Art Talks

IMMA Talks 2018

Transcript:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1__qCQTPfZcWdA0qENtIRDpUh7eW8QxBC

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.

Here, Amalia Mesa-Bains discusses five works from the exhibition, Archaeology of Memory, at BAMPFA.

Amalia Mesa-Bains:  What The River Gave To Me

Introduced by  Sarah Glennie (Director, IMMA),  Antony Gormley (artist) is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. To mark and celebrate Gormley's major contribution to the practice and discourse of contemporary sculpture since the 1970s, the artist will present a lecture that considers his current practice in the light of his seminal work at IMMA shortly after the museum opened in 1991. 

This talk took place on the 8.12.15 and was in association with AICA Ireland.
Image : Antony Gormley, Sick, 1986-1989, Lead, fibreglass and plaster, IMMA, 1994

Winter Lecture 2015 | Antony Gormley : Making Space

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

Track: Winter Lecture 2012: Alice Maher, Happenstance
As part of the IMMA's established Winter Lectures series which feature prominent Irish and  international artists, Alice Maher discusses her art practice and works within her  ongoing artistic practice and mid-career retrospective titled Becoming, presented in the IMMA temporary galleries at the National Concert Hall at Earlsfort Terrace. This talk took place on 13.12.2012.

"When the conscious engaged mind is at work it is capable of using circumstances to drive happening and of turning happening into fruitful circumstance. " Alice Maher 
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Further Information

About Exhibition 
ALICE MAHER  - BECOMING
Becoming is a mid-career retrospective of the work of Alice Maher, one of Ireland’s most respected and influential artists. Including painting, sculpture, photography and animation, the exhibition will include seminal works such as Berry Dress, 1994, from the IMMA Collection; Familiar, 1995, from the Crawford Art Gallery, and many other works held in IMMA’s own Collection. 
06 Oct 2012–17 Feb 2013.

About Artist
Alice Maher studied at the University of Limerick and the Crawford College of Art, Cork. She was awarded a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster and shortly after a Fulbright Scholarship to San Francisco Art Institute.

Maher works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Her work involves many different media including painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography and installation.

She has exhibited widely in Ireland, England and the United States, and represented Ireland in the 22nd São Paolo Bienal. In 2008, the David Nolan Gallery in New York hosted a solo exhibition of new drawings and sculptures titled Hypnerotomachia.

In 2007, a large survey show of her work, Natural Artifice, was held at the Brighton and Hove Museums. Also, in that year she completed a major drawing installation, The Night Garden, for the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. A mid-career retrospective of Maher’s work was held at IMMA in 2012 entitled Becoming.

Winter Lecture 2012: Alice Maher, Happenstance

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

To open the programme of selected works by Yvonne Rainer, the legendary artist presents a monologue that spans her 50 year long career of dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and writing, informed by a multiple of movements in dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism. This pre-performance lecture by Rainer is introduced by Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

About Artist
Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934, USA) 
Moving from San Francisco to New York in 1956, Yvonne Rainer studied dance at the Martha Graham School, while learning ballet at Ballet Arts. By the early 1960s, she had participated in Anna Halprin’s workshops, become a protégé of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and was fully immersed in the New York performance scene. As a founding member of the legendary Judson Dance Theater, she collaborated with many ground-breaking artists of her generation: Robert Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Robert Morris, and Carolee Schneemann. Rainer pursued a minimalist aesthetic, using everyday, spare pedestrian movements as seen in her masterwork Trio A (1966). Revolutionary at the time, her approach radically altered the vocabulary of dance and continues to inform contemporary artists working across disciplines today.

In the mid-1960s, Rainer began incorporating short film pieces and narrative into her dances. Her work became increasingly personal and political, and in the early 1970s she began to focus entirely on filmmaking. She went on to direct seven feature-films, each as experimental as her dance pieces, and explored themes such as political power, social exclusion, terrorism, sexuality, and illness. In 1997, retrospectives of her cinematic works were organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

In 2000, after 25 years of filmmaking, Rainer returned to dance with a newly commissioned work After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which was recognized with a Bessie Award. Since then, she has choreographed several new dance pieces such as The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there's nothing left to move? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015. Rainer also developed her writing, releasing her memoir Feelings Are Facts: A Life, published by MIT Press in 2006, and a book of her poetry, Poems, released by Badlands Unlimited in 2012. Currently, she is a contributing writer to Triple Canopy. In 2014, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles presented a major retrospective of Rainer's dances and films. Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Rockefeller Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wexner Prize, and in 2015, the Merce Cunningham Award. She currently lives and works in New York.

This talk took place on  12 May 2018.

Keynote Lecture and Performance

Pre - Performance Talk / Yvonne Rainer

Chris Dercon, former Director of  Volksbühne Berlin and Tate Modern, presents a keynote lecture on the occasion of featuring selected works by pioneering dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and writer Yvonne Rainer at IMMA.  Drawing on Rainer’s incredible 50 years practice, and its influence of on a subsequent generation of practitioners, Dercon’s talk examines the various ways dance and performance is used to intervene and invade the space of the museum, exploring historic and contemporary examples that defy categorisation. 

Introduced by Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA; this talk offers the rare chance to hear from one of the most prolific figures working and programming contemporary art, theatre, dance and performance, today.

Further Information 
About Speaker 
Dercon has been directing art institutions since 1990, including PS1 in New York, Witte de With - Center for Contemporary Art and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, both in Rotterdam, Haus der Kunst in Munic, the Tate Modern in London and the Volksbühne Berlin. From 1976 to 1982, he studied theatre and film in the Netherlands. Throughout the 1980s Dercon was active in the Belgian and Dutch performance, dance, and avant-garde theatre scene. During this time, he worked as a freelance theatre producer and director for the theatre and dance festival Klapstuk in Leuven and founded the International Theatre Tape Festival in Rotterdam. He produces numerous programmes on dance and film for Belgian and Dutch television.

In 1988 Dercon assumed the position of programme director at the Institute of Contemporary Art PS1 in New York. In 1990, he took on the role of director of Witte de With - Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and became the director of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1996. As director of Haus der Kunst in Munich 2003-2011, he initiated collaborations with, and publications about, Amar Kanwar, Allan Kaprow, Alexander Kluge, Martin Margiela, Paul McCarthy, Carlo Mollino, Garin Nugroho, Christoph Schlingensief, Patti Smith, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ai Weiwei. In addition, alongside contemporary art, Dercon also firmly established theatre, dance and performance, as well as film, photography, architecture, design and fashion in the programme. In addition, he headed the institution's "critical reconstruction", which reversed structural changes that had been carried out in the context of architectural denazification after the Second World War, to provide a perspective on the venue's origins and to facilitate a discourse about its history. From 2011 to 2016, as director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon focussed firmly on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In 2013, he opened the new "Tank" exhibition spaces that were transformed by Herzog & de Meuron, for Art in Action and initiated such exhibitions including as Ibrahim El-Salahi, Bhupen Khakhar, Richard Tuttle, Fahrelnissa Zeid and Wolfgang Tillmans. At the Volksbühne Berlin he worked with dancers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz and Tim Etchells who also performed at Tate Modern under his tenure.

This keynote Lecture is programmed in association with Live performance, talks & film screenings by Yvonne Rainer, Selected Works, 12, 13 May 2018  and Andrea Geyer, When We, presented 1 June – 21 October 2018.

This talk took place on 18 May 2018 at IMMA. 

Image Credit: Yvonne Rainer, Trio A with Flag,
Performance View, Judson Church, 1970.

Keynote Lecture on Yvonne Rainer / Chris Dercon

No Irish artist has placed the Ogham so centrally to their work as O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland, the source behind O’Doherty’s conceptual drawings and structural plays currently on view in IMMA. Damian McManus Professor of Early Irish in Trinity College, Dublin, explores the rich history, Irish heritage and social functioning of this 1,500 year old language. 
FURTHER INFORMATION
Learn more about the history of the Ogham script from its inception down to the present, its writing systems, its distinctive linear characters, rhythmic motifs, and inscriptions as well as its importance within the context of the history of the Irish language today.  This talk/lecture was programmed in the context of National Heritage Week and IMMA’s national collection of modern and contemporary art.

About the Speaker
Damian McManus is Professor of Early Irish in Trinity College, Dublin. He is author of A guide to Ogam (1991) and co-editor of the history of the Irish language, Stair na Gaeilge (1994), to which he contributed the chapter on Classical Modern Irish. He directed the TCD Bardic Poetry project which provided a digitized database of all surviving Bardic poetry as well as publishing the largest collection of medieval poems ever published in Ireland, A Bardic Miscellany (2010). He has published widely in the areas of Primitive Irish morphology and phonology, Latin loanwords in Early Irish, the history of Ireland’s oldest writing system and Classical Irish grammar, metrics and poetry. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and co-editor of its journal of Irish philology and literature, Ériu.

About the Exhibition
IMMA presents Brian O’Doherty Language and Space, in association with fine art print studio Stoney Road Press, Dublin. Presented in the context of our Collections exhibition Coast-Lines, this solo exhibition includes a number of works by Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland from IMMA’s National Collection, in addition to drawings from the 1960s, Structural Plays and new works recently published by Stoney Road Press as limited edition prints. See further details here 

About National Heritage Week
Various Locations, Saturday 19th August - Sunday 27th August 2018
National Heritage Week is coordinated by The Heritage Council and its aim is to build awareness and education about our heritage thereby encouraging its conservation and preservation. National Heritage Week is part of European Heritage Days. The main aim of European Heritage Days are to promote awareness of our built, natural and cultural heritage and to promote Europe’s common cultural heritage. Every year millions of Europeans visit historical monuments and sites throughout Europe on European Heritage Days. 

This Talk was recorded on Tuesday 21 August 2018 at IMMA.
IMMA credits: Brian O’Doherty, Rotating Vowels v, 2014. Etching, 92 x 73.5cm. Edition of 40. Image courtesy the artist and Stoney Road Press.

Brian O Doherty

Talk - Damian McManus, The Ogham Script

This lecture survey’s Wright’s artistic practice to date, introducing key tenets that have preoccupied the artist since her burgeoning career in the 1990s. Exploring some of Wright’s artist most distinctive and emotive bodies of work in dealing with the essence and meaning of being human, Kate Brindley, Director of Collection & Exhibitions at Chatsworth House UK, reflects on Wright’s multimedia response to the work of Lucian Freud, and considers what this might bring to new readings of Freud’s work in the present.

FURTHER INFORMATION
About Speaker
Kate Brindley is Director of Collections & Exhibitions, Chatsworth & Lismore Castle Arts. In January 2017 Kate become the first Director of Collections & Exhibitions for the Devonshire Group, a new role to lead the artistic content at Chatsworth and Lismore Castle Arts In Co.Waterford and development of the significant collections across the organisation.
Kate has over 25 years’ experience in the visual arts and museums sector including being Head of Arts and Museums for Wolverhampton where she led the RIBA award winning capital development of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.  From 2005-2009 Kate was Director of Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives and lead for the South West Renaissance museums programme. Her achievements included developing M Shed, a £26million new museum, and the record-breaking Banksy V Bristol Museum exhibition 2009. Kate was Director of mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) until March 2014 where she led the international visual arts programme and a governance change to University control. She was CEO of the Arnolfini in Bristol for 3 years leading their successful finalist award for Museum of the Year in 2016. For 8 years she was one of only four national advisors for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Art Funding Programme, including being the key advisor for the influential ‘Our Museums’ initiative focussed on active participation in museums until 2016.

About Exhibition
The Ethics of Scrutiny, curated by artist Daphne Wright, is the second exhibition to be presented as part of the IMMA Collection: Freud Project - a five-year loan of 52 works by renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011); one of the greatest painters of the 20th-century. This exhibition takes aspects of Freud’s intimate studio practice as a starting point to explore themes of vulnerability, longing and loss that permeate the painter’s work, while also looking to the works of other artists who address on a wider scale the complexities of representation. More details here
Daphne Wright, born 1963, Ireland, is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London, and was elected as a member of the Aosdána, in 2011. She lives and works in Dublin and Bristol. Wright’s work manoeuvres things into well-wrought but delicate doubt – shifting between taughtness and mess, it sets imagery, materials and language in constant metaphorical motion. Wright has exhibited extensively in England and Ireland since 1994, with solo exhibitions at many venues. Most recent projects include, Prayer Project, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 2017; Emotional Archaeology, R.H.A Gallery, Dublin, 2017.

This talk took place on 30 August 2018 at IMMA.  
IMMA credits: Jesmonite, paint, Head 1: 43 x 35 x 20 cm Head 2: 42 x 28 x 15 cm, Image courtesy of the Frith Street Gallery, London.

IMMA Collection:   Freud Project, The Ethics of Scrutiny, Curated by Daphne Wright

Keynote Lecture by Kate Brindley / The Work of Daphne Wright

In advance of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at IMMA from the 26 October 2018, internationally renowned artist Tillmans presents a  talk on his most recent projects. Delving deeper into the socio-political concerns that drives his expanded practice of photography, activism performance, music and installation, Tillmans shares the exciting ways that his IMMA exhibition, Rebuilding the Future pushes the limits of the photographic form. 
Presented in partnership with National College of Art and Design. 

FURTHER INFORMATION

About Speaker 
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany, 1968 and lives and works in Berlin and London. He has recently held solo exhibitions at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2017), Germany, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2017), Tate Modern, London (2017); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2016); The National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan (2015), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include The Photographic I - Other Pictures , S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium, I am you, you are too, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, The Absent Museum, WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2017), A History of Photography: The Body, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK (2016) Ordinary Pictures, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and The Noing Uv It, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2015). His work has been included in significant survey exhibitions including the 5th Biennale of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece (2015), Manifesta 10, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014), Fundamentals, the 14th International Architecture Biennale directed by Rem Koolhaas, Book for Architects, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2014). 

About Exhibition 
Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future 
26 October 2018 - 17 February 2019
Wolfgang Tillmans has shown his work in previous group exhibitions at IMMA but this will be his first solo exhibition at the museum, and his first solo project in Ireland. The exhibition includes new works from the artist who had a major show at Tate Modern last year. Further information here. 

This is talk took place 20 October 2018, at NCAD Rupert Guinness Theatre, Dublin. 

Image Credits: Wolfgang Tillmans / © Karl Kolbitz / courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans - Rebuilding the Future

Artist Talk/ Wolfgang Tillmans - Rebuilding the Future

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

Talk - Damian McManus, The Ogham Script

IMMA Ireland