middlesex University. Her books include: Visibly Female (ed.); Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women; Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2001 and 1968-2014; Companion to Feminist Art (co-ed.: Maria Buszek). Forthcoming books are: Feminism/Art: A History; and Feminisms-Museums-Surveys: An Anthology (co-ed.: Lara Perry). She is the recipient of the College Art Association’s award for Distinguished Feminist Scholarship, 2024. Both Professor Hilary Robinson and Dr Tina Kinsella are the curators of the FAMH project.

About Project: 
The ‘Feminist Art Making Histories’ (FAMH) research project is recording, curating, and creating a digital archive of oral histories and ephemera associated with artistic and feminist practices to explore the hidden history of the encounter between art and feminism in Ireland and the UK since the 1970s. This unique archive will be held in perpetuity in the Digital Repository of Ireland.

'Ireland, Feminism, Art- A Gathering' Keynote Talk Hilary Robinson

To coincide with national celebrations that mark St Brigid’s day, IMMA is delighted to partner with Feminist Art Making Histories’ (IRC/AHRC) to present, Ireland, Feminism, Art – A GATHERING. National and international guests come together to discuss Feminist Art Making Histories, with a special focus on the pioneering work and art historical legacy of women artist – activist group WAAG (1987 – 1991).

This historical GATHERING brings together intergenerational, cross-disciplinary and cross-border/s perspectives to probe the shared, yet occluded, cultural heritage of the encounter between art and feminism across the island of Ireland.

Track Details:
Ireland, Feminism, Art- A Gathering. Recorded 1 February 2024 at IMMA.

About Speaker:
Dr. Tina Kinsella is the Irish PI for ‘Feminist Art Making Histories’ (FAMH). She is Head of Research at IADT and Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, TCD. She has collaborated with contemporary artists as a writer, researcher and curator. She recently curated a joint exhibition of work by Aideen Barry and Alice Maher, Fair is Foul & Foul is Fair, at the Katzen Center, American University, Washington DC and she was a researcher and writer for Jesse Jones’s ‘Tremble Tremble’ for the 57th International Biennale of Art in 2017. She has been commissioned to write art catalogue essays and presented keynote lectures and invited talks at the Mothernists collective, Elliott School of International Affairs (New York University), Van Abbemuseum, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Royal Hibernian Academy, Ireland at Venice, Istanbul Biennial, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery. 

About Project:
The ‘Feminist Art Making Histories’ (FAMH) research project is recording, curating, and creating a digital archive of oral histories and ephemera associated with artistic and feminist practices to explore the hidden history of the encounter between art and feminism in Ireland and the UK since the 1970s. This unique archive will be held in perpetuity in the Digital Repository of Ireland.

'Ireland, Feminism, Art - A Gathering' Keynote Speaker Dr. Tina Kinsella

To coincide with national celebrations that mark St Brigid’s day, IMMA is delighted to partner with Feminist Art Making Histories’ (IRC/AHRC) to present, Ireland, Feminism, Art – A GATHERING. National and international guests come together to discuss Feminist Art Making Histories, with a special focus on the pioneering work and art historical legacy of women artist – activist group WAAG (1987 – 1991).

This historical GATHERING brings together intergenerational, cross-disciplinary and cross-border/s perspectives to probe the shared, yet occluded, cultural heritage of the encounter between art and feminism across the island of Ireland.

Track Details:
Ireland, Feminism, Art- A Gathering. Recorded 1 February 2024 at IMMA.

About Panellists:
Dr Martina Mullaney is the Irish Post Doc. Researcher for FAMH. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London and AHRC-funded Ph.D. from the University of Reading. A recipient of the Red Mansion Art Prize, London, and China, she has been artist in residence with The British Council in Sri Lanka, and Tbilisi Georgia. Her work has shown at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Franekel Gallery, San Francisco, Artwall Gallery, Prague and Cork Film Center, Ireland. 

Dr Fionna Barber is Reader in Art History in the Manchester School of Art and Research Degrees Co-ordinator for Art / Visual Culture. Her research interests are contemporary and twentieth century Irish visual culture, feminist art history, contemporary women’s painting and a range of issues in twentieth century modernism including nation, memory and identity and gender performativity and embodiment. 

Pauline Cummins’ performance and video work examines the human condition from a feminist perspective. Research driven themes of the political body, activism, human rights and gender are often explored in the artists practice. Cummins likes to collaborate with artists and communities in public sites and situations; including within prisons as a visiting artist and was the founding chairperson of the Women’s Artist Action Group, (WAAG). Her work is in both national and international collections including The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Maternity Hospital. 

Dr Alessia Cargnelli is a visual artist and researcher based in Belfast. Alessia is a former co-director of the artist-led initiative Catalyst Arts Gallery (2016-2018). She was 2020-21 Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry. She completed a BFA with Hons in Visual and Performing Arts at IUAV University and a MA in Contemporary Art History at Ca’Foscari University in Venice, Italy. She obtained an Associate Fellowship Diploma with AFHEA at Ulster University in 2021 and she is currently completing her doctoral research at the Belfast School of Art on feminist-led women-artists’ advocacy groups connected with the island of Ireland in the late 80s and early 90s. In 2023, Alessia was appointed post-doctoral researcher-in-residency at the National Irish Visual Arts Library, based in NCAD, Dublin. Alessia is also a member of Array Collective that featured in current exhibition at IMMA Self-Determination: A Global Perspective. 

Sarah Kelleher lectures in Art History at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and is a Government of Ireland scholar, currently finishing her PhD on contemporary Irish sculpture with the History of Art Department in UCC. Her research focuses Irish art since the 1990s with an emphasis on sculptural practice, queer theory and phenomenology. As co-founder of Pluck Projects along with Dr. Rachel Warriner, Sarah also nurtures an independent curatorial practice and is the curator of Kevin Mooney: Revenants, IMMA 2022 and Taking Form: Students of the Year 1973-77 – Maud Cotter, Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche at Lavit Gallery 2023

Image: Book Cover: Unfinished Revolution, Essays On The Irish Women's Movement 1989. Courtesy of the archive of Una Walker.

'Ireland, Feminism, Art - A Gathering' Round Table Discussion

In the form of an artist’s talk, Iz Öztat discusses the new installation work, titled Rest 2024, that is one of several artworks commissioned by IMMA for the major research exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, on show in the courtyard galleries from 15 February 2024.

Track Details: Artist Talk & New Commission: 'Rest' with Iz Öztat, 2024, 38 Mins | Recorded on 16 February 2024

The installation and video 'Rest' contemplates forms and gestures that evoke subjugation, struggle, resilience, confrontation and negotiation and recovery. Öztat will discuss the ideas, processes and research that inform this new body of work. We will also learn how this relates to ongoing collective processes that are central to Öztat’s wider practice, including the artist’s ongoing collaboration with Zişan (1894 – 1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost and an alter ego. This is manifested in other works by the artist, that are currently on view in the main galleries, as part of the museum wide exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective.

About Speaker:
In her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her research, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational and speculative fictions. İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to construct a complex temporality of action that enables the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. The values and methodologies driving her practice have been articulated in relation to struggles against the taming of running waters and have been informed by consensual negotiation of power dynamics.

Selected exhibitions include Self-determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA, Dublin (2023); The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein, (2016); Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Her academic articles, essays and fictional texts have been published in various media. She has been dedicated to expanding the discursive potential of art by being part of artistic research processes in self-organized, academic and institutional settings. Öztat participated in artist residency programs in Amman, Berlin, Dublin, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Mexico City, Oslo, Paris and Yerevan. She is currently a recipient of the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung / Berlin Programme for Artistic Research.

About Commission: 
İz Öztat (1981, Istanbul)
Rest, 2024 UHD video, 33′ 30”
Installation, Commissioned by IMMA

Presented in the courtyard galleries – The installation sets the stage for working through the top-down imposition of ideologies that attend the founding and perpetuation of nation states, as well as the struggles to resist them. In the video, a group of fellow artists activate the installation, drawing on embodied collective memories that relate to multiple connotations of the word “rest”:
The rest here refers to those whose existence and equal rights are denied by those in power. Resting on one’s shoulder is a burden of violent histories motivated by sovereign fantasies of total control over the rest. Collectivizing mourning as a demand for justice is at once an attempt to put the dead to rest, and to pave the way for a future of recovery that rests in the struggles for freedom and peace.

Rest grapples with these multiple meanings through forms and gestures that evoke subjugation, struggle, resilience, mourning, confrontation and negotiation.

Artist Talk & New Commission: 'Rest' with Iz Öztat, 2024

The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary perspectives is a key element of the exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective. IMMA invites several artists to respond to the long-term impacts of nation building and this discussion explores the work 'Right?' by Banu Cennetoğlu (artist) with Başak Ertür (critical legal scholar).

Track Details: 'Right?' with Başak Ertür & Banu Cennetoğlu. Recorded 24 February 2024 at IMMA. 102 minutes.

To coincide with presenting the installation, right? by Banu Cennetoğlu, we invite critical legal scholar Başak Ertür to present a talk that takes the installation.  This provides the departure point for a deeper reflection on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR -1948) and the human rights regime whose initiation it marked, exploring the meaning of the declaration itself, its history, monumental performativity, its promises and ruins.

This is followed by a conversation with the artist Banu Cennetoğlu, where we explore interdisciplinary interests related to the artists' work,  and themes of human rights, law, history and history.

About Speakers:
Başak Ertür is a critical legal scholar based at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (Fordham University Press, 2022). Her work is engaged with questions of legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law’s epistemologies and aesthetics. She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow, working on a book on counter-forensics and people’s tribunals. Başak’s edited collections include the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on the Lived Experience of Ideology (with James Martel, Naveed Mansouri and Connal Parsley, 2024), Manual for Conspiracy (2011), and Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (with Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, 2008). She serves on the advisory board of Forensic (Berlin), and the editorial committee of Law & Critique. 

Banu Cennetoğlu is an Istanbul-based artist engaged in a wide range of cross-disciplinary practices. Cennetoğlu explores the political, social and cultural dimension of the production, representation and distribution of knowledge and asks how this feeds into a society’s collective thinking and becomes part of its ideology. In her cross-disciplinary practice, which includes photography, sculpture, and moving image, Cennetoğlu explores the impossibility of giving form to absence and how the process of attempting to do so deepens our understanding of loss.

Cennetoğlu had solo exhibitions at institutions including Void, Derry; K21 Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Sculpture Center, New York; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Bonner Kunstverein; Rodeo Gallery, London; Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest; Kunsthalle Basel. Along many group shows, she has participated in the Berlin, Istanbul, Liverpool, Gwangju, Athens and Venice Biennials, as well as Manifesta 8, Murcia; documenta14, Athens/Kassel and 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburg. She is the founder of BAS, an, artist-run space in Istanbul dedicated to artists’ books and printed matter. Cennetoglu is currently an advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

About exhibition:
'Self-Determination: A Global Perspective' is the culmination of a three-year research project focusing on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary perspectives is a key element of this project.

'Right?' with Başak Ertür & Banu Cennetoğlu, 2024

Programmed in collaboration between IMMA and Trinity College Dublin – The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery; this symposium follows the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. As a sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) was forward looking in combing themes of gender, humanity, relationships, deep histories and religion, with sculptural form and materials of stone, lead, steel and wood. Exploring social, cultural and philosophical shifts of 1920/50s onwards, the symposium opens up new readings on Heron’s work, her modernist vision, past influences and the artist’s enduring relevance in the present.

Track details: IMMA Talks & TCD. The Modern Masters Symposium: Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor Part 1, recorded at TCD on Thur 23 May 2024. 1hr 26 minutes. 

Timestamps of Presentations: 
Introduction by Dr Angela Griffith - 0.00
Seán Kissane - 1min 42sec
Dr Billy Shortall: - 18min
Rian Coulter - 49 min
Panel discussion and Q&A - 1hr 15min

About speakers: 
Dr Angela Griffith (Moderator) is Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, TCD, and is an art historian who specialises in Irish modern and contemporary art and design.

Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA and leading curator of the Modern Masters series at IMMA. He describes his practice as ‘curating the edges’, producing deeply researched exhibitions focussed on the work of female and queer artists whose work has been critically neglected.

Dr Billy Shortall is an art historian and a leading scholar on the life and work of Hilary Heron. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the Irish Art Research Centre Trinity College Dublin.

Rian Coulter is a curator and art historian whose research focuses on Irish and Northern Irish art. She is co-editor with Roisin Kennedy of Censoring Art: Silencing the Art Work, (IB Taurus, 2018) and is the Vice Chair of the Irish Museums Association.

About Hilary Heron:
Hilary Heron was born in Dublin in 1923, the same period which saw the establishment of the Irish Free State. Heron studied sculpture at the National College of Art, where she won the prestigious Taylor Art Scholarship Prize three years running in 1944, 1945 and 1946. With her Mainie Jellett travel scholarship, Heron bought a motorbike and travelled throughout Europe and to Paris, where her contact was Samuel Beckett. She was represented by Ireland’s most important commercial gallery, the Waddington Galleries, who presented her first solo exhibition in 1950. Heron’s international visibility as Ireland’s foremost modern sculptor was reinforced when she was selected to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956 alongside Louis le Brocquy. Heron’s key influences include the environment and art circles of Post War Paris, Existentialism, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Leslie Waddington amongst others.

Modern Masters Symposium: 'Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor' (Part One)

Part Two- MODERN SCULPTURE: International Developments & Contexts

Programmed in collaboration between IMMA and Trinity College Dublin – The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery; this symposium follows the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. As a sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) was forward looking in combing themes of gender, humanity, relationships, deep histories and religion, with sculptural form and materials of stone, lead, steel and wood. 

This talk considers the context in which Heron was showing in the post war years. Curtis first focusses on 1956 and looks at the international fora for modern art as developed in the 1950s. Venice specifically to the British presentations, Curtis explores the work of the few women sculptors who were making their way at the same time. Penelope Curtis studied 19C sculpture and has written widely about modern and contemporary sculptors. After directing the Henry Moore Institute, Tate Britain and Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, she has recently begun to write fiction, and published her first novel After Nora, April 2024

Track details: IMMA Talks & TCD. The Modern Masters Symposium: Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor Part 2, recorded at TCD on Thur 23 May 2024. 52 minutes.

Timestamps: 
Introduction by Dr Angela Griffith - 0.00
Penelope Curtis - 1 min
Q&A with Seán Kissane - 31 min

About Speakers:
Dr. Penelope Curtis studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1979–1982) followed by a Masters and PhD on French sculpture after Rodin at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1983–89). Since 2015, Dr. Curtis has served as Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She ran the Tate Britain as Director from 2010 to 2015, and oversaw a number of successful exhibitions, along with the revamped Tate Britain in 2013, including the critically acclaimed rehang of its collections. She was chair of the jury for the Turner Prize. Prior to her to Directorship of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis was Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds from 1999 where she was responsible for developing an acclaimed and distinctive program of exhibitions, presenting sculpture of all periods. Alongside this she oversaw the development of the Leeds collections along with its research and publishing program, the acquisition of significant works including those by Rodin, Epstein and Calder, and built up a unique archive of sculptors’ papers.

Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA and leading curator of the Modern Masters series at IMMA. He describes his practice as ‘curating the edges’, producing deeply researched exhibitions focussed on the work of female and queer artists whose work has been critically neglected.

Modern Masters Symposium: 'Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor' (Part Two)

Part Three - CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS: Speculations on Heron’s Enduring Relevance

Programmed in collaboration between IMMA and Trinity College Dublin – The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery; this symposium follows the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. As a sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) was forward looking in combing themes of gender, humanity, relationships, deep histories and religion, with sculptural form and materials of stone, lead, steel and wood. Exploring social, cultural and philosophical shifts of 1920/50s onwards, the symposium opens up new readings on Heron’s work, her modernist vision, past influences and the artist’s enduring relevance in the present.

Track details: IMMA Talks & TCD. The Modern Masters Symposium: Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor Part 3, recorded at TCD on Thur 23 May 2024. 1 hr 5 minutes.

Timestamps:
Introduction by Clíodhna Shaffrey - 0.00
Barbara Knežević - 6.40 min
Niamh O’Malley - 21.30 min
Sara Damaris Muthi - 31.12 min
Panel Q&A  - 43 min

About Speakers:
Clíodhna Shaffrey is Director of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. She was part of the curatorial team for Ireland at Venice 2022, the national representation of Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale. Clíodhna was previously Visual Arts Advisor to the Arts Council of Ireland, and Arts Officer with two local authorities in Ireland.

Barbara Knežević is an artist working with sculpture, installation and film. Her practice is attentive to how sculptures and other artistic objects engage the body and affect the politics of materials, nationality and ethnicity; historically and in contemporary contexts closely related to her own subjecthood. Materially, her work is comprised of assemblages of objects that are handmade, formed, found, re-purposed or transformed and placed into relationships with one another in exhibition contexts.

Niamh O’Malley is a visual artist. She was born in Co. Mayo, Ireland, studied to PhD, Belfast, 2003 and currently lives and works in Dublin. O’Malley works with moving image alongside sculptural materials including glass, wood, metal and stone. Works gesture towards enabling, offering protection, conveying sensations of touch, and more – of grabbing, holding, caressing surfaces, offering a moment of tether and precarious poise.

Sara Damaris Muthi is a curator and writer, currently the exhibitions Curatorial Fellow at IMMA. Born in Bistrița-Năsăud, Romania and based in Dublin, she has exhibited annual commissions since 2018 with themes ranging from metaphysics to migrant identities. Sara is the recipient of Black Church Print Studio Emerging Curator Award 2022 and Pallas Projects Studios / PVA Writer Award 2023.

Modern Masters Symposium: 'Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor' (Part Three)

Programmed in collaboration between IMMA and Trinity College Dublin – The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery; this symposium follows the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. As a sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) was forward looking in combing themes of gender, humanity, relationships, deep histories and religion, with sculptural form and materials of stone, lead, steel and wood. Exploring social, cultural and philosophical shifts of 1920/50s onwards, the symposium opens up new readings on Heron’s work, her modernist vision, past influences and the artist’s enduring relevance in the present.

Track details: IMMA Talks & TCD. The Modern Masters Symposium: Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor Part 4, recorded at TCD on Thur 23 May 2024. 1 hr 23 minutes.

Timestamps:
Introduction by Riann Coulter - 0.00
Dr Mary Kelly - 0.57 min
Fionna Barber - 23 min
Panel Q&A - 58 min
Closing Speech by Penelope Curtis - 1h 12min

About Speakers:
Riann Coulter is a curator and art historian whose research focuses on Irish and Northern Irish art. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA) and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (MA, PhD), she has curated and co-curated over 50 exhibitions for institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum, National Gallery of Ireland and the F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Co. Down where she has been curator since 2009. 

Dr Mary Kelly (née Healy) is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Global Art Histories, University College Cork, Ireland. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin. 

Dr Fionna Barber is Reader in Art History in the Manchester School of Art and Research Degrees Co-ordinator for Art / Visual Culture. Her research interests are contemporary and twentieth century Irish visual culture, remaking of feminist art history, contemporary women’s painting and a range of issues in twentieth century modernism including Irish modernist women artists, nation, memory and identity and gender performativity and embodiment. 

Dr. Penelope Curtis studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1979–1982) followed by a Masters and PhD on French sculpture after Rodin at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1983–89). Since 2015, Dr. Curtis has served as Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She ran the Tate Britain as Director from 2010 to 2015, and oversaw a number of successful exhibitions, along with the revamped Tate Britain in 2013, including the critically acclaimed rehang of its collections. She was chair of the jury for the Turner Prize. Prior to her to Directorship of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis was Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds from 1999 where she was responsible for developing an acclaimed and distinctive program of exhibitions, presenting sculpture of all periods. Alongside this she oversaw the development of the Leeds collections along with its research and publishing program, the acquisition of significant works including those by Rodin, Epstein and Calder, and built up a unique archive of sculptors’ papers.

Modern Masters Symposium: 'Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor' (Part Four)

Take a Breath Kid's Audio Guide - Audio 1

Alex Cecchetti, The Journey of One Breath (2024), presented by Maia aged 8.  

Transcription of audio:

Hi, my name is Maia and I am 8 years old. 

This artwork is by Alex Cecchetti and is called The Journey of One Breath. 

When I first looked a this artwork, I saw hanging fabric with tie-die, a lot of underwater stuff- themed kind of, and like, on the walls they looked like they were painted all blue or white and somebody just like got a ginormous bucket and just like juice and just poured it all over the wall kind of. 

Blue is my third favourite colour so I really like it. 

The first hammock that I see looks very, really mother nature and the second hammock reminds me a lot about the sun. 

At the end of the artwork, we see a video of a lot of fishes, sea creatures, turtles, seaweed, and it makes me feel like I, like I’m swimming in it kind of. 

The artist is a free-driver which he dives depe into the ocean and he can hold his breath for a really long time. 

The artist explorers the underwater world and how special it is. 
Did you know that the ocean makes half of the oxygen on earth? 
If you look closely at the hammock, you can see bits of plants. 

The artist used flowers and plants to dye the fabric. 

I recommend for you to spend a long time here and look at everything, and sit in the hammock but you must take your shoes off. 

Do you like being underwater, how does it feel? 

I love it and I just learned like how to swim like properly without holding my breath on holidays last summer, not last summer, like this summer. So, it’s very different than how I normally did it but it’s very fun and it’s kind of relaxing. The sea is very, like, beautiful, so yeah. 

Thank you for listening. Bye!

Take a Breath Kid's Audio Guide - Audio 1

Take a Breath Kid's Audio Guide - Introduction 

Presented by Sheena Barrett, Head of Research & Learning at IMMA.

Transcription of audio:

Hello, my name is Sheena Barrett and I am the Head of Research & Learning here at IMMA. 

Welcome to Take a Breath - a special new exhibition that helps us understand breathing in different ways. This exhibition shows us how breathing is connected to many parts of life, like how we treat the environment, how people live together,  how we feel inside or what it's like to hold our breath underwater.

Through the seven artworks selected for this audio guide, we will discuss how pollution has changed the air we breathe, and how, in some communities, breath is a powerful symbol when people protest for their rights. Finally, we will also look at how breathing can help us feel calm, and reflect through meditation.

Special thank you to Maia, Emily, Rose, Eanna, Freddie, Penny and Alice for sharing their thoughts and ideas on their chosen artwork.

We hope you enjoy the exhibition. 

Before you move on to Audio 1, let's take a deep breath together. Breathe in, breathe out. 

Thank you for listening.

Take a Breath Kid's Audio Guide - Introduction

Listen back to a Public Talk on Hamad Butt’s Life, Work, and Lasting Influence Hamad Butt (1962-1994) was a ground breaking artist whose poignant installations continue to resonate with audiences today. His work is critically regarded as one of the most sophisticated responses in British art to HIV/AIDS. Speakers include Dominic Johnson, Gilane Tawadros and Seán Kissane.

Track Details: Hamad Butt Apprehensions & Legacies
Recorded on Thurs 05 Dec 2024, IMMA Chapel, 109mins
0min - 12min: Curator's Introduction, Seán Kissane
12min 53sec: Keynote Lecture, Dominic Johnson
38min 36sec: Response, Gilane Tawadros
51min 52sec: Closing Q&A

Talk & Responses: This timely discussion to coincide with the first retrospective exhibition, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, organised by IMMA and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Leading scholars and curators reflect on Butt’s pioneering practice that span intermedia interventions in art and science, conceptual sculpture, installation, and queer diasporic art. His sculptures and installations address the AIDS epidemic with conceptual rigor and symbolism.
The track includes a keynote talk by guest curator Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London. Gilane Tawadros, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA, will provide responses. Our special guests will discuss key works from the exhibition, explore Butt’s unrealised installations, and give in-depth consideration to the artist’s enduring relevance in the face of today’s ongoing struggles around health, identity, racial difference, and social justice.

Discussion: Hamad Butt Apprehensions & Legacies, 2024

Listen Back to  Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections, IMMA who presents a lecture that marks the opening of a major three-year display titled IMMA Collection: Art as Agency. 

Track Details: IMMA Collection, Art As Agency with Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections. Recorded at IMMA on Thurs 27 Feb 2025. 43 minutes in duration.

Celebrating IMMA’s Permanent Collection as a source of agency and knowledge across key works and recent acquisitions, this talk marks the exhibition’s opening launch. From the 1960s to the 1980s, we will gain insight into selected works that narrate the foundational story of the Irish art scene, highlighting the material innovation and socially engaged practices that confront the hierarchies of the modernist era. The talk also looks to recent practices where memory and storytelling become vital. A focal point of the lecture highlights key moments, such as the specially created ‘white cube’ gallery space, inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s critique of the gallery, to works by Post-War American women, Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Geyer and major installations by Daphne Wright and Alice Maher. This lecture invites audiences to reflect on contemporary art’s evolving role in shaping our understanding of action in the world, while making connections across time, geographies and artists’ media.

About Speaker
Christina Kennedy has been the Senior Curator, Head of Collections, at IMMA since 2008. Prior to that she was Head of Exhibitions at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane (DCGHL). She has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, edited publications and contributed texts to numerous catalogues, notably: Beyond the White Cube: A Retrospective of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, DCGHL, 2006; The Studio, co-curated with Jens Hoffmann, DCGHL, 2007; Tacita Dean, DCGHL, 2007; The Burial of Patrick Ireland, IMMA, 2008; The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from 1900s – 1970s, IMMA, 2010-2011, Postwar American Art: the Novak/O’Doherty Collection, IMMA 2010; Hello Sam by Brian O’Doherty, National Gallery of Ireland as part of Dublin Contemporary, 2011; Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio, Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, co-curator, 2013, Art as Argument: Brian O’Doherty and the Novak O’Doherty Collection, Kunstmuseum Bayreuth, 2013. Patrick Scott: Image, Space, Light, IMMA 2014; Lucian Freud Project at IMMA 2016-2021, Lead Curator; Editor of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: IMMA: 30 years of the global contemporary.

IMMA Collection Art As Agency, Lecture by Christina Kennedy, 2025

Listen back to  Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation for a talk on the unique quilt making tradition of Gee’s Bend, a community of over five generations of Black American quiltmakers located on the banks of the Alabama River. This talk coincided with the launch of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend.

Track Details: The Quilts of Gee's Bend with Curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder. Recorded at IMMA on Thurs 27 Feb 2025. 53 minutes in duration. 

About Speaker: 

Raina Lampkins-Fielder is a Paris based curator and cultural programmer. She currently serves as chief curator for Souls Grown Deep, the Atlanta based non-profit that documents, preserves, and showcases art by African American artists of the American South. Raina Lampkin-Fielder’s distinguished career in major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City which mounted the seminal The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition in 2002 and Brooklyn Museum, has now led her to focus on the preservation and presentation of art by African-American artists of the American South. As curator for Souls Grown Deep, Lampkins-Fielder advocates for artistic recognition of Black artists from the American South, promoting visibility, scholarship, and education about their contributions to art history while fostering economic development and racial and social justice in the communities that gave rise to these artists.


About Exhibition: 

Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers
28 Feb –27 Oct 2025

The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers are a group of African American women from a small Alabama community who’s work became symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride. This stunning collection of textile works celebrates African American culture and heritage. In recent years, the quilts have been shown in art museums and galleries internationally, celebrated for their striking geometric compositions and improvisational approach to shape, texture, and colour.

Lecture: The Quilts of Gee's Bend with Raina Lampkins-Fielder, 2025

Listen back to Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA,  who introduces the curatorial premise behind the IMMA exhibition Staying with the Trouble. This new group exhibition draws on ideas of Donna Haraway’s seminal text Staying with the Trouble as a touchstone for exhibition making and themes of speculative enquiry, related to the work of contemporary artists. Exploring some of the most compelling issues of an interconnected world, artists discuss the ways their work reconfigures human centric thinking and interrelations between humans, animals, technologies and eco planetary systems.

Track details: Staying with the Trouble - Exhibition Preview Introduction by Sean Kissane. 9 minutes, 53 seconds in duration. Recorded at IMMA, People's Pavilion on Thurs 01 May, 2025. 

About Speaker: 
Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA. His ‘Modern Masters Series’ aims to bypass the art market, radicalise the canon of modernism, encourage a critical historiography and propose a porous relationship with history and includes curated retrospectives for Leonora Carrington (2013), Derek Jarman (2019) and Mary Swanzy (2018). Contemporary projects include Alice Maher and Isaac Julien and project exhibitions with Shahzia Sikander, Romuald Hazoumè and Alan Phelan. In 2021, he curated the major group show Queer Embodiment, as part of IMMA’s 30th anniversary; and he was lead curator of Self-Determination: A Global Perspective (2023–24). His writing has been published by IMMA, DAP, Charta, Thames & Hudson, Irish Arts Review and other publications.

Image Credit: Verus Patel, 'Still from Daisy: Propher of the Apocalypse' (2023). Courtesy of the Artist.

Staying with the Trouble - Exhibition Introduction by Seán Kissane, 2025

Listen back to an artists’ conversation with special guests whose work is part of the exciting new exhibition, Staying with the Trouble. Speaking artists include Laura Fitzgerald, Eoghan Ryan, Jacqui Shelton, Marie Foley, and Atsushi Kaga. Moderated by Sarah Muthi, Curatorial Fellow, IMMA.

This new group exhibition draws on ideas of Donna Haraway’s seminal text Staying with the Trouble as a touchstone for exhibition making and themes of speculative enquiry, related to the work of contemporary artists. This conversation shares a range of perspectives on themes of the exhibition and invites deeper reflection on the role of ‘making kin’ and ‘sowing worlds’, in the face of social and ecological crises.

Speaker Timestamps:
Eoghan Ryan - 0.29
Jacqui Shelton- 7.44
Atsushi Kaga- 17.34
Marie Foley- 23.05
Laura Fitzgerald- 35.38
Q&A- 43.36

Track details: Artists' Discussion - Staying with the Trouble. Recorded at IMMA Thurs 1 May 2025. 50 minutes in duration. 

About speakers: 
Eoghan Ryan works across moving image, installation, performance, puppetry and collage. Selected shows, performances and screenings have taken place at Rencontres, Internationales (FR/DE) Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT), The Complex (IE), Edith Russ Haus(DE), Centrale Fies (IT), BFI LFF and ICA London (UK), Busan Biennale 2022 (KR) IFFR, Rotterdam (NL), Visio (IT) Kunstverein Freiburg (DE) South London Gallery (UK) and Serralves Museum (PR). 

Jacqui Shelton is an artist and curator born on Barada Barna land (Central Queensland), and based in Naarm (Melbourne). Shelton’s practice is grounded in reading and writing, manifesting as short films, sound, performance, and installation. They are interested in continually testing how text, language and images work together or undermine each other.

Atsushi Kaga is originally from Tokyo, and now living and working between Ireland and Kyoto, Japan, Atsushi Kaga studied Fine Art at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, graduating in 2005, and made a critically acclaimed first solo museum exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny in 2008. Kaga collaborated with his mother on a process show, Nerd bag, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2010) and re-iterated in a solo Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach, (2011). 

Marie Foley was born in 1959 Marie Foley studied Fine Art in The Crawford College of Art, Cork, Goldsmiths, University of London, Cardiff College of Art and was awarded an MA in 1987. Her sculptures are composed of elements which are carved in yew, bog oak, ash, sycamore, beech, holly… elements modeled in porcelain and hand-worked or salvaged elements in metal, glass or stone.

Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She received a 2024 Markievicz award to work with the archive of experimental filmmaker, animator and poet, Flora Kerrigan. Laura will present a new body of work at Lismore Castle Arts in June 2025.


Artists' Discussion - Staying with the Trouble, 2025

Listen back to Mary Cremin, Head of Programming at IMMA who introduces the new exhibition Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields, the first solo exhibition in Ireland by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the leading innovators in post-war American painting.

Track Details: Curator's In Gallery Talk & Walk-through with Mary Cremin - Sam Gilliam Sewing Fields. Recorded at IMMA 18/06/2025. 30 minutes in duration. 

About exhibition: 
Sam Gilliam Sewing Fields
13 June 2025 – 25 January 2026
House Galleries

IMMA presents for the first time in Ireland a solo exhibition by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting, co-organised with the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Emerging in the mid-1960s, his canonical ‘Drape’ paintings merged painting, sculpture, and performance in conversation with architecture in entirely new ways. Suspending unstretched lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed.

About Curator: 
Mary Cremin is Head of Programming at IMMA and was previously Director of Void Gallery, Derry since 2017, where she has supported artists to produce and present ground-breaking new works, including commissioning the artist Helen Cammock’s Turner Prize winning film The Long Note. Cremin was the Commissioner and Curator of the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with artist Eva Rothchild in 2019. Working with organisations such as the Afghan Visual Arts & History Collective and Beirut Art Residency, her program focuses on revealing new narratives and histories that address and challenge the disparities that exist within Western culture, her program acts as a curatorial corrective. Her areas of research are embedded in ecology, ethics and is informed by politically and socially engaged practice.

Image Credit: Sam Gilliam, Silhouette/Template (2), 1994. Painted fabric collage, stitched installation. Dimensions 152 x 190 x 28cm. Courtesy Sam Gillaim Foundation.

Curator's In Gallery Talk: Mary Cremin - Sam Gilliam Sewing Fields,2025

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

1 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? 
Introduction by David Crowley (Head of the School of Visual Culture & Head of Research, NCAD), followed by talk by Yazan Khalili (visual artist, architect, and cultural activist). 

Track details: 
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? (Part 1). Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 9 July 2025. 32 minutes in duration.

About Speakers: 
Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili’s photography is detailed, reflective, and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives. He weaves together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. In particular, he focuses on the effect of geographical distance on our rendering of territory, and its ability to heighten or arrest our political and sentimental attachments.

Chair: David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there. After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. He has a long-standing interest in visual culture and particularly graphic design writing a book on the subject with Paul Jobling entitled Graphic Design. Representation and Reproduction since 1800 (1996). He is on the editorial board of Eye magazine and in summer 2016 he was invited to curate of the Warsaw International Poster Biennale exhibition, The Poster Remediated.

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme: 
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners: 
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict?

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

1 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict?
Introduction by David Crowley (Head of the School of Visual Culture & Head of Research, NCAD), followed by talk by Jill Jarvis (Associate Professor at Yale University).

Track details:
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Part 3. Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 9 July 2025. 37 minutes in duration.

About Speakers:
Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in the wake of French empire. It won the MLA Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and Yale’s Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research in the Humanities. Her next book, Signs in the Desert: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara (University of Chicago Press), builds a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective. Her other writing appears in New Literary History, Representations, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, Yale French Studies, Expressions maghrébines, Public Books, and elsewhere.

Chair: David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there. After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. He has a long-standing interest in visual culture and particularly graphic design writing a book on the subject with Paul Jobling entitled Graphic Design. Representation and Reproduction since 1800 (1996). He is on the editorial board of Eye magazine and in summer 2016 he was invited to curate of the Warsaw International Poster Biennale exhibition, The Poster Remediated.

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme: 
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners: 
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? (3)

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

1 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? With speakers Yazan Khalili, Odessa Warren, Jill Jarvis & chaired by David Crowley

NOTE: This panel discussion has been published as a bonus track for research purposes. You may encounter quality issues with this track such as background noise and volume levels. 

Track details:
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Part 4. Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 9 July 2025. 37 minutes in duration.

About Speakers:
Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in the wake of French empire. 

Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili’s photography is detailed, reflective, and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives.

Odessa Warren is a Lebanese-British curator and cultural organiser. She has organised exhibitions, public programmes and artist commissions in the UK and internationally. Her curatorial work is interested in socially engaged practices and critical ecologies. 

Chair: David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there. After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. 

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme:
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners:
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 1 – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? (4)

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

2 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict?
Introduction by Annie Fletcher (Director of IMMA), followed by talk by Amanda Dunsmore (visual artist & researcher). 

Track details:
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 10 July 2025. 23 minutes in duration.

About Speakers:
Amanda Dunsmore works in art processes that explore representations of societal transformation, utilizing durational artist engagement with individuals, groups, and associated social and political structures. The resultant artworks are undertaken after in-depth research, using video, sound, text, photography, installation, and drawing to create contextual portraits. These include a series of extensive social-political-historical art projects, archives, and exhibition series. Dunsmore’s socio-political art making and her artworks act as a mechanism of awareness, visibility, and societal reflection, working extensively around representation of equality, of peace-making and peace-makers, of the sites of social change, and the local/international implications and perceptions of these changes. Amanda Dunsmore has exhibited extensively, and her artworks are held in national and international collections. Winner of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) 2024, AIB Portrait Prize for the moving image portrait of Dr Lydia Foy, Irish transgender activist. Significant projects include the KEEPER archive (1997–ongoing), initiated while she was Artist-in-Residence at The Maze/Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland, and the Ireland/UK LGBTQI+ project BECOMING CHRISTINE. Invited by the Fingal County Council Arts Office, Dunsmore is currently researching for the Democracy and Politics commission, exploring the history and legacy of local government. Her research includes conversations with local archivists, historians, and councillors. 

Chair: Annie Fletcher is Director of IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). Previously she was Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10). In 2012, she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on International juries, including the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the 2016 Irish Pavilion at Venice; the 2015 Köler Prize, Estonia; the 2014 Turner Prize, UK; the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award, Hungary; and the 2011 BC21 Art Award, Austria.

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme:
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners:
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict?

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

2 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Part 2. 
Introduction by Annie Fletcher (Director of IMMA), followed by talk by Slinko (visual artist).

Track details:
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 10 July 2025. 23 minutes in duration.

About Speakers:
Slinko (Ukraine / USA) Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in the US. While her practice is informed by scholarship on labor, ideology, and politics, her inspiration comes from interactions with ordinary people, localized contexts, and material culture. With a sharp eye for the personal and the anecdotal, Slinko often zooms in on the micro within larger historical and political narratives, offering specific insights into the workings of power and its effects. Slinko’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including political satire, drawing, moving image, performance, printmaking, and graphic design.

Chair: Annie Fletcher is Director of IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). Previously she was Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10). In 2012, she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on International juries, including the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the 2016 Irish Pavilion at Venice; the 2015 Köler Prize, Estonia; the 2014 Turner Prize, UK; the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award, Hungary; and the 2011 BC21 Art Award, Austria.

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme:
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners:
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict?  (2)

As part of the L’internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, listen back to series of public talks and discussions with a group of national and international contributors invited to assemble in Dublin in July 2025. Invited speakers explore a set of key questions about the impacts of conflict on our relationship to and understanding of land, as it is experienced, imagined, constructed; as territory, as resource, as boundary, as home.

2 # Panel Discussion – What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? Part 3.
Introduction by Annie Fletcher (Director of IMMA), followed by talk by Zdenka Badovinac (curator and writer).

Track details:
Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? (3). Recorded at Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD on 10 July 2025. 23 minutes in duration.

About Speakers:
Zdenka Badovinac was director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana from 1993 to 2020 and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 2022 to 2023. She currently works as an independent curator and writer. Her work is concerned with the historicisation of Eastern European art and the situated voices in contemporary art and its institutions. Her first exhibition dealing with these issues was Body and the East – From the 1960s to the Present (1998). She also initiated the first collection of Eastern European art, Arteast 2000+, at the Moderna galerija. Her most recent exhibitions are Sanja Iveković, Works of Heart, Kunsthalle, Vienna, (2022) and MSU in Zagreb (2023) and Freeing the Voices in Kunshaus Graz. Her latest books are Comradeship: Curating, Art and Politics in Post-Socialist, 2019 and Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions, 2022. Founding member of L’Internationale.

Chair: Annie Fletcher is Director of IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). Previously she was Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10). In 2012, she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on International juries, including the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the 2016 Irish Pavilion at Venice; the 2015 Köler Prize, Estonia; the 2014 Turner Prize, UK; the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award, Hungary; and the 2011 BC21 Art Award, Austria.

About IMMA's 2025 Summer School theme:
Landscape (post) Conflict
We are living in a period of increasing instability and accelerating violence worldwide. Atrocity, invasion, genocide, mass-displacement – these are brutal realities for millions across a growing number of conflict zones. Given ongoing advances in military technology, we are also witnessing the deployment of ever-more ruthless forms of mechanised violence, often against civilian populations. In the process, the limits of international law (and the notion of a Western ‘world order’) are being brutally exposed. The landscape is the locus of conflict and its legacies.

Partners:
National College of Art and Design
L’internationale- Museum of the Commons
Centre for Democracy and Peace Building

Summer School 25: Panel Discussion 2 - What is the relationship between landscape and conflict? (3)

This keynote talk and discussion explores the theme of ‘Architectures of Care’, how creativity, culture, and science shape the ways we age and care. Contributors include Regius Professor Rose Anne Kenny (TCD/SJH-MISA), Brian Kennedy (Global Brain Health Institute) and Annie Fletcher (Director, IMMA).
Track Details: Panel Discussion: Architectures of Care - Art, Aging & Health, recorded on Wed 16 July 2025, IMMA 's Lecture Room, duration 93mins
What does it mean to care – for ourselves, for others, and for society – across the lifespan? How can the arts and sciences expand our understanding of aging, health, and wellbeing?
Hear responses from guest contributors, Keynote Speaker Regius Professor Rose Anne Kenny, researcher, author and leading global expert on ageing and longevity; Annie Fletcher, Director of IMMA, whose vision champions the role of culture in civic transformation; Brian Kennedy, Former Director of four prominent international art museums and an advocate for the integration of creative arts programmes and brain health in rethinking how we live and age.

The panel share a range of perspectives, as a leading activist or advocate in their field, using their work to challenge assumptions, influence policy, and reshape public narratives around age, health, creativity, and care. At the heart of this conversation is the role of interdisciplinarity – not simply as collaboration, but as a vital strategy for reimagining how we approach care in all its forms.

This IMMA Talks event was developed in collaboration with IMMA Horizons and MISA through the Creative life pillar at St James hospital, and reflects a long standing partnership since 2017 that champions the role of the arts in enhancing health, wellbeing and quality of life in clinical settings and throughout the lifespan.

Panel Discussion: Architectures of Care - Art, Aging & Health, 2025

To mark National Heritage Week this  conversation with Sylvia Stevens and David Fox, Directors of 'Picturing Derry' is Chaired by Dr Isobel Harbison. The conversation explores  the influences, production and subsequent reception, of Picturing Derry, since its first broadcast in 1985.

Track details: Heritage Week Discussion | Recording History - Picturing Derry, 
Recorded at IMMA, Lecture Room on Tues 19 Aug, 2025, 56 minutes in duration. This track is made available for research purposes only, some noise disruption maybe experienced in the opening section of this track.

Introductions by Sheena Barrett and Dr Isobel Harbison. 
Conversation with Sylvia Stevens & David Fox,chaired by Isobel Harbison

Picturing Derry (1985) is a documentary about conflict photography in Derry in the 1980s. Produced for Channel 4’s ‘Eleventh Hour’, it includes interviews with British and Irish photographers and journalists, news editors, collectives and artists. Learning from John Berger’s media-critical approaches, it asks who was producing these photographs, and for what purpose?

Recording History (2025–2026) is an oral history research project led by Dr Isobel Harbison comprising of interviews with filmmakers active in the North of Ireland from 1968 to 1990. This is a partnership with IMMA, Ulster Museum and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland and is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs: Shared Island Civic Society Fund, the Heritage Council, Ecclesiastical Ireland and the Benefact Group. More details here

Speaker Details: 
Sylvia Stevens
Sylvia Stevens is a co-founder of Faction Films, with over thirty years of experience as a producer and director. She has made programmes for UK broadcasters – BBC, Channel 4, ITV – and internationally – NETFLIX, RTE, PBS, NHK, ARTE, SBS, AVRO, STV, AJ and YLE amongst others. She has done co-productions in Latin America – Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil – and in India, South Africa, Australia and Japan.

David Fox
Artist and filmmaker David Fox was born in Dublin and spent his childhood in Killarney. He studied painting in Colchester and Bristol, and postgraduate painting at the Slade. He began making political art with The Poster-Film Collective in London and gave up painting for the next ten years. Later he was a founder member of Faction Films. He has directed and edited many documentaries for television including for RTÉ, Arte, BBC & Channel 4. He returned to live in Ireland in 2004.

Dr Isobel Harbison (Moderator)
Dr Isobel Harbison is an Irish art historian, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first book, Performing Image, was published by the MIT Press in 2019 and her second book is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. She is currently working on an oral history project with the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum, with the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland called Recording History.

Heritage Week Discussion | Recording History - Picturing Derry

Listen back to acclaimed artist, writer, broadcaster Ferren Gipson, an inspiring evening exploring the radical artistry and enduring legacy of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers. Drawing on her influential book Women’s Work: From Feminine Arts to Feminist Art (2022); Gipson shares a maker’s perspective on how textiles—once dismissed as mere craft—have become powerful tools of cultural resistance, identity, and expression.

Track Details:  Women’s Work and the Reclamation of Textiles with Artist and Writer, Ferren Gipson. 56 minutes in duration. Recorded at IMMA, Lecture Room on Thurs 4 Sept, 2025

This talk celebrates the remarkable tradition of quilt making passed down through five generations of Black American women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose bold, improvisational works continue to shape contemporary textile practices. Gipson will explore the politics of labour, materiality, and matrilineal knowledge embedded in these quilts, and reflect on the practices of other artists—such as Cecilia Vicuña, amongst other—who use fabric as a language of memory, spirit, and resistance.

Anchored in feminist and intersectional thinking, this talks weaves together art history and personal insight, from a hands-on textiles practice to champion ‘women’s work’ as both deeply political and profoundly creative.

Presented in conjunction with Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition at IMMA, this IMMA Talks event is for anyone interested in art, activism, and the beauty of working with textiles.

Speaker Details:

Ferren Gipson is an art historian and artist exploring themes of politics, popular culture, and identity in modern and contemporary visual culture. She is the author of Women’s Work and The Ultimate Art Museum, and as a dynamic storyteller, has contributed to the Financial Times and hosted the Art Matters podcast. She has previously taught for the Courtauld Institute and SOAS, delivered numerous talks for institutions including TED and Royal Academy of Art, and was named one of Apollo Magazine’s ’40 under 40 Thinkers’ in crafts. Within her art practice, Ferren explores themes of spirituality, materiality, and matrilineal ties through textiles. She has previously shown her work with Hauser & Wirth, Unit London, and Paul Smith Space.

Topics in her research include exploring intersections between art and popular culture, highlighting the work of women artists, and political themes in modern Chinese art. Within her textile practice, she explores themes of labour, matrilineal connections, materiality, and colour. She holds a Doctorate from SOAS, University of London.

Women’s Work and the Reclamation of Textiles

Why do so many in the art world speak such an opaque and impenetrable jargon?  Martin Waldmeier, resident curator at IMMA, in association with  Art in the Contemporary World, MA programme at NCAD,  took this question as a starting point to discuss the complex role of language in contemporary art, the Babel problem and the fascinating history of world languages, and the power of language to invent the world and make ourselves at home in it.

This talk took place on 15 November, 2016 at IMMA. 

Further Information
Programmed in conjunction with Waldmeier’s teaching module at NCAD, on contemporary art as lingua franca, which considered how global artists and exhibition-makers imagine and communicate with their audiences, taking into account notions of “abstract art as a world language to the more recent phenomenon of ‘international art english’.

Martin Waldmeier is a curator and researcher. He studied History of contemporary art and of media, and obtained a Fulbright Award to pursue critical visual studies in the United States at the Arts Institute in Chicago. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; his dissertation is entitled “The Artist Translator.” Martin has worked as assistant curator and residency coordinator at PROGRCenter for Cultural Production and as curator and interim director at Stadtgalerie (both in Bern, Switzerland). He has also recently been the winner of Apexart’s Unsolicited Proposal Program in New York with the exhibition “Death of a Cameraman”. Born in 1984 in Basel (CH), he lives and works in London and Warsaw.

Image Credit: Luis Camnitzer, Insults (2009), installed at the MARCO Vigo, Spain, 2015, cropped from the exhibition: The Translator’s Voice, 2015-2016

Research Fellow, IMMA & NCAD

Lecture:  Martin Waldmeier - Speaking in Tongues

Nancy Scheper-Hughes book Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics (1979/ 2001) is regarded as one of the most important seminal anthropological studies of an Irish community and mental illness in rural Ireland.  40 years on  ground-breaking author and activist anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, artist Duncan Campbell and Professor Luke Gibbons/ Discussion Moderator  reflect on Scheper-Hughes experiences of tracing the social disintegration of a remote village in Ireland and her later attempts to reconcile an honest ethnography with the community.

This conversation draws on Campbell’s film The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy and the artist’s extensive research into 1968 documentary film The Village made by the Ethnographic Film Unit of UCLA,  and in particular Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Using this material as a framework for a broader discussion, speakers  address the evolving ethics and politics of social, cultural and visual anthropology, considering its validity as a historical record in bearing witness to rural village life. Thus offering a timely reflection on the tensions between truthful representation and the anthropologists’ gaze, a subject that is central to Campbell’s new film and its re-framing of contemporary Ireland. 

Programmed in association with the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.

Also read IMMA's Blog, 'The devastation of the people: An interview with Nancy Scheper - Hughes by author Lisa Godson. https://immablog.org/?p=3329

Further Information
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. Scheper-Hughes' lifework concerns the violence of everyday life examined from a radical existentialist and politically engaged perspective. Her examination of structural and political violence, of what she calls "small wars and invisible genocides" has allowed her to develop a so-called 'militant' anthropology, which has been broadly applied to medicine, psychiatry, and to the practice of anthropology. She is perhaps best known for her books on schizophrenia among bachelor farmers in County Kerry (Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland) and on the madness of hunger, maternal thinking, and infant mortality in Brazil (Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil). 

Duncan Campbell  lives and works in Glasgow. He is best known for his films which focus on particular moments in history, and the people and objects at the centre of those histories. He uses archive material as a route to research subjects and histories that he feels are important. He completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in 1996. Campbell was the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize (Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell) and was one of three artists representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale as part of Scotland + Venice 2013 (Corin Sworn, Campbell, Hayley Tompkins). In 2012 Campbell took part in Manifesta 9 curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, Belgium and in 2010 he took part in Tracing the Invisible, Gwangju Biennale. In 2017, Wiels, Brussels will host a solo exhibition on Duncan Campbell

Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, the University of Notre Dame, USA, and as Visiting Professor at New York University.  His most recent publications include Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (University of Chicago Press); (Co-editor), Charles O’Conor: Life and Works (Dublin: Four Courts Press); ‘Introduction,’ to Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited (Dublin: Tramp Press), and Limits of the Visible: Representing the Irish Great Famine (Quinnipiac University/Cork University Press).

This talk took place on 30 March 2017 at IMMA.

Critical Reflections | Duncan Campbell, Nancy Scheper-Hughes & others, 2017

Marking the exhibition preview of Nan Goldin, Weekend Plans, Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA and renowned American artist and photographer Nan Goldin discusses her connections to Ireland, bringing to light the influence of individual relationships on Goldin’s work, including a 40-year friendship with Irish artist and film-maker Vivienne Dick, who is featured in several of Goldin’s photographic works. Weekend Plans is the first solo exhibition by Goldin to be presented in Ireland, programmed concurrently with the solo exhibition Vivienne Dick, 93% Stardust.

This talk was held at IMMA's Johnston Suite on 16 June 2017.

IMMA-Weekend Plans

Nan Goldin & Rachael Thomas / Artist's Preview Talk

The Freud Affect: Reflecting on Viewers’ Experience of the Lucian Freud Exhibition

When we visit an exhibition, we encounter a series of artworks made by an artist and presented to us by a curator. We are offered an experience. How we engage with that experience can tell us as much, if not more, about ourselvess it might about the artist. What was your experience of visiting the Lucian Freud exhibition? Which room did you visit first? Did you spend more time with certain works? Can you remember any of the thoughts you were having as you moved around the gallery space? This talk explores the ways in which psychoanalysis can help us to reflect on our affective response to the exhibition, particularly how our gut reactions to Freud’s works might tell us something about the otherwise unconscious, inarticulable aspects of our mind.

Further Information
Dr Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and the director of the Psychoanalysis + interdisciplinary initiative. She is also Lecturer in Counselling in the School of Communication & Media at Ulster University. She has published extensively in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and cultural studies.

IMMA COLLECTION FREUD PROJECT (2016 – 21)
IMMA has secured a significant five-year loan of 50 works by one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Renowned for his portrayal of the human form, Freud is best known for his intimate, honest, often visceral portraits. Working only from life Freud’s studio was intensely private and he mainly worked with those he was close to, often asking subjects to sit for hundreds of hours over multiple sittings to better capture the essence of their personality. 

The Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, (TRIARC) 
TRIARC was established in 2003 in response to the growing interest in Irish art at home and abroad. Since then, the centre provides postgraduate teaching and supervision and it supports new research and publications. The establishment of the centre was facilitated by the generous support of benefactors, enabling the appointment of dedicated staff, and the restoration of the Provost's House Stables to provide facilities for education and research, including a visual archive and dedicated library on all aspects of Irish art, architecture and design.

This talk took place on Wednesday 24 January 2018, at IMMA.

IMMA & TCD: LUCIAN FREUD LECTURE SERIE

IMMA & TCD: LUCIAN FREUD LECTURE SERIES / Dr Noreen Giffney

Author Mark O’Connell draws on his acclaimed publication, To be a Machine (2016) in which to discuss our desires, delusions and use of technology to alter the human condition to escape mortality and our biological lives. This is followed by a discussion, moderated by Dr. Sinead Hogan, Lecturer & Co-Director, ARC, IADT. 

Further Information

To be a Machine - Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death - is the first book, by Dublin-based essayist and critic Mark O’Connell which explores the philosophical and scientific roots of transhumanism; a movement that believes we can and should use technology to control the future evolution of our species, to enable us to live, perhaps, forever. The transhumanism movement campaigns for the direct incorporation of technology into our bodies and minds, and strives to remove ageing as a cause of death. But what does this mean for human consciousness and an embodied sense of self? These are just some of the fascinating and critical questions that O’Connell’s book invites us to explore about possible futures of  technology.


Programmed in collaboration with IADT- ARC as part of the IMMA digital_self public programme of talks, events and online projects invites all ages to explore the ways new technologies are transforming how the self is voiced, shaped and understood in various digital realms.
 
Mark O'Connell is a journalist, essayist, and literary critic from Dublin. His book, To Be a Machine: Encounters With a Post-Human Future, will be published by Granta (UK & Commonwealth) and Doubleday (US & Canada) in 2017. He is Slate’s books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog; his work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Observer, and The Independent. He is also the author of the Kindle Single Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever (Byliner/The Millions).
He has a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and in 2013 his academic monograph on the work of the novelist John Banville, John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. He was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow from 2011 to 2012 at Trinity College, where he taught contemporary literature. For more details visit here.

This talk took place on Tuesday 30 January 2018  at IMMA.

Digital_self

IMMA & IADT: ARC Talk / To Be a Machine – Mark O’Connell

The Economy of Painting - Reflections on the specific Value Form of the Painted Canvas (Comments on Freud)

Internationally renowned art historian and professor Isabelle Graw considers what constitutes painting today and looks at current measures of value in painting, from artistic to economic, through the lens of art history and critical theory. This lecture draws on Graw's new book The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, (February 2018) that aims to establish where painting can be seen today. Graw’s talk explores the current popularity of painting from a historical and medium specific perspective in which to address Freud´s work and persona as a model that has both potential and problems when considered from a present vantage point.

This lecture is followed by a closing discussion, moderated by Christina Kennedy, Head of IMMA Collections and Led Curator of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016 – 2021.

FURTHER INFORMATION
Isabelle Graw is a professor of art theory and art history at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste (Städelschule) Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin. She has edited and contributed to many important books on the medium of painting, most notably Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (Sternberg Press, 2016) and Thinking through Painting. Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas (Sternberg Press, 2012). Her forthcoming book The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium aims to establish where painting can be seen today and to reconstruct the historical origins of its current popularity. Further details here

IMMA/ TCD Talk Series / 18 October 2017 - April 2018   
Marking the first year anniversary of the significant loan of 50 works by Lucian Freud (1922-2011), IMMA, in collaboration with the The Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin (TRIARC) invites leading artists, critics and cultural researchers to offer new perspectives on Freuds work and its critical reception today. Keynote events rotate on a monthly basis between venues at IMMA and TCD, concluding with a major symposium in April 2018. Each session introduces a distinct topic on this seminal artist’s work.The schedule of speakers include: 18.10.2017 at TCD : Martin Gayford (Art Critic/Author UK) /  01.11.2017 at IMMA:Yvonne Scott (TRIARC TCD) / 06.12.2017 at TCD: Christina Kennedy (IMMA) / 24.01.2018 at IMMA : Noreen Giffney (Ulster University) / 07.02.2018 at TCD: Nathan O’ Donnell (Paper Visual Art-PVA) / 07.03.2018 at IMMA: Isabelle Graw (Städelschule, Frankfurt) / 10.03.2018 at TCD:  Daphne Wright (Artist), Angela Griffith (TRIARC) TCD), Christina Kennedy (IMMA) and others.

This talk took place on Wednesday 7 March 2018, at IMMA

IMMA Collection: Lucian Freud Project

IMMA & TCD - TRIARC / LUCIAN FREUD TALK SERIES / Isabelle Graw

IMMA Talks digs deep into its audio archive to present recordings of past public talks and discussions, that feature contributions by IMMA Collection Artists.

Track: Artist Lawrence Weiner in conversation, September 1993.
In advance of IMMA’s 30th anniversary in 2021, IMMA Archive: 1990s considers the rich early history of IMMA’s programmes and Collection and offers a space to reflect on the Museum’s formative years through the lens of the archival material it has amassed.

About Artist
American Conceptual artist Laurence Weiner (born 1942) first exhibited his work in New York in the early 1960s. Taking language, and the way meaning is carried in words, symbols and codes, Weiner challenges traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object. He has exhibited internationally since the 1970s, including major solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; SFMOMA; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Further Information
In association with the live programme, IMMA Talks archives recordings of past public talks, are in operation since IMMA’s inception in 1991 and has been integrated into one Audio Archive library. Over the years this has accumulated into a rich resource dedicated to contemporary art discourse and practice in Ireland and features the voices of many artists, curators and educators who discuss the ever-evolving contexts in which art is made. 

The IMMA Audio Archive is testament to the museum’s formative years, and programming history. Many past talks are published on the IMMA Soundcloud Channel, where audiences can listen back to individual talks and themed playlists.

While we work to digitise the complete Audio Archive, we are delighted to share a selection of analogue recordings spanning the 1990s, now digitised and available for the first time, as part of this archive display.

Return to the dedicated playlist IMMA ARCHIVE: 1990S FROM THE EDGE TO THE CENTRE, to listen back to other artist’s responses and presentations.

Image Credit: Installation view of IMMA Archive: 1990's From the Edge to the Centre. 13 December 2019 - 10 May 2020. IMMA, Dublin. Photo by Ros Kavanagh.

In Conversation /  Lawrence Weiner, 1993

In this short talk, listen to the acclaimed artist Helen Cammock discuss the role of the archive in her practice, offering a rich and insightful perspective on the archive's relationship to the present.

Further Information
Track: Helen Cammock: Excerpt  - Artists' Working with Archives /  Archives LIVES (1)IMMA and aemi: 07.10.20
This extract is taking from a recording of a  larger webinar series:  IMMA & aemi / Archives LIVE (1) Artists Working with Archive. To coincide with the IMMA Collection initiatives of IMMA Screen and the ongoing Archive Digitisation Project, IMMA has partnered with aemi to devise online discussions with artists and conservators on the subject of the archive. Session 1 offers fresh insight and new perspectives on the experience of working with personal, colonial, televisual and collection-based archives through discussion with acclaimed artists Helen Cammock, Onyeka Igwe and Frank Sweeney. The artists will be joined by aemi co-directors Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick who lead the conversation with artists and others.
Presented in collaboration with aemi on the occasion of The Long Note (2018) by Helen Cammock as the fifth film work from the Collection to be showcased as part of IMMA Screen.

About Speaker
Helen Cammock was born in Staffordshire, UK in 1970. She studied at the University of Brighton, and the Royal College of Art, London. An interest in histories, authorship, storytelling and the excavation of lost, unheard and buried voices lead Cammock to map her own creative processes on to social and political situations. Cammock was shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize and was awarded the prize along with the other three nominees. Recent screenings include the Serpentine Cinema Series and Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme. Cammock has exhibited at Cubitt, London; Galerie Futura Alpha Nova, Berlin; The Tetley, Leeds; Open Source Contemporary Arts Festival; Hollybush Gardens, London; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Void, Derry, Northern Ireland.

Helen Cammock: Excerpt  - Artists' Working with Archives /  Archives LIVES (1)

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. IMMA TALKS is an activated live programme of talks and events that opens up conversations around the core themes of our exhibition programme, and permanent IMMA Collection, bringing you deeper into the thinking and making of contemporary art.

For further information on IMMA TALKS please contact Sophie Byrne, Assistant Curator, Talks & Public Programmes, IMMA. Email sophie.byrne@imma.ie

IMMA Ireland

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