Tom Flanagan is an artist and filmmaker based in Galway. His solo and collaborative work with artist Megs Morley constitutes an ongoing investigation into the language of cinema and its relationship to political power and collective memory. Their moving image and photographic works engage with real and imagined politically complex sites and overlooked histories exploring the spaces between image, memory, knowledge and power, seeking to intervene in collective understandings of the present. Their work has been supported by multiple Arts Council bursaries and project awards, and forms part of the Arts Council’s National Collection. Selected exhibitions and commissions include: Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, 2025, Folk Radio, X-PO / Shifting Ground Public Art Commission, 2018–2020, Inhabiting the Bageion: Architecture as Critique, Athens Biennale, 2017, Still, the Barbarians, EVA International, 2016, Centenaries: Artists Destabilising Irish Histories, IMA Brisbane, 2016, Allagóirí Chumhachta / Allegories of Power, TG4 Splanc! & The Arts Council, 2016, Agitationism, EVA International, 2014, Building on Ruins, Cirrus Gallery, 2013, Lucca Experimental Film Festival, 2013, Labour and Lockout, Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2013, Momentous Times, CCA Derry~Londonderry, 2013, Peaks of Present, Sheets of Past, Mermaid Arts Centre, 2012, Rencontres Internationales, Centre Pompidou, 2012, A Series of Navigations, The Model, 2012, Post-Fordlândia, Galway Arts Centre, 2012.
Autumn 2026
Film/Video / Multidisciplinary Practice / Installation / Visual Arts / Socially Engaged Practice
Research Focus
Tom Flanagan is working on an experimental essay film that traces the echoes of geopolitical collapse, cultural haunting, and mythic time across two island cultures Japan and Ireland. It navigates ritual, memory, and spiritual persistence in the face of planetary crisis. Thematically the project imagines peace not as a fixed outcome but as an ongoing negotiation with memory, silence, and embodied knowledge. Rather than documenting conflict the work in progress evokes the psychic residues that remain when catastrophe – atomic fire, economic collapse, colonial legacy- has already passed and asks how cultural memory, ritual, and myth might constitute technologies of survival and peace.
More about the Dwell Here Residency
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.