Cassandra’s Necklace (2012) by Alice Maher was commissioned by IMMA for the artist’s mid-career retrospective at the museum in 2012. The short film is inspired by an unfinished play script by Anne Enright, written in the late 1980s. Maher’s appreciation of Enright’s work underlines a shared interest – “I like her because she’s a very visceral writer who mixes the contemporary with the weirdly ancient.”.* When approached to collaborate with Maher for the exhibition at IMMA in 2012, Enright presented this script about the mythical prophetess Cassandra.

Taking the script as a point of departure, Maher worked with fellow artist Vivienne Dick and composer Trevor Knight, who also created the music for Maher’s earlier work The Music of Things (Sleep) (2009).

*”Through the looking-glass with Alice”, The Irish Times, Aidan Dunne, 11 October 2012.

This work is linked to the MExIndex website, an innovative online resource containing a wide range of experimental film and artists’ moving images works by Irish and Irish-based artists: https://www.mexindex.ie/