IMMA announces landmark Lucian Freud Project for Ireland alongside an expanded 2016 programme of new work celebrating the radical thinkers and activists whose vision for courageous social change in Ireland and beyond remains relevant to us today.
IMMA is pleased announce highlights from our 2016 exhibition programme today, Tue 8 March 2016. See video.
Sarah Glennie, Director of IMMA, said
“We are delighted to announce today that the IMMA Collection has secured an important long-term loan of 50 works by Lucian Freud (1922-2011); one of the greatest figurative painters of the 20th-century. From September 2016, the IMMA Collection: Freud Project will be presented in a new, dedicated Freud Centre in the IMMA Garden Galleries for five years. With this extraordinary resource IMMA will create a centre for Freud research with a special programme of exhibitions, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this exciting opportunity on offer in Ireland.” Continue reading Landmark Lucian Freud Project and 2016 programme
Dementia is a term describing a range of conditions which cause damage to our brain. This damage affects memory, thinking, language and our ability to perform everyday tasks. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia Alzheimer Society of Ireland
E.gress, produced by artist Marie Brett and musician Kevin O’Shanahan, is a film that maps a world of loss and change, exploring how individuals diagnosed with dementia find new ways to adjust to changing world. Launched at IMMA in November 2015, the national tour of E.gress continues with the next stop The Model in Sligo opening on Thursday 3 March.
In this blog Marie Brett reflects on some of the questions she asked herself at the outset of making the work, and what concerns her now that the work has been made and is more widely seen.
Marie Brett and Kevin O’Shanahan, E.gress, HD video still, 2013, Courtesy of the artist
Pauline Boss’s theories on Ambiguous Loss were very significant when forming ideas for E.gress. Boss describes how when a loved one’s mind or memory is taken away by a chronic mental or physical illness (such as Alzheimers), this leaves the person physically present and psychologically absent; that is, physically with us but emotionally or cognitively missing. I was fascinated by this; the ambivalence of someone being both absent and present, and the simultaneity of presence and loss. Continue reading Marie Brett reflects on her filmwork E.gress
As part of the Curator’s Voice series we invited curatorial duo RGKSKSRG (Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain) discuss their project This is Public & Sexy, a one-night collection of artworks, choreographers and minor dramas, performed live, which co-incidentally took place on the closing weekend of What We Call Love.
Emma Haugh, “The Re-appropriation of Sensuality” (Detail) also featuring This is Public & Sexy printed map designed by Alex Synge. What We Call Love coincidentally shared its closing weekend with that of our residency as independent curators RGKSKSRG at studio 468, a studio based in St. Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin 8. Located a stone’s throw from the museum, the concerns of our community-based residency and that of the major exhibition at IMMA, were spun from mutual desires. This text serves as a footnote marking this moment of interest in the softer, wetter things in life – desire, sexuality, love – as poised across two very different spaces within Dublin city. This rush of feelings to the site of presentation could be read as reflecting the collective impulse of a society to cast and hold a space where the complexities of love and sexuality can be celebrated, in public. Continue reading Kissing in public
“This is an unashamedy sensual show, by turns exotic, repulsive, shocking, challenging and yet deliberately thoughtful throughout” Cristín Leach Hughes, The Sunday Times.
We are now in the final three weeks of the major exhibition What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Nowwhich ends on Sunday 7 February. Alongside the exhibition IMMA has presented an extensive programme of screenings, talks, events and live happenings to open up conversations and bring you deeper into the artists’ work. We have gathered together all the resources from the exhibition in this blog, see below, making a perfect introduction to the work, or if you have already visited, a place to delve deeper for further information.
Love is something that effects us all whether it’s relationship love, parental love or the love between friends or communities. The exhibition What We Call Love doesn’t seek to define love, rather it examines how artists have responded to love in their work, from Surrealism to the current day. Through this lens the exhibition explores how the notion of love has evolved over the 20th century and what love means in our contemporary culture. At time beautiful and at times challenging this exhibition explores a multitude of love’s faces, from crazy love to love unrequited. It has inspired a wide range of reactions from our visitors, not least of all inspiring a marriage proposal (to our great delight). The Exhibition draws to a close a week before the big love celebration that is St Valentine’s, so why not get in the mood for love and experience What We Call Love at IMMA before February 7th.
Visitors are advised that this exhibition contains some adult themes and explicit imagery. If you would like to know more please speak to a member of staff for further information.
Upcoming Events
There are two upcoming events taking place in the final few weeks of the exhibition. A film series in partnership with the Irish Film Institute takes place this weekend on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 January with screenings of Un Chant D’Amour (A Song of Love), Dir. Jean Genet, 1950; L’age D’or,Dir: Luis Buñuel, 1930; and Under The Skin,Dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2013. While on Thursday 4 February there is a live performance in gallery of the work of Elmgreen & Dragset, ’24/7/365′, 2009, which displays the love that can exist between two men in a direct, but no less romantic, manner.
Also just opened is the exhibition F**K IMMA, (2015-2016), by Séamus Nolan, a film, live event and archive, commissioned by IMMA as part of What We Call Love and on view in the project spaces (Ground floor, behind reception). Admission is free to Nolan’s work, and the overall exhibition carries an entry fee of €8/5.
Highlights include a talk on the exhibition by curator Christine Macel, Centre Pompidou; The Neurobiology of Love by Semir Zeki on his pioneering research on the organisation of the visual brain and his experimental enquiries into how a visual stimulus triggers an affective, emotional state, similar to our experience of beauty, desire and love; and an excerpt from the lecture by Dr Maureen Gaffney on her research into the science of emotional intelligence, human functioning and strategies for building fulfilling lives.
Join curators Christine Macel (Centre Pompidou) and Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, as they introduce the core ideas and themes within the exhibition. The film also features a selection of vox pops around the question, ‘what does love mean to you?’
Exhibition Guide
For more detailed text on the show you can read the exhibition guide. This guide will also be provided in printed form on your visit.
Walkthrough Love
Installation View, Louise Bourgeois and Miriam Cahn, IMMA 2015, What Call Love, from Surrealism to Now. (c) Denis Mortell Photography 2015
Over on facebook you can look through our installation shots of the exhibition. These include shots of Felix Gonzalez-Torres billboard work,“Untitled” (The New Plan), 1991, which was presented on six billboards across six sites within Dublin city centre in December. There are also documentation images of the live event Hot on the Heels of Love, a live nocturnal response to the exhibition curated by Pádraic E Moore. You can read a review of the night in District Magazine.
See what other visitors think by following the #WhatWeCallLove hashtag on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
New commissions in this exhibition are part of an exciting new initiative, New Art at IMMA. Proudly supported by Matheson this strand allows IMMA to continue to support this vital work through programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talent, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.
In our fourth and final Love Blog,Dr Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain examines “notions of love over distance and meditated by technology” in her blog Global Love on Skype.
The Love Blog series is presented as part of the exhibition What We Call Love which runs into its final three weeks, ending on 7 February 2016.
Global Love on Skype
Attila Csörgő, Make Love, 2002-2005, C-Print, 83 x 83 cm, Courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin
What we call love is shaped by a changing society – changing notions of sexuality, marriage, and increasing acceptance of same-sex couples. In this exhibition, even physical representations of love reflect different ideas about where love resides in the body – the brain, the heart, the genitals. But what effects are globalization and technology having on these collective notions and social practices of love? Are globalization and technology use making the world a smaller, more intimate place, or do they take us away from those we love?
Love is often expressed visually as two bodies that are physically close – the warmth of an embrace, the act of the kiss, the intertwining of bodies. This is implicit in many of the pieces we see in the exhibit. Even the cold, rigid Mr. and Mrs. Woodman (Man Ray 1927-1945) are married (hence the name) and portrayed as a heterosexual couple even if enjoined wooden mannequins – they too fall in and make love. In today’s mobile, technological and global world, more people are on the move and understandings of embodiment must widen to also encompass notions of love over distance and mediated by technology. This is an important theme implicitly referenced in the exhibition – embodied love mediated by technology. How do bodies of lovers who are not together in the same space love?
Attila Csörgö’s piece, Make Love (2002-2005), pictures two figures, nominally a woman and man, standing apart with blurred electrical connections between them. The warmth of their emotion is reflected in the back and forth movement between and connecting them – love not of intertwined bodies, but love from a distance. Connection through electrical (and digital) means draws them together in love, although their bodies are separated. There are echoes here of the use by many people of visual digital media (such as Skype or Facetime), to stay in touch with the ones they love. The use of Skype allows distant and transnational lovers to create spaces of transconnectivity, practicing simultaneous and ongoing emotional connection across vast temporal and geographic distances.
Garrett Phelan, NEW FAITH LOVE SONG – Radio and Gold Hearts, 2012, Philips RL 210 Radio, 34 gold hearts (plaster/24 carrott gold leaf), black Lacobelglass, MDF. Courtesy of the artistThis affects how people ‘do’ emotions. These emotion practices can consist of storing love in technological devices such as the radio pouring its gold hearts out as in Garrett Phelan’s piece, NEW FAITH LOVE SONG—Radio and Gold Hearts, 2012. But technology can also mediate love in the present though emotional streaming, promoting ongoing interaction over distance by keeping Skype on for long periods of time. Through these attempts to try to recreate everyday loving practices via continuous use of Skype, transnational emotions of love and longing are de-intensified by leaving the webcam on all day and enabling ongoing long-distance emotional interaction.
Digital affectivity facilitates our loving actions but also serves as a container for love to be used or felt at a later date. Beyond just depositing affects, moods, and dispositions into technology, people also take cold, hard, rational technology and use it to mediate love through bodily, facial, and visual expressions in their interaction and practices on line. Technology then may provide opportunities for lovers to be closer in terms of personal intimacy, allowing loved ones constant, real time, everyday access to their lives via visual technology. People use Skype as the ‘next best thing’ to being there. Skype is a form of virtual embodied love not replacing actual physical contact, but acting as a stand in until lovers could be physically together again.
Technology and emotional warmth are often juxtaposed ironically, for example, in the cars kissing at the beginning of the exhibit. Behind this irony though is a deeper truth that it is increasingly, through these cold hard technologies of light and wire, that love is mediated and embodied and that lovers are connected.
Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Maynooth University. Her research interests are in emotions, technology and globalization; race/ethnicity and critical race theory; people of mixed descent, beauty, and Japanese Americans. She has published in Global Networks, Ethnicities, Sociology Compass, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, Irish Geography and in many edited books. She is the lead editor of Global Mixed Race (New York University Press). Her book Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (University of Minnesota Press) examined the use of blood quantum rules in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. She is currently researching and writing about ‘The Globalization of Love’.
In our final blog of 2015 and as part of our Love Blog series, Andrew Hyland looks back to 23 May 2015 when the ground breaking Marriage Equality Referendum received a Yes vote in his article Love’s majesty.
This is the third blog in the Love Blog series, in association with the exhibition What We Call Love. Coming to you in the New Year is our fourth and final piece; Global Love on Skype, by Dr Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain.
Laurel Bradley on life as a temporary resident at IMMA “in a shifting community of artists, critics and writers who get to stay at the museum after the big iron gates swing shut”
Notes from a Fulbright Scholar and IMMA Resident
As the first Fulbright Scholar resident at IMMA, I have the privilege of living and working on the spacious grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. In my “real life,” I am Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. But in a wonderful eight-month time-out, I join IMMA’s Collections Department, taking up special projects related to photography and lens-based art works. This blog post, though, will focus on life as a temporary resident in a shifting community of artists, critics and writers who get to stay at the museum after the big iron gates swing shut.
The unique Residency Programme, providing time and studio space for emerging and established professionals to experiment, work, think, and engage with the museum staff and publics, is a dynamic complement to IMMA’s exhibitions, activities and events. The programme hosts creative types from Ireland and abroad for periods of a few weeks to several months. Lodged in one of three apartments, I will be the longest resident to date when I depart May 20, 2016. Not all “residents” actually live at the museum; a few Dublin-based artists commute to one of the eight studios, while others settle into an apartment or a bedroom in the Flanker, a communal house at the east end of the two former coach houses just across from Barry Flanagan’s giant joyous hare.
In the second of our Love Blog series, in association with the exhibition What We Call Love, Dr Noel Kavanagh asks the question Do I lie when I say I love you? Make sure to check out Noel’s nominated pop song in his concluding reflection.
Our third Love Blog, Love’s Majesty by Andrew Hyland, coming up next week.
Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2002, (Detail view), Glass, beads, fabric and steel 68 x 55.9 x 30.5 cm / 26 ¾ x 22 x 12 in, Private Collection. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
For the love of Mod
As both a Mod and a philosopher who likes to talk of love, I am obsessed with lost origins. Mods are entirely engrossed in the pursuit of the ‘original’ of the species: we speculate as to who was ‘the first’, those original mods who began the style and because it is a lost origin we endlessly try to repeat what is not there. In doing so create versions of an absent form never actually made apparent. It is the differánce of mod and then perhaps modernists were always…well, post-modernists. Yet we endlessly get into arguments amongst ourselves whether something is unique, authentic and then ‘properly’ mod: the greatest complement one can be given is that someone would refer to you as a ‘proper’ mod.
It appears that I may love you (or not, as the case may be!)
One of Ireland’s best kept secrets, the IMMA Editions are a range of limited edition art prints, all exclusive to IMMA. A great opportunity to buy affordable art this Christmas the Editions include work by Sean Scully, Patrick Scott, Alice Maher, Dorothy Cross , Isabel Nolan, Etel Adnan, Isaac Julien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Barrie Cooke and many more. Signed by the artist and released in a limited, numbered series, IMMA Editions start at just €100. An exclusive new edition by Irish artist Grace Weir, who currently has a major solo show at the Museum, will be released before Christmas.
Become an IMMA Member today and enjoy a 30% Discount on the listed price for Editions during the month of December. In addition to enjoying a special 30% discount on Editions this December, any new or gift memberships taken out this month will go into a prize draw to win an IMMA Edition by either Dorothy Cross or Isaac Julien.
In the blog below we highlight some of our favourite IMMA Editions, particularly those that have very limited editions remaining.
We’re all familiar with the challenge that gift giving brings at Christmas; how and where to find original presents for your loved ones of all ages. IMMA’s new shop comes to the rescue this year with a selection of creative and unique gifts. Prices start from as little as €5 and we have a great selection of Irish design and craft, jewellery, art books, toys, art prints, or a year-long art experience from IMMA. Not only will you be buying Irish, and giving a really creative gift, but you’ll also be supporting our work at IMMA through your purchase.
Gift Inspiration from IMMA
Now in a new prime location on the First Floor of the main IMMA Galleries, the IMMA Shop is proud to present some of the best Irish craft and design this Christmas. We have stunning pieces of hand-blown BTU Glass (from €89) in beautiful designs and with a flawless finish, cool contemporary architect designed watches from PUSH (from €35), modern ceramics from Karo Art (from €28) and Ariane Tobin’sbeautifully designed collection of hand-made jewellery inspired by nature. Continue reading Unique Gifts this Christmas from the IMMA Shop
Manage consent
By clicking "Accept" you agree to IMMA's use of cookies and similar technologies to enhance your browsing experience, security, analytics, customisation and personalised content. Select "Cookie Settings" to make more granular choices. You can read more in our cookies policy.
Necessary
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Please note this is archive content and may not display optimally.
Welcome to IMMA. Our website may not work correctly in your browser. We only support IE 10+ (PC only), Chrome 60+, Firefox 55+, Safari (9+ Mac / 5+ PC).
![GarrettPhelan_Radio_and_Gold_Hearts[1]](https://imma.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/garrettphelan_radio_and_gold_hearts1.jpg)
