IMMA presents Hilary Heron: A Retrospective, an exhibition of some 60 works celebrating the pioneering work of modernist sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977) opening on Friday 24 May 2024. As the first major retrospective exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964, this exhibition seeks to correct the ways that her work has been overlooked in Irish and international histories of modern sculpture.

Hilary Heron was a Dublin born sculptor who co-represented Ireland at the 1956 Venice Biennale alongside painter Louis le Brocquy (1916 – 2012). The exhibition brings together work from national and international collections, including carvings, welding and castings. Heron was a master welder, a practice highly unusual for an Irish artist, let alone a woman in the 1950s. Her work tactfully and skilfully broaches themes of gender, relationships, deep histories and religion through impressive, varied mediums including stone, lead, steel and wood.

Commenting on the exhibition, Seán Kissane, Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA, said: “This exhibition aims to bring Heron’s work back into public focus, and to publish a monograph with images and commentary on her work making it available to future audiences. Although Heron carved out a successful career for herself during her lifetime, problems of historiography and how the art market values the work of women less than that of men, meant that her work fell into obscurity after her death.”

Highlights from the exhibition include those works shown at the Venice Biennale each loosely on the theme of birds and the human body. Of these, Virgo (1950) is the most life-like rendition of the body, unlike each of the other sculptures which propose highly exaggerated features, like the Idol (1951) whose neck has been stretched and whose hair forms two shoulder-like appendages; or the Stiff Necked Woman (undated) whose body has been exaggerated almost to the point of abstraction.

Presented alongside Heron’s work is a display of works titled Redux: Contemporary Irish sculptors at Venice. This display features the work of Siobhán Hapaska, Eva Rothschild, and Niamh O’Malley, all female sculptors who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2001, 2019, and 2022 respectively. Redux, meaning revival, signals Heron’s enduring influence on contemporary Irish sculpture and her legacy in proximity to contemporary sculptural practice, making her influence visible for the first time.

A symposium on the work of Hilary Heron, presented in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin The Long Room Hub and FE Mc William Gallery, takes place on Thursday 23 May at TCD. This one-day gathering brings together a milieu of voices to reflect and speculate on Heron’s overlooked legacy. Speakers include Penelope Curtis, Fionna Barber, Riann Coulter, Billy Shortall, Mary Kelly, Barbara Knezevic, Niamh O’Malley, and others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by IMMA, with texts by Riann Coulter, Seán Kissane, Sara Damaris Muthi, Billy Shortall, and Eva Rothschild.

Hilary Heron: A Retrospective is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Doyle Collection.

15 April 2024

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For further information and images please contact:  Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T: 086 2010023 Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: 086 2009957

Additional notes for Editors

Hilary Heron: A Retrospective 24 May – 28 October 2024 Admission Free

Open: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5.30pm.

Wednesday: 11.30am – 5.30pm. Sunday: 12noon – 5.30pm.

Webpage: Hilary Heron: A Retrospective

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by IMMA, with texts by Riann Coulter, Seán Kissane, Sara Damaris Muthi, Billy Shortall, and Eva Rothschild. Price €20.00.

Exhibition Tour

This exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane, Curator, IMMA, in collaboration with Riann Coulter, Curator, FE Mc William Gallery & Studio. The exhibition will tour to the FE Mc William Gallery & Studio, Banbridge from 15 November 2024 to 15 February 2025.

Redux: Contemporary Irish sculptors at Venice is curated by Sara Damaris Muthi, Curatorial Fellow, Exhibitions, IMMA.

IMMA Talks – Hilary Heron Series

Symposium

Hilary Heron, Ireland’s Most Promising Sculptor

Thursday 23 May 2024, 10.30am – 4.30pm Offsite Trinity College Dublin – Long Room Hub

Ticketed – ticket link

Why was an extraordinary woman sculptor left in the shadows of Modern Art history? On Thurs 23 May 2024 from 10:30 – 16:30; IMMA & TCD Long Room Hub presents a symposium to coincide with the forthcoming IMMA exhibition, Hilary Heron: A Retrospective that celebrates the revolutionary work of modernist sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977). This one-day gathering brings together a milieu of voices to reflect and speculate on Heron’s overlooked legacy, in anticipation of the exhibition of Heron’s work in Ireland at IMMA.

Invited speakers include: Keynote – Penelope Curtis (author, historian, former director of Henry Moore Institute, Tate Britain, and Gulbenkian Museum, UK); Fionna Barber (Reader in Art History, Manchester School of Art, UK); Riann Coulter (art historian, curator, FE Mc William Gallery); Billy Shortall (art historian, leading Hilary Heron scholar, TCD); Mary Kelly (Programme Director, MA in Global Gallery Studies, UCC); Seán Kissane (curator, Exhibitions, IMMA); Barbara Knezevic (artist, lecturer); Sara Damaris Muthi (curatorial fellow, IMMA); Niamh O’Malley (artist) and others.

This symposium follows in the IMMA Modern Masters Series that offers a critical reappraisal of the work and ideas of lesser-known artists. The symposium is followed by the exhibition launch and preview of Hilary Heron: A Retrospective at IMMA. Refreshments are available to all event attendees on the day. See full details here https://imma.ie/whats-on/modern-masters-symposium-hilary-heron-irelands-most-promising-sculptor/

Curators Talk Series – Free & Drop In

Hilary Heron: A Retrospective with Seán Kissane

Sun 30 June 2024, 2 – 3pm, Meeting Point, IMMA Garden Galleries

Seán Kissane (Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA) gives and in-gallery introduction on a selection of works that comprise the exhibition, Hilary Heron: A Retrospective.

Admission free.

Redux: Contemporary Irish sculptors at Venice with Sara Damaris Muthi Sun 18 August 2024, 2 – 3pm, Meeting Point, IMMA Garden Galleries

Sara Damaris Muthi (Curatorial Fellow, IMMA) gives an in-gallery introduction to Redux: Contemporary Irish sculptors at Venice.

Admission free.

About the artist

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, and Leslie Waddington, amongst others.

IMMA presents We realised the power of it, an exhibition-project by Sara Greavu and Ciara Phillips, that deals with the history of the radical film collective, Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW), opening on Saturday 30 March 2024.

DFVW was a woman-led film production company established in Derry in 1983 that operated until 1990. Its members, most of whom had no prior experience of filmmaking, came together with a sense of urgency to make films addressing overlapping political tensions around gender, class, the Irish national question and legacies of colonialism.
  
We realised the power of it includes raw footage, photographs, and archival documents that trace a partial history of the workshop and its practice. Working through the archive and with former collective members Anne Crilly and Margo Harkin, the research begins to uncover the organic, reactive, and experimental methodologies of the collective. It considers the highly-charged context in which they were working, as well as the overarching political principles and energy that bound them together.

A DFVW document from 1988 states its purpose “Derry Film & Video Collective was legally formed as a Company in June 1984 as a logical extension of an idea which was being developed by a small group of people in the North West of Ireland. We observed that the North of Ireland had become one of the most media-biased areas of the world over the preceding fifteen years and that, for the most part, this media coverage was sensationalist, superficial, interventionist and censored. Derry Film & Video was formed, therefore, to make an indigenous contribution to media representation of our lives”.  

DFVW produced a number of films, including Stop Strip Searching (1984); Planning (1986); Mother Ireland (1988); Hush-a-Bye Baby (1990), as well as enacting various forms of cultural education including community screenings and filmmaking courses. Working to counteract the ‘slow violence’ of British TV news and cinema stereotyped depictions of the north of Ireland, members of DFVW sought to tell a different story about their lived political and social realities. The intersections and fractures between feminism and republicanism were the key area of interest that shaped their output. In doing this work of representation and crafting both documentary and fiction films, they learned methods of researching, filming, logging, collating, scripting, and editing through doing, driven by a sense of the pressing political need to speak on their own behalf.

We realised the power of it was originally commissioned for the Guest Programme of the 39th EVA International, curated by Merve Elveren.

– ENDS –

For further information and images please contact:   
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]  T: 086 2010023 
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]  T: 086 2009957 

Additional notes for Editors

We realised the power of it – Derry Film and Video Workshop 
30 March – 22 September 2024  
Admission Free

Open: 
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5.30pm.
Wednesday: 11.30am – 5.30pm.
Sunday: 12noon – 5.30pm.
Webpage: We realised the power of it – Derry Film & Video Workshop – IMMA 
 
About the project  
We realised the power of it is part of a long-term, ongoing research process that has involved working with former members of the collective, their supporters, peers, and fellow activists; helping to preserve, digitise, and archive the videotapes that only existed in their original U-matic format; and working with an extensive document and image archive that was preserved by former collective member, Margo Harkin. Other members of the collective, at different points in time, included Anne Crilly, Trisha Ziff, Geraldine McGuiness, Jim Curran, Stephanie English, Tommy Collins, Therese Friel, Brendan McMenamin, and Jamie Dunbar.

Receiving the bulk of their funding from Channel 4, the workshop was one of the companies formed under the terms of the 1982 Workshop Declaration (1), an initiative that sought to democratise the process of filmmaking and broadcasting, and amplify the voices of those who were marginalised on the basis of race, gender, geography, sexuality and class. As a newly established ‘publisher broadcaster,’ Channel 4 provided both significant financial support for production and the platform to distribute their works.

The work of DFVW amounts to more than its filmic outputs. Revisiting and reframing the project provides an opportunity to think beyond notions of the filmmaker-auteur and to think through practical and administrative aspects of this work as well. Within a broader frame, it is possible to consider context, infrastructure, physical space and those allies who were willing to hold political space for the work to be made. It admits, for instance, the stories of surveillance and raids, speaking as much to the increased administrative burden that this state oppression engenders as to its injustice. It points to the experience of being both incorporated and disavowed through financial and distributive dependence on a British broadcaster—albeit the most progressive of these, at that time. It touches on their story of collective organising, of the horizontal and equal distribution of resources among collective members; of the way that organising in collective structures and sharing resources equally amounts to a kind of speculation about what the future could be, prefiguring and proposing a different way of working.

(1) An initiative of The Independent Filmmakers’ Association, the British Film Institute, and ACTT (the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians).

Sara Greavu (she/her) lives and works between Derry and Dublin. A researcher, writer and organiser, she is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. In 2024, with Project Arts Centre, she is curator of Ireland’s Pavilion at the 60th International Venice Biennale, presenting Eimear Walshe’s work, ROMANTIC IRELAND.  

Ciara Phillips is an Irish and Canadian artist born in Ottawa, Canada in 1976. Her work has been exhibited in public institutions, artist-run spaces and private galleries worldwide including: Ciara Phillips at Trykkeriet in Bergen in 2019; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; The Model, Sligo; Kunsthall Stavanger; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Benaki Museum, Athens; TATE Britain, London; and Hamburg Kunstverein. She is the initiator of many collaborative projects including: Workshop (2010 – ongoing); Poster Club (2010 – 2017); Press Room (2019); and Åpent Trykkeri (2018 – 2019). In 2014, Phillips was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 2020 she was awarded the Queen Sonja Print Award in Oslo. She is a Professor at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.

Today IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) and Matheson LLP, are excited to announce the opening of a new community space created by Studio Makkink & Bey, The Matheson Creativity Hub in Memory of Tim Scanlon.  

Designed by internationally-renowned design practice, Studio Makkink & Bey, who were selected as the winning designers by a panel of judges in March 2023 after an invited architectural competition, the Matheson Creativity Hub at IMMA combines exceptional architecture and design to provide a welcoming and inclusive space that inspires creative engagement and fosters social connectivity for audiences of all ages. IMMA have been delighted to partner with Matheson to realise this new space. 

Michael Jackson, Managing Partner, Matheson, said: “We are proud to partner with IMMA to bring this innovative and inclusive space to life. The Matheson Creativity Hub is a tribute to Tim’s legacy and a symbol of our enduring partnership with the Museum, furthering our shared dedication to making a meaningful impact within our community. Delivered as part of the arts pillar of Matheson’s Impactful Business Programme, this project underlines our commitment to diversity and inclusion, and providing access to the arts for people of all ages and backgrounds. I would like to thank the volunteers of Matheson’s Arts Committee and the team at IMMA who gave their time and expertise to this initiative, as well as the designers, Studio Makkink & Bey, for creating a welcoming and engaging new space. We hope that the Matheson Creativity Hub will empower individuals of all walks of life to access and participate in the arts.” 

Sheena Barrett, Head of Research & Learning, IMMA said: “The Matheson Creativity Hub in Memory of Tim Scanlon is an exciting new addition to IMMA and supports our vision, to be the most dynamic and welcoming cultural destination in Ireland. At IMMA, we believe in the power of artistic practice to imagine and shape a different world—a world where every voice is heard, where communities thrive, and where unexpected experiences spark inspiration and change. The Matheson Creativity Hub in Memory of Tim Scanlon provides a bespoke space to drop-in, draw, make and enjoy taking time to invest in your creative self. Through a mixture of programmed events, workshops, performances and more casual drop-in times, these new spaces are inviting and radically public. Studio Makkink & Bey have designed the space to be flexible to accommodate our family Explorer and Schools programmes for families and children, our IMMA Horizons programmes for the lifelong curious, reading groups and seminars, silent disco drawing workshops, performances and more while also being open to visitors who’d like to spend some time delving into the boxes of art materials on offer to create responses to the exhibitions they’ve seen. The space is both playful and luxurious and invites visitors to spend time, be curious and explore their own creativity and foster imaginations.”  

Commenting on the new space, Studio Makkink & Bey said: “The design of the Matheson Creativity Hub provides endless possibilities to host diverse activities for an inclusive community. It acts as a place to inspire and be inspired by, while providing attributes to activate participation around modern art and artistic expression. Here, visitors indulge in experiencing the embodiment of diverse artistic practices. With and without programming, the space offers a soft invitation to participate.”  

Makkink & Bey is an internationally renowned design practice with over  20 years of experience in the spatial and artistic field. At the heart lies their  methodology to oversee the greater landscape of a project, reaching from social  and historical to material and environmental aspects.

Matheson has made a significant contribution to the cultural landscape in Ireland and has worked with IMMA since 2015, supporting over 50 artists through new commissions and major international exhibitions. Both partnerships – New Art at IMMA (2015 – 2018) and Irish Art at IMMA (2018 – 2019) were championed by Tim Scanlon (1965 -2020). As former Chairperson of Matheson and IMMA Board Member (2016 – 2020),Tim was an important influence on IMMA’s thinking. Tim encouraged progressive programming and change-making conversations that placed community engagement and inclusivity at the heart of the Museum’s activities.          

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Contact: For further information and images please contact
Monica Cullinane, IMMA, E: [email protected]
Patrice Molloy, IMMA, E: [email protected]
Heather Yates, Matheson LLP, E: [email protected]
David Kinch, MKC Communications, E: [email protected]   

Additional Notes for Editors 

About Matheson 

– Matheson’s clients include the majority of the Fortune 100 companies and it advises 7 of the top 10 global technology brands, 7 of the world’s 10 largest asset managers, and over half of the world’s 50 largest banks.

-Matheson is headquartered in Dublin and also has offices in Cork, London, New York, San Francisco and Palo Alto.  The firm employs over 860 people across its six offices, including 122 partners and tax principals, and over 560 legal, tax and digital services professionals.

-Matheson was named Ireland Transfer Pricing Firm of the Year at the International Tax Review (ITR) EMEA Tax Awards 2023 in September 2023.

-In September 2023, Matheson was awarded the Best Energy Achievement in Financial & Professional Services award at the Business Energy Achievement Awards 2023.  Partner, Garret Farrelly received the Energy Leader Award, which recognises and honours outstanding leaders, at the same event.

-Also in September 2023, Matheson’s collaborative initiative to support Ukrainian refugees won the Partnership with Charity / Volunteering award at the Chambers Ireland Sustainable Business Awards 2023.

-Matheson won the Pro Bono: Outstanding Firm award at the Chambers Europe Awards 2023 in Milan in May 2023.

-Also in May 2023, Matheson was named Irish Firm of the Year at the IFLR Europe Awards.

-In April 2023, the firm was awarded the Net Zero Carbon Award at the Business & Finance ESG Awards 2023 for our innovative energy tracking app, CarbonCal.

-Also in April 2023, Matheson was awarded the Sustainability in Early Talent Recruitment Award and the Highly Commended Award in the Diversity Recruitment Award category at the gradIreland Graduate Recruitment Awards 2023.

-In February 2023 Matheson was ranked as Ireland’s Leading Funds Practice by assets under management for the twelfth consecutive year by the Monterey Insight Ireland Fund Report.

-Matheson was named Diversity and Inclusion Law Firm of the Year at the Irish Law Awards 2021 and 2022.  In November 2023, the firm’s female / male partner gender ratio was ranked the sixth most gender-diverse in Europe by The Lawyer in its European 100 report 2023.

-In 2019, Matheson became the first organisation in Ireland to receive the Investors in Diversity Gold Standard Award from the Irish Centre for Diversity in recognition of the firm’s development and implementation of a series of people-focussed D&I initiatives.  In March 2022, Matheson succeeded in retaining the Gold Standard.  Matheson is the only law firm in Ireland to achieve the Gold Standard.

-In 2021 Matheson became one of the first Irish law firms to establish a dedicated cross-sectoral and partner-led Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Advisory Group which assists companies in navigating and responding to the rapidly evolving ESG landscape.  Matheson clients have access to an online ESG resource hub of knowledge and insights.

-In 2020, Matheson became the first Irish-headquartered law firm to sign up to the Mindful Business Charter, a collaboration between financial services businesses and law firms in Ireland and the UK promoting healthy and effective ways of working.  In 2021, Matheson became a signatory to the Law Society of Ireland’s Professional Wellbeing Charter, which champions behaviours, skills and practices to promote and enable professional wellbeing in the workplace.

About IMMA
Founded in 1991, IMMA is Ireland’s National Cultural Institution for Modern and Contemporary Art located in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Its vibrant, bold, and diverse programme comprises exhibitions, commissions and event-based projects by leading Irish and international artists, as well as a rich engagement and learning programme which together provides audiences of all ages the opportunity to connect with contemporary art and unlock their creativity. IMMA is also the home of the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of nearly 4,000 artworks by Irish and international artists. IMMA makes this national resource available through exhibitions at IMMA and other venues nationally and internationally, engagement and learning programmes and digital resources. 

About Studio Makkink & Bey
Studio Makkink & Bey is led by designer-architect Rianne Makkink and designer Jurgen Bey. The studio works in various domains of applied art and includes public space projects, product design, architecture, exhibition design and applied arts. Supported by a design team, they have been operating their design practice since 2002. 

The ambition of Studio Makkink & Bey is to see the role of the designer expanded to the most strategic function possible. To this end, their design team includes professionals from many different fields of knowledge; forming alliances with other designers, architects and experts. Their past projects include work with the Theatre Kunstmin 2014, the Rotterdam 2015, and their self-initiated project, the WaterSchool. studiomakkinkbey.nl 

 

Ten years since its inception, L’Internationale Online launches its new research and publishing platform at internationaleonline.org. The platform includes over 200 long reads, opinion pieces and artist contributions on urgent cultural and political debates from some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners, all available in PDF in reader formats. Over forty publications, produced by the confederation are available for free download. 

IMMA is a proud member of L’Internationale, a European confederation of museums, art organisations and universities. Founded in 2009, L’Internationale works across programming (exhibitions, seminars, schools, residencies, public programmes) research and publishing, and communication. L’Internationale Online was initiated a decade ago and serves as the shared platform for the confederation. Its new version has been developed under the editorship of Nick Aikens, who assumed the role of the Managing Editor and Research Responsible in August 2023 as part of the four year, EU funded project ’Museum of the Commons’.

Nick Aikens explains:
L’Internationale has grown considerably in 2023, currently comprising 11 partners, 3 academic partners and 3 associate partners.
The focus on content-led collaboration and working for the commons makes the new L’Internationale Online platform a vital resource for the network and our diverse constituents. The new platform will be a generative tool for students, researchers and the wider arts community at a time when we desperately need imaginative, critical thinking to shape more fair, just worlds.  

Internationaleonline.org includes contributions, reading recommendations, free ebooks, editorials, statements, essays and articles by researchers affiliated to the institutions, think tanks or universities that make up L’Internationale alongside invited scholars and practitioners. The index allows you to search for material by title, author or thematic thread, including the three content strands within the Museum of the Commons project: climate, situated organisations and past in the present. All content on the platform is free and without advertising. Content is commissioned in the contributor’s original language and translated into English.

The project was led by Nick Aikens with Anna Granqvist and Tove Posselt. It was designed by Anja Groten, interaction and development was by Joel Galvez, website accessibility and ecology by Karl Moubarak. The Digital Ecology Institute served as Ecology Consultant. Content for the platform is decided through the L’Internationale Online Editorial Board.

L’Internationale is a European confederation of museums, arts organisations and universities, founded in 2009. It takes its name from the 19th century worker’s anthem written by Eugène Pottier. The confederation advocates a new internationalist model that challenges exclusivity and emphasises common heritage through interconnected archives and constituent-led approaches, fostering individual and collective emancipation. In its current configuration L’Internationale brings together eight major European art institutions: HKW (Berlin, Germany); MSU (Zagreb, Croatia); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain); MACBA (Barcelona, Spain); M HKA, (Antwerp, Belgium); MSN (Warsaw, Poland), Salt (Istanbul, Turkiye), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), with Institute of Radical Imagination (Naples,Italy), tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iasi, Romania), and VCRC (Kyiv, Ukraine). L’Internationale has three academic partners: HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), NCAD (Dublin, Ireland) and ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and three associate organisations IMMA (Dublin, Ireland), MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and WIELS  (Forest, Belgium).

L’Internationale is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This platform reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, today (15 February 2024) announced highlights of its 2024 programme, featuring a retrospective exhibition of the work of pioneering modernist sculptor Hilary Heron; an immersive video installation by melanie bonajo presented in IMMA’s stunning 17th-century Baroque Chapel; and for the first time outside of the UK the showing of the work of ground-breaking artist Hamad Butt. A major group exhibition, Take a Breath, that provides an historical, social, political, and personal examination of breathing; why we breathe, how we breathe and what we breathe, includes live performances by Okwui Okpokwasili, Maria Hasabi and Camille Norment. 

Other highlights include the presentation of We realised the power of it, an exhibition-project dealing with the history and archive of the radical film collective, Derry Film and Video Workshop; an exhibition of modernist and contemporary photographers derived from the David Kronn Collection; and the return of the popular Summer at IMMA programme and IMMA’s Eco Festival, EARTH RISING. IMMA is also excited to announce the opening of a new community space in partnership with Matheson created by Studio Makkink & Bey, and the roll out of a new IMMA MEMBERS programme with a series of bespoke events and happenings.  

Continuing in 2024 is the momentous 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. Opening today, two new works commissioned by IMMA are presented as part of the exhibition – Turkish artist İz Öztat site-specific installation, Rest, and a new multi-narrative environment, An Dún, by Belfast based Array Collective. 

Opening in March, We realised the power of it, is an exhibition-project by Sara Greavu and Ciara Phillips that deals with the history and archive of the radical film collective, Derry Film and Video Workshop. This installation of archive material includes footage, photographs and documents that trace a history of the workshop, exploring concerns with gender, class, collective organising, the Irish ‘national question’ and the legacies of imperialism. Originally co-commissioned with EVA International, as part of the Guest Programme of the 39th EVA International.  

In May, Hilary Heron: A Retrospective, celebrates the pioneering work of modernist Irish sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977). As the first major retrospective exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964, this exhibition will seek to correct the ways that her work has been overlooked in Irish and international histories of modern sculpture. Heron was a master welder, a practice highly unusual for an Irish artist, let alone a woman in the 1950s. Her work tactfully and skilfully broaches themes of gender, relationships, deep histories and religion through impressive, varied mediums including stone, lead, steel and wood.   

IMMA’s summer season opens with Take a Breath, a major new exhibition that tracks the impact of air pollution from industrialisation to modern-day wars and how that effects our environment, our health and how we live. The act of breathing is central to existence, we inhale and exhale unconsciously, it gives voice through language and speech. The exhibition will explore the suppression of protests of voices from different communities, breath as a symbol of distinct voices, community, and resistance. Moving to the personal, the use of breath as meditation to move from the external to the internal, to consciously influence your breathing in daily life and focus on the present. Take a Breath features the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Alex Cecchetti, Ammar Bouras, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Hajra Waheed, Ana Mendieta, Isabel Nolan, among many others. The exhibition will explore breath through movement and sound with performances by Okwui Okpokwasili, Maria Hasabi and Camille Norment.    

Opening in July, When the body says Yes, is an immersive video installation by melanie bonajo (they/them), a queer non-binary Dutch artist, filmmaker, sexological bodyworker and somatic sex coach and educator. The installation, originally commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the Biennale Arte 2022, is part of the artist’s ongoing research into the current status of intimacy in our increasingly alienating, commodity-driven world. For bonajo, touch can be a powerful remedy for the modern epidemic of loneliness. 

Throughout the Summer months Summer at IMMA will present a vibrant programme of artist performances, workshops, talks, and IMMA’s popular Music in the Courtyard series. The Summer programme culminates with EARTH RISING, a two-day festival of free events and experiences aimed at addressing the climate crisis and inspiring collective action towards a sustainable and hopeful future, taking place from 20 to 22 September.  

In the Autumn an exhibition of photography from the David Kronn Collection celebrates the fourth donation from Irish-born, US-based collector David Kronn. This latest gift will bring the total number of works donated to IMMA to nearly 200 photographs. The present donation includes a diverse selection of works, ranging from 19th-century to the present day, by modernist photographers such as André Kertész, Irving Penn, Berenice Abbott, Brett Weston, Mike Disfarmer and Martine Franck, as well as contemporary works by Nicolai Howalt & Trine Søndergaard, and Doug DuBois. 

 IMMA is excited to present for the first time outside of the UK a retrospective exhibition of the work of Hamad Butt (1962-1994), organised by IMMA and Whitechapel Gallery, London, opening in December. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in London, he was British South Asian, Muslim, and queer. Before his AIDS-related death in 1994, aged 32, Butt completed and showed four key sculptural installations and left behind writings, drawings, paintings, and plans for new installations. He was a contemporary of the Young British Artists (and their peer at Goldsmiths) and critics described him as epitomizing the new ‘hazardism’ in art. He exhibited widely in his lifetime, and he was arguably the first British artist to respond in a non-militant, conceptual mode to HIV/AIDS. His iconic sculptural works have never been shown together, his paintings and drawings never exhibited until now.   

Commenting on the 2024 programme, IMMA Director, Annie Fletcher said: “In 2024, IMMA is proud to present a diverse and thought-provoking programme that reflects our commitment to showcasing pioneering artists that resonate with contemporary life. From retrospectives honouring overlooked artists such as the sculptor Hilary Heron to ambitious immersive installations exploring intimacy and touch by artists like melanie benajo, our programme aims to spark dialogue, challenge perceptions, and inspire. We look forward to welcoming visitors to engage with these compelling works and to join us in fostering a vibrant inclusive cultural community, here at IMMA.”  

 A key element of IMMA’s work is the Collection on Loan. IMMA lends extensively its Collection, nationally and internationally, to support the exhibition programmes of other public institutions. To date in 2024, works from the IMMA Collection will travel to the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts; Tate Britain; Royal Academy of Fine Arts, London; Firstsite, Colchester; Lewis Glucksman Gallery, and Crawford Art Gallery. Touring exhibitions include works from IMMA’s acclaimed Patrica Hurl: Irish Gothic retrospective to be shown at the South Tipperary Arts Centre and Source Arts Centre. 

Please click on the links below to read more about the individual exhibitions, which will be accompanied by a dynamic programme of talks, events, screenings, performances, artist residencies and artist commissions to be announced throughout the year.   

IMMA Programme 2024 

Continuing in 2024 

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective
Until 21 April 2024 

Opening in 2024 

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective – Artist Commissions 

15 February – 15 September 2024 

We realised the power of it – Derry Film & Video Workshop 

28 March – 22 September 2024 

Hilary Heron: A Retrospective
24 May – 3 November 2024 

Take a Breath
14 June 2024 – 30 March 2025

melanie bonajo: When the body says Yes
26 July – 27 October 2024  

David Kronn Collection  

28 October 2024 to 26 January 2025   

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions  

6 December 2024 – 5 May 2025  

Collection on Loan
Ongoing  

 

– ENDS –  

For further information and images please contact:  

Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]  

Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]  

Additional notes for Editors

The Matheson Creativity Hub in Memory of Tim Scanlan 

In March, IMMA in partnership with Matheson, will launch a new innovative community space designed by Studio Makkink & Bey called The Matheson Creativity Hub in Memory of Tim Scanlan. Studio Makkink & Bey was selected by a panel of judges, after an invited architectural competition, to create an innovative space at IMMA that combines exceptional architecture and design to provide a welcoming and inclusive space, that inspires creative engagement and fosters social connectivity for audiences of all ages. IMMA are thrilled to partner with Matheson to realise this new space.

IMMA MEMBERS 

IMMA is built on the stories it holds, tells, and inspires. And there are no better ambassadors to tell these stories than our friends and supporters – IMMA’s newly launched membership programme, IMMA MEMBERS is an inclusive community of like-minded, curious, and creative individuals who would like to experience IMMA in new ways. Across the year, IMMA MEMBERS will be invited to all our exhibition openings, unlimited access to the museum’s programme of exhibitions, events and talks, enjoy retail discounts and bespoke membership merchandise, plus have the chance to experience money-can’t-buy seasonal events each quarter. You can read more about the programme on the IMMA website here 

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Hugh Lane Gallery and Culture Ireland are delighted to announce the selection of two artists, Breda Lynch and Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, as participants of the 24th Biennale of Sydney, a direct result of the IRELAND INVITES programme.

Launched in early 2023, IRELAND INVITES seeks to enhance international exposure for Irish based visual artists by hosting biennale curators to undertake visits to studio and art institutions in Ireland. The first visiting curator Inti Guerrero, Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale, 2024 travelled to Ireland as part of the IRELAND INVITES initiative in May of this year.

During his visit Guerrero met with several visual artists from across Ireland.  Artworks by Irish artist Breda Lynch and Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, who produced her work while on a Production Residency at IMMA in collaboration with EVA International, have been selected to participate in the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, which takes place from 9 March to 10 June 2024.

Commenting on the selection of Lynch and Shahmuradova Tanska to participate in the Biennale of Sydney, Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA, Barbara Dawson, Director Hugh Lane Gallery and Sharon Barry, Director Culture Ireland said: “We are thrilled for both artists on their selection for the Sydney Biennale and delighted that IRELAND INVITES was able to play a role in facilitating this wonderful achievement.  Ireland has a strong visual arts practice, and we are excited about the opportunity IRELAND INVITES provides to further enhance the representation of Irish visual artists internationally”.  
 
IRELAND INVITES gives visiting curators the opportunity to enhance their understanding of contemporary art practices in Ireland availing of the curatorial expertise of IMMA, Hugh Lane Gallery and Culture Ireland, who create bespoke hosted trips for each visiting curator.

The programme also welcomed Miguel A. López and Dominique Fontaine this year, co-curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024 who visited Ireland to coincide with EVA, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art in Limerick.  Plans are in place to welcome curators representing Hawaii, Karachi, and Berlin in the coming months.

– ENDS – 
 
Contact: For further information and images please contact: 
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] 
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected]

Additional Notes for Editors 

24th Biennale of Sydney 
The 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, takes place from 9 March to 10 June 2024. Visit Ten Thousand Suns – Biennale of Sydney for details.

Inti Guerrero 
Inti Guerrero, together with Cosmin Costinas was announced last summer as the Co-Artistic Director of the 24th Biennale of Sydney which will take place from 9 March to 10 June 2024. Inti Guerrero is currently tutor of the Curatorial Studies programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts-KASK, Ghent.  He was the Artistic Director of bap – bellas artes projects, Manila (2018-2022), Curator of the 38th EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick (2018), Artistic Director of TEOR/éTica, San Jose (2011-2014) and the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator at Tate, London (2016-2020).

As an independent curator, Guerrero has curated exhibitions across Asia, Europe, Latin America and West Africa, including ‘Myth Makers” (curated with Chantal Wong) at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2023), ‘Fraccionar’ at Casa Museo Luis Barragan, Mexico City (2019), ‘A Chronicle of Interventions,’ Tate Modern, London (2014) and ‘A Transatlantic Affair: Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier,’ (curated with Carlos Maria Romero) at Museum of Art of Rio-MAR, Rio de Janeiro (2014). He has edited and contributed his writing to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogues and has taught and lectured at different universities, art academies, and institutions across the world.

Over the past 10 years, Costinaș and Guerrero have co-curated a number of exhibitions together including ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ (Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul and San Francisco, 2013-2015) ‘Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs’ (Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, 2016-2017), ‘Long Green Lizzards’ – Dakar Biennale, La Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain, Dakar (2018). Both curators are based in Berlin.

Breda Lynch 
Artist, curator and teacher, Brenda Lynch attended the Crawford College of Art, Cork, Chelsea College of Art, London, and the University of Wolverhampton. Lynch has exhibited extensively in Ireland and abroad. International exhibitions include curated group exhibitions in Scotland, England, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Thailand, China, USA, and Australia.

Solo exhibitions in Ireland and Northern Ireland include:’WItch and Lezzie’, Ashford Gallery RHA (2017), ‘Fragments of a Lost Civilisation’, Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar (2016), ’The Pit and Other Stories’ , at Siamsa Tire Gallery, Tralee (2014), ’Thursday’s Clinic’ , 126 Gallery, Galway (2013), ‘Strangelove’, Black Mariah, Triskel, Cork (2010),’Song to the Siren’, Galway Arts Centre (2009), ‘Place of the Crows’ and ‘Fleurs Fatales’, Context Gallery Derry (2007) and ‘Dark Brides and Silent Twins’ Limerick City Gallery of Art (2006).

She is represented in several national collections including the OPW – Office of Public Works, NUIG Collection – Galway, Luciano Benetton Italy, Trinity College Art Collection, Limerick City Gallery Collection, University of Limerick Collection, Hunt Museum Limerick and other private collections.

Sana Shahmuradova Tanska 
Sana Shahmuradova Tanska is a Ukrainian artist currently based in Kyiv, a significant part of her childhood was spent in the countryside in the Podillia region, among rivers and forests. In 2014 she relocated to Toronto as an immigrant where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at York University, Toronto, ON in 2020. Following this Sana decided to return to the city of Kyiv which has always inspired her.

Sana Shahmuradova Tanska was on a Production Residency at IMMA from February to April 2023 and was nominated for this opportunity by EVA International ‘Guest Programme’ curator Sebastian Cichocki. The 40th EVA International took place in Limerick, from 31 August – 29 October 2023. Production Residencies support national programming through the provision of space and time leading up to major exhibitions or research projects with partnering organisations and programmes.

About IMMA www.imma.ie   
Founded in 1991, IMMA is Ireland’s National Cultural Institution for Modern and Contemporary Art located in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Its vibrant, bold, and diverse programme comprises exhibitions, commissions, and event-based projects by leading Irish and international artists, as well as a rich engagement and learning programme which together provides audiences of all ages the opportunity to connect with contemporary art and unlock their creativity. IMMA is also the home of the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of nearly 4,000 artworks by Irish and international artists. IMMA makes this national resource available through exhibitions at IMMA and other venues nationally and internationally, engagement and learning programmes and digital resources.

About Hugh Lane Gallery www.hughlane.ie 
Located in Dublin’s City Centre, in Parnell Square, Hugh Lane Gallery, (originally named Municipal Gallery of Modern Art), houses one of Ireland’s most exciting collections of modern and contemporary Irish and international art. It is also the home of Francis Bacon’s Studio. The Gallery was founded by Sir Hugh Lane in 1908 as part of the dynamic and pioneering Celtic Revival Movement in Ireland at the turn of the 20thcentury. Since its foundation, the gallery’s collection of modern and international art has grown considerably. As rich resource in the visual arts, HLG, where art and ideas meet, participates with many diverse communities nationally and globally through its programmes of engagement, learning, exhibitions, rotating displays, and research.
 
About Culture Ireland www.cultureireland.ie 
Culture Ireland promotes Irish arts worldwide and creates and supports opportunities for Irish artists and companies to present and promote their work at strategic international festivals and venues. Culture Ireland develops platforms to present outstanding Irish work to international audiences, through showcases at key global arts events, including the Edinburgh Festivals and the Venice Biennales.

This autumn, IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) presents a major international exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, one of the largest exhibitions in the Museum’s history, opening on Thursday 30 November 2023. Self-Determination is the culmination of a three-year research and commissioning project, in dialogue with museums and institutions worldwide, presenting over 110 artists. Focusing on new nation-states which emerged in the wake of the First World War, it explores the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building and statecraft. The exhibition is part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012–2023.

Bringing together a range of Irish and international works, both modern and contemporary, the exhibition illuminates the shared experiences of early 20th century new states. It includes key works from national and international collections – including the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU), who have sent major works from Kyiv to Dublin for the exhibition – as well as new commissions by artists invited to respond to the theme of self-determination.

The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary perspectives is a key element of the exhibition. IMMA has commissioned new works by Array Collective, Jasmina Cibic, Declan Clarke, Minna Henriksson and İz Öztat. The exhibition also presents co-commissions by Banu Çennetoğlu, and Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. These commissions benefit from a century of hindsight, inviting audiences to navigate between the past and the present, fostering a deeper understanding of the long-term impacts of nation building.

Two major Ukrainian art institutions, the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) and the Museum of Theatre, Music, and Cinema of Ukraine, are lending more than 20 artworks to the exhibition. These works, which will have travelled from Kyiv to Dublin for this collaboration, reflect the bold creative expression of Ukrainian national identity after the First World War, and attest to the creative fruition of a distinct Ukrainian modernism. IMMA is honoured to work with partners in Kyiv to show these important artworks in Ireland, reflecting on the urgency of self-determination both historically and in the present day.

In addition, the exhibition will include a number of artworks by contemporary artists, reflecting on the preoccupations of the project. This will encompass works from the IMMA Collection as well as a number of key contemporary loans, including works by Ursula Burke, Dorothy Cross, Ieva Epnere, Dragana Jurišić, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Gülsün Karamustafa, Istvan Laszlo, Niamh McCann, Brian O’Doherty, Alan Phelan, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Sasha Sykes and Dilek Winchester.

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012–2023, which marks the 100-year anniversary of the foundation of the Irish State. In 1919, Arthur Griffith, writing from Gloucester Prison, urged his colleagues to ‘mobilise the poets’ to help make Ireland’s case for independence on the international stage. Griffith’s letter acknowledges the role of art and culture in developing international solidarities and justifying Ireland’s right, among other small nations, to ‘self-determine’. It also highlights the new possibilities for artists in the early twentieth century, an era of collapsing empires and seismic geopolitical shifts, to articulate and enact radical modern and democratic principles.

Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD welcomes the opening of the exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art: “This is a significant exhibition that is inspired by our own journey of self-determination in Ireland. It is most fitting that my Department is supporting the exhibition and associated IMMA programming under the Decade of Centenaries Programme. Putting the Irish story in the context of the wider historical international movement through the medium of diverse multi-national cultural imagination and expression is highly effective in helping audiences to gain a deeper grasp of history and the perspectives and interpretation of great artists from the period.”

Conceived by IMMA Director Annie Fletcher, Self-Determination was developed by lead curator Seán Kissane, lead researcher Nathan O’Donnell and commissions curator Johanne Mullan, following a process of speculative enquiry and long-term consultation and exchange with researchers, artists and curators from around the world. It asks questions around how diverse countries understood the formation of the new state; how it was imagined; and how contemporary artists today reckon with the legacies of this period. At the same time it explores some of the common cultural strategies that emerged across many of the new nation-states including Finland (1917), Estonia (1918), Latvia (1918), Poland (1918), Ukraine (1917), Turkey (1923), and Egypt (1922), against the backdrop of the international movement towards self-determination, most famously articulated by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919.

Each of the new states produced its own cultural complexities, with its own traditions, histories, and industries to be reimagined in line with the new imperatives of modernity. Self-Determination: A Global Perspective explores common strategies and methodologies developed by artists, cultural practitioners, and others invested in the formation of a new state in the first half of the twentieth century.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Art and Self-Determination: A Reader, edited by Lisa Moran (Curator: Engagement and Learning, IMMA) and Stephen O’Neill (IMMA/IRC Enterprise Postdoctoral Research Fellow).

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012–2023.

1 Nov 2023

– ENDS –

For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane | [email protected]
Patrice Molloy | [email protected]

Additional notes to editors

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective
30 November 2023 – 21 April 2024

Admission Free

Open:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5.30pm.
Wednesday: 11.30am – 5.30pm.
Sunday: 12noon – 5.30pm.
Webpage: Self-Determination: A Global Perspective – IMMA

Artists commissions

Commissioned artists are Array Collective, Banu Çennetoğlu, Jasmina Cibic, Declan Clarke, Minna Henriksson, İz Öztat, and Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. Throughout 2023 IMMA Residencies enabled sited research and production supports for several commissions.

Art and Self-Determination: A Reader

The Self-Determination reader comprises some 30 texts addressing the theme of self-determination drawn from the 2022 International Conference: 100 years of Self-Determination and the International Summer School, alongside an introduction to the exhibition and illustrated list of works.

Conference: 100 years of Self-Determination

An international research conference took place from 9 to 11 November 2022, organised by Lisa Moran (Curator: Engagement and Learning, IMMA); Sophie Byrne (IMMA Talks and Public Programmes) and Stephen O’Neill (IMMA/IRC Enterprise Postdoctoral Research Fellow). Available to watch back are key papers presented by invited keynote speakers and selected researchers, drawn from an open call for papers responding to conference themes – Self Determination Resources – IMMA

Podcast: IMMA Past Futures
A related podcast series on the shared site histories of IMMA / RHK co-hosted by Barry Kehoe and Stephen Taylor (IMMA Visitor Engagement Team), produced by Sophie Byrne (IMMA Talks and Public Programmes) is available to listen back too – IMMA Past Futures Podcast – IMMA

Poetry as Commemoration

IMMA is collaborating with the project Poetry as Commemoration, an initiative of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin and supported by the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Poetry as Commemoration is a project led by Catherine Wilsdon that encourages creative engagement with the material history of the revolutionary period. Throughout the exhibition the Poetry as Commemoration Jukebox will be installed in the Courtyard at IMMA – the jukebox is a sound installation that animates public spaces through the medium of poetry. Poet-led workshops will also run over the course of the exhibition.

Ali Curran appointed as new Chair to the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)

The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, T.D. has today announced the appointment of Ali Curran as the new Chair of the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).  The appointment is for a five year term.

Ali was initially appointed to the Board as Board Member on 18th January 2023 and is an experienced business and organisational consultant. She is a Director of CHL Consulting Ltd., a member of the Institute of Directors Ireland, and a certified Management Consultant with the Institute of Management Consultants and Advisors. She holds a Masters in Organisational Psychology, professional certificate in Organisational Change and is a qualified executive and leadership coach.

Ali has a strong history of successful leadership and management of cultural organisations having previously worked as Director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, Director of The Peacock Theatre @ The Abbey, and Director of the Tron Theatre, Glasgow.

The Minister also announced that she has re-appointed Margot Lyons and John A Cunningham to the Board for a second term.  The Minster wants to thank them for agreeing to serve again on the Board and to help to guide IMMA over the coming years.

Speaking today Minister Martin said:
“I want to congratulate Ali Curran on her appointment and wish her well in this new and exciting role. She is already serving on the Board and comes to the position of Chair with excellent experience and understanding of leadership and organisational change. I am confident that under her leadership, the Board will provide the necessary oversight and support to IMMA and its executive Team lead by Annie Fletcher as they continue to develop and grow this dynamic and innovative institution.”

ENDS

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IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is proud to present EARTH RISING, a four-day festival of free events and experiences aimed at addressing the climate crisis and inspiring collective action towards a sustainable and hopeful future. Taking place, from Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 September 2023, at the landmark Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin, EARTH RISING promises an unforgettable experience that seeks to provoke, inspire, and empower audiences to become agents of change. 

As a space for dialogue and understanding, IMMA recognises the significance of the climate crisis as one of the greatest challenges of our time. EARTH RISING will be a catalyst for creative thinking, imagination, and individual agency in tacking this urgent issue, reimagining a more sustainable and liveable future for generations to come. 

The festival programme offers a diverse array of events, including over 50 artists and collaborators who will showcase their work via installations, screenings, workshops and tours; a talks stage that brings together influential voices in the fields of science, design and creativity; a dedicated food-themed site that will explore challenging topics curated by Gerry Godley and Jennie Moran; a Screening programme that includes the ground-breaking film series Leviathan Cycle by Shezad Dawood that examines climate change, migration and mental health; an exhibition by American artist Jo Baer inspired by the artist’s stay in the archaeologically rich countryside of Co. Louth; and a Future Generations Tent curated especially for children and young adults by ECOUNESCO. Throughout the festival visitors can enjoy Music in the Courtyard, including an Eco Ceilí brought to you by Martin O’Donoghue and Damhsa Liomhsa, and a wide variety of food vendors. 

Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA said “EARTH RISING embodies IMMA’s commitment to fostering creative-thinking, dialogue, and understanding as we collectively address the climate crisis and envision a brighter, more sustainable future. The museum is dedicated to promoting social progress and cultural innovation through dialogue and understanding. With a mission to address contemporary challenges and inspire positive change, this festival serves as a catalyst for creative thinking and our collective agency in the face of pressing global issues”.

The festival programme is available on the EARTH RISING FESTIVAL APP, which can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play.  

Festival Highlights: 

EARTH RISING PRESENTS: Through an open call IMMA has provided funding to support over 50 artists who will showcase their work during the festival weekend. Events include workshops ranging from human-size nest making with Ilaria Delcane, Simona Roveda, Zoë Uí Fhaoláin Green and Silke Michels to cheesemaking with David Beattie and Michelle Darmody, a live cinema indoor performance from Colm Higgins and an outdoor Gaelic ritual immersive theatre piece by Sadbh Grehan, a community smokehouse by William Bock and Max Jones, a wind activated clay pipe installation by Brendan Lomax and an interactive moss-pit from RE-PEAT to name a few. 

EARTH RISING TALKS: The Earth Rising talks stage will bring together influential voices from diverse fields to explore creative solutions for environmental and societal change. Eminent author and activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva; Irish inventor and environmental advocate Fionn Ferreira; Irish broadcaster and ecologist Anja Murray, and best-selling author Eoghan Daltun are among the notable speakers. GOAL’s NextGen Youth Programme will hold a panel discussion featuring their current youth participants who are travelling from Uganda, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and will be joined by Irish participant Clodagh Sully. On Culture Night, Friday 22 September, the festival will host a special Seanchoíche storytelling evening exploring the theme of “Creativity for Change”. The EARTH RISING TALKS programme is presented in partnership with the DCU Centre for Climate and Society. 

EARTH RISING FIELD KITCHEN, curated by Gerry Godley and Jennie Moran, is a dedicated food-themed site within the festival, fostering discussions, provocation, demonstrations, and conviviality. Topics explored include Imagining a different kind of Dublin Food Landscape, Grain Sovereignty, Farming in Transition, Thoughtful Meat Consumption and Who decides what Ireland eats?. With an empowered and positive stance on our shared food future, this space promises a richly diverse programme throughout the four-day event. For Culture Night the Field Kitchen will co-host a special evening of food demos, music, and dancing with Cooking for Freedom, a group of refugees in Direct Provision hostels who advocate to cook for themselves and their families.

EARTH RISING FUTURE GENERATIONS TENT, curated especially for children and young adults by ECOUNESCO, will host a vibrant programme of exhibitions, workshops, and discussions, exploring themes of biodiversity, sustainability, mental health and agency for change, involving younger generations in the crucial conversations about our planet’s future. 

EARTH RISING EXHIBITON: Coming Home Late: Jo Baer in the Land of The Giants is a solo exhibition by the American artist Jo Baer that brings together a series of recent paintings inspired by the artist’s stay in the archaeologically rich countryside of County Louth between 1975 and 1982. The series of six works completed between 2009 and 2013, presented alongside two additional paintings dating to 2020, was fuelled by Baer’s continued research into Irish Neolithic artefacts and myths. They reflect the artist’s long-life interest in history and science and trace the convergences and timelines of thought and memory between the ancient and now. 

All events and experiences at EARTH RISING are free of charge, ensuring the festival is accessible to all. However, booking in advance may be required for specific workshops and events. For updates and further details, visit www.imma.ie. 

ENDS 

For media inquiries, interviews, or additional information, please contact:
Patrice Molloy:  [email protected]
Monica Cullinane: [email protected] 
Dylan Mellody-Kelly: [email protected]  

Additional Notes for Editors 

Earth Rising Festival Details 

Admission: Free    

Dates: Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 September 2023 

Opening Times:  

Thursday 21 Sept: 11am – 7pm 

Friday 22 Sept: 11am – 9pm (Culture Night) 

Saturday 23 Sept: 11am – 7pm 

Sunday 24 Sept: 11am – 7pm  

Festival App: The festival programme is available on the EARTH RISING FESTIVAL APP 

Download from App Store (Apple iOS):
https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/earth-rising/id6464311010 

Goggle Play (Android):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appmiral.earthrising

Webpage: Earth Rising Festival 

 

IMAGE Information  

From Leviathan Cycle by Shezad Dawood, screened on Friday 22 and Sunday 24 September.
About: Leviathan Cycle is a multi-episode film series, and part of Shezad Dawood’s ground-breaking Leviathan Project. Leviathan Cycle looks at the key issue of our day: how do we understand the intersection between climate change, migration and mental health in our shared ecosystems?. In dialogue with a wide range of marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists, evolutionary geneticists, forensic anthropologists, trauma specialists and activists, Leviathan Cycle is set 20-50 years into the future, envisaging a future eerily like our present to consider possible links between borders, psychological trauma, and human and marine ecologies. Every film in Leviathan Cycle is a universe unto itself, and follows the journeys of a cast of characters who are the survivors of a cataclysmic solar event.

Taking a global and collective approach, Leviathan Cycle reflects on the systemic crises within our biosphere, to imagine where we might end up if we fail to gain a deeper understanding of the intersections between fields of knowledge and ways of living, across and between human and more-than-human ecologies. 

Caption: Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo, 2022. Single screen, HD video, 14.42. Commissioned by Toronto Biennial of Art and Leviathan –Human & Marine Ecology. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions. 

 

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is delighted to launch solo exhibitions by two renowned artists, Jo Baer and Anne Madden, opening today Thursday 24 August 2023. American artist Jo Baer and Irish-Anglo-Chilean artist Anne Madden have both demonstrated an uncompromising commitment to painting as a medium lasting over the past seven decades. These solo presentations, alongside exhibitions by Patricia Hurl and Howardena Pindell, continue IMMA’s programming strand that champions the practices of long-established female artists whose relevance and contribution to the contemporary discourse remains as urgent as ever.

The solo exhibition by Jo Baer, Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants, brings together a series of recent paintings inspired by the artist’s stay in the archaeologically rich countryside of Co. Louth between 1975 and 1982.

Born in 1929, Baer was one of the key figures of the Minimalist painting movement in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, she explored the formal aspects of the medium and developed a visual language of non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge paintings, culminating in her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. That same year, reflecting on Minimalism’s failure to respond to the dramatic events of the 1960s, Baer abandoned the style and left New York to become chatelain of Smarmore Castle in Co. Louth. Over the next seven years, her practice gradually shifted towards a ‘radical figuration’, also known as ‘image constellations’ that combine figural elements, text, images, and symbols.  

The series of six works completed between 2009 and 2013, presented alongside two additional paintings dating to 2020, was fuelled by Baer’s continued research into Irish Neolithic artefacts and myths. They reflect the artist’s long-life interest in history and science and trace the convergences and timelines of thought and memory between the ancient and now.   

Seven Paintings by Anne Madden (b.1932) is a series made during the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows a sixty-year international career, during which the artist has produced a powerful and distinctive body of work.  Madden’s themes explore the transformative forces and cyclical nature of life and experience.  Ideas of the empyrean, the subterranean and of the emergence from darkness to light have informed all of her work; from her earliest canvases of the glaciated Burren landscape, her series of Megaliths, Monoliths and Doorways from the 1970s, the Elegy, Pompeii, Odyssey and Garden series of the 1990s, and since 2003 atmospheric phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis.   

 Madden’s present series continues to excavate the human imprint through themes of death, rebirth, liminality and hubris, and draws on ancient forms and mythologies that give potent shape and expression to the anarchic forces and uncertainties of today.  The paintings reference Antigone, Ariadne and Daphne, archetypal women whose voices are not silenced, in spite of their fate, and who connect with existential, feminist perspectives today.  In their midst is Ann Lovett – a young girl of our time. Death of Ann Lovett (1968-1984), recalls the teenager’s tragic death in childbirth in a religious grotto in rural Ireland and the surrounding hypocrisy, silence and the failure of the social system, an event which continues to resonate in Irish society.   

 Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants is a co-curation between IMMA and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda in collaboration with Jo Baer and guest curator and Baer scholar Janine Armin. The exhibition was first shown at Highlanes Gallery from 29 April – 17 June 2023.  

 Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants has been made possible with the generous support of Mondriaan Fund and PACE Gallery.  

 Image Credits from Left: Jo Baer, Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars), 2020, painting, oil paint on canvas.
Anne Madden / Death of Ann Lovett (1968-1984) / 2020-21, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm / IMMA Collection / Donation the Artist, 2022. 

24 August 2023 

 

– Ends – 

 For further information and images please contact:
Monica Cullinane / [email protected]
Patrice Molloy / [email protected]  

 

Additional Notes for Editors  

Exhibition Details  
 
Title: Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants  
Visit https://imma.ie/whats-on/jo-baer-in-the-land-of-the-giants/  
 
Title: Anne Madden: Seven Paintings  
Visit: https://imma.ie/whats-on/anne-madden-seven-paintings-2/   

 

Dates: 24 August 2023 – 21 January 2024 
Admission free, book online at imma.ie 
Location: Courtyard Galleries 
Open: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5.30pm. Wednesday: 11.30am – 5.30pm. Sunday: 12noon – 5.30pm. Bank Holiday Mondays: 12noon – 5.30pm  

Curator Talk 
Sunday 27 August, 2 – 3pm \ Drop-in 
Join Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator, Collections, IMMA for a gallery walk-through and discussion on selected works presented in both exhibitions.   

About the Artists   

About Jo Bear 
In the 1960s and 70s, Jo Baer (b. 1929, Seattle, Washington) explored non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge paintings as part of the New York Minimalist movement. She left New York for Europe in 1975, eventually settling in Amsterdam after years spent in Ireland and London. Through the course of her move to Europe, Baer’s work shifted away from pure abstraction, gradually adding figural elements, text, images, and symbols.  

Baer has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions at institutions worldwide at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1975); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (1978, 1986); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1986, 1999, 2013); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2002); Secession, Vienna (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); Camden Arts Centre, London (2015); MAMCO, Geneva (2022); and Dia | Beacon, NY (2022–26).  

Significant recent group exhibitions include Busan Biennale, Busan Museum of Art, Korea (2012); São Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2014); Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014); Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection, The Drawing Center, New York (2016); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2016); Calder to Kelly, Die amerikanische Sammlung, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); The Absent Museum, WIELS, Brussels (2017); and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).  

Her works are part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.  

About Anne Madden   

Anne Madden (b. 1932, London, UK) spent her first years in Chile. Her family moved to Europe when she was four and lived in Ireland and London. She attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. In 1958 she married the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy. Madden’s work, abstract at first glance, but generally with a figurative element, regularly carries references to her Irish background as well as reflecting on life and death.   

Madden’s works from the 1960s on are inspired by the glaciated landscape of the Burren, pre-historic landscape, notions of the empyrean and the subterranean, astronomy and megalithic structures. While another aspect of her practice during this time responded to the conflict in Northern Ireland.    

 From the 1990s, Madden’s works reflected ancient Mediterranean civilizations in series such as Pompeii, Oddessy and Garden that draw on themes of death, rebirth, liminality, hubris and human imprint.    

 Since the 2000s she has responded to climate, weather patterns, the Aurora Borealis and the effects of the Anthropocene as well as existential, feminist perspectives through ancient cycles.    

 Madden has exhibited widely, including a significant retrospective at IMMA in 2007. She is a member of Aosdána and is represented by Taylor Galleries, Dublin.