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

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

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

Dr Billy Shortall presents an informal talk on the World Congress of the Irish Race, held in Paris in January 1922, and the Exposition d’Art Irlandais that accompanied it. In association with the Congress the emerging Irish State presented the grand narrative of Irish cultural history, theatre, music, a series of lectures on Irish life, and more. The centrepiece of the spectacle was a month-long exhibition of Irish art. Organised at the Galerie Barbazanges, the exhibition was a bold statement in the art capital of the world by a new state. With 300 works, it presented a public display of artistic independence to support the Irish Free State’s claims of political independence.

Track Details: Irish Art in Paris, 1922 with Billy Shortall. Recorded at IMMA on the 6/03/2024. 38 minutes.

Presented in association with Irish Association of Art Historians (IAAH). The Irish Association of Art Historians is concerned with the advancement of the study of the history of art at every level in Ireland: in art galleries and museums, in universities, in art schools and departments, in the school system, and through independent scholarship and publication. 

About Speaker: 
Chair of IAAH – Dr Billy Shortall, is Ryan, Gallagher, Kennedy Research Fellow on the Cuala Press Project, Schooner Foundation, at Trinity College Dublin. 

About exhibition:
IMMA presents a major museum wide exhibition, 'Self-Determination: A Global Perspective', one of the largest exhibitions in the Museum’s history. The culmination of a three-year research project, this exhibition focuses on the 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.

Image: 
Paul Henry (1877-1958), Un village de l'ouest de I'Irlande, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Collection: Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchased by the French Government from 1922 Exposition D'Art Irlandais.

Irish Art in Paris, 1922 with Billy Shortall

This special in gallery talk & conversation on Self-Determination: A Global Perspective led by Seán Kissane (IMMA) with Mart Kuldkepp (UCL) explores comparative art histories of emerging nation states of Ireland, Estonia and in early 20th Century. This talk reveals overlapping political, cultural and social contexts surrounding a selection of artworks.

This talk is kindly supported by the Embassy of Estonia in Dublin and is programmed in association with KUMU Art Museum.

Track details: Curator Talk Series with Seán Kissane & Mart Kuldkepp. Recorded March 26 2024 at IMMA, Garden Galleries. 53 minutes.

Note: This track is made available for research purposes. Due to the conversational nature of curator talks in the public galleries, listeners may encounter some minor audio distortion on this track.

About Exhibition: 
IMMA presents a major museum wide exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, one of the largest exhibitions in the Museum’s history. The culmination of a three-year research project, this exhibition focuses on the 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. 

About Speakers:
Mart Kuldkepp is Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London (UCL). In 2024, he is also visiting professor at Department of History, University of Tartu. His areas of research include the history of Estonia and the Baltic Sea Region in the early 20th century – especially the history of Baltic-Scandinavian relations – and the self-determination of stateless nationalities during the First World War. In February 2024, he published a monograph on the history of the idea of Estonia’s Nordicness and the origins of the Estonian nation state. Currently, he is finishing the manuscript of a short history of Scandinavia. He is also a regularly contributing writer to the largest Estonian daily, Postimees, and a frequent commentator on foreign and security policy issues in Estonian and international media.

Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin. He curates deeply researched exhibitions focused on the work of female and queer artists whose work has been critically neglected. These projects have included major touring exhibitions such as the retrospectives for Derek Jarman, Leonora Carrington, and Mary Swanzy. In 2016 he presented the critically acclaimed ‘Patrick Hennessy: De Profundis’, the first queer reading of Irish modernism. He is currently a PhD candidate at Gradcam, TU Dublin.

Track Image: Artists' own. Mart Kuldkepp 2024.

Curator Talk Series with Seán Kissane & Mart Kuldkepp

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

Self-Determination, A Global Perspective, 2023/24

IMMA Ireland