25 November 2016 – 26 February 2017

IMMA is pleased to present the first survey exhibition of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s work in Ireland. Europa brings together almost two decades of sculpture, film, drawings, large-scale installations and photography with a focus on Jacir’s work in Europe, in particular Italy and the Mediterranean. The show’s title refers to the Italian and Arabic word for “Europe”. Renowned for work that is as poetic as it is political and biographical, Jacir investigates silenced historical narratives, translation, movement, resistance, transformation and exchange.

The first iteration of Europa took place at Whitechapel Gallery, London in late 2015. For IMMA, Jacir has included several new works, and has collaborated with IMMA’s Head of Exhibitions, Rachael Thomas to include seminal artworks such as the two channel video installation, Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) (2002), where Jacir was held at gunpoint by Israeli Occupation Forces when she was filming her feet on her daily commute. Another addition is a sketch in the Egyptian Museum April 24, 2003 Cairo (2003), where Jacir has documented a museum worker casually dusting off a stone bearing a five-thousand-year-old hieroglyphic inscription as visitors pass by unperturbed. Filmed in the days following the catastrophic loss of Iraq’s National Library and Museum it is at once a memorial to the cultural devastation of that April and an omen of the future.

Commenting on the work on exhibition at IMMA Emily Jacir states; “These works reflect the strong links between Palestine and Ireland and the shared history of British Colonial Rule. Though Ireland went on to attain its independence, Palestine with the Nakba, an event whose repercussions are even more harsh and devastating today, remains occupied. Additionally, those refugees who were forced to flee in 1948 are now fleeing for a second, third and sometimes fourth time due to the current events in the region.” Throughout the exhibition, according to curator Rachael Thomas, Emily Jacir “unveils to us intermittent leitmotifs of archiving, writing, video, film, interventions, photography and performance. All of which interweave time, both past and present and the challenges between conflict and exchange.”

In Europa, Jacir premiers newly commissioned projects at IMMA. These include her new site-specific project Notes for a Cannon (2016), which takes as its point of departure the Clock Tower that once stood at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. It was destroyed by the British in 1922, under the command of Ronald Storrs, the British Military Governor of the occupied city. The removal of this tower served to match the British imaginary of what the Holy City and the land of the bible should look like.

La mia Roma (omaggio ai sampietrini) (2016) is an ode to walking, to labour, and to what Jacir describes as one of the great architectural wonders of Rome – the sampietrini. Made of solid volcanic rock and each one individually hand cut, sampietrini are the stones with which Rome has been paved with for centuries. This work comes from Jacir’s walks throughout the city of Rome where she collects the sampietrini, takes them to her studio, documents them, and then puts them back where she found them. The resulting work is a record not only of the selciatori (pavers) hand-cutting each individual cobblestone but also a diary of Jacir’s walks. Since the 1960s, the sampietrini have also been used during Italian protests as they are easy to collect, and so they have become part of the history of class struggle in Italy.

Key works in the exhibition include embrace (2005) – a circular sculpture matching the diameter of the artist’s height and fabricated to look like a luggage conveyor system found in airports. It remains perfectly still and quiet in the corridor at IMMA, but when one comes close their presence activates the work and it starts to move. Jacir often refers to Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Athens Airport” when discussing this work.

Also ex libris (2010 – 2012), a work that was originally commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13), commemorates the approximately thirty thousand books from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. Six thousand of these books are kept and catalogued at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem under the designation “A.P.” (Abandoned Property). Jacir photographed these books with her mobile phone during repeated visits to the library over the course of two years. ex libris not only addresses the looting and destruction of books but also raises questions regarding repatriation and restitution.

Two drawings from her series from Paris to Riyadh (drawings for my mother) (1998–2001) document the illegal sections of issues of ‘Vogue’ Magazine. These pieces are based on Jacir’s memories of travelling in and out of Saudi Arabia. On the airplane flying into Saudi Arabia, the artist’s mother would black out, using a marker, all the exposed parts of female bodies from the latest ‘Vogue’ magazine in order to bring them into the country. When living in Paris, Jacir collected old ‘Vogue’ magazines from the years they lived in Saudi Arabia and retraced her mother’s action. Extracting the “illegal” sections from each magazine, the work speaks about traversing the space in between two extreme forms of repressing woman; a space in which the image of women is commodified and a space in which the image of women is banned. 

In conjunction with her exhibition at IMMA, Jacir is organising a two-week workshop for her students from the International Academy of Art in Ramallah in exchange with Irish students which will focus on the events and discourse surrounding the Easter Uprising of 1916 in Dublin.

Europa is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published with Prestel. The catalogue features original essays by Jean Fisher, Lorenzo Fusi, Omar Kholeif, Graziella Parati, and Nikos Papastergiadis, as well as an excerpt from Franco Cassanno’s “Southern Thought” chosen by the artist.

For further information, and images, please contact
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9921
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 612 9920
________________________________________________________________________________
Additional Notes for Editors

About the artist
Emily Jacir’s recent solo exhibitions include IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin (2016 – 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). Jacir’s works have been in important group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); 5 consecutive Venice Biennales, 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); Sharjah Biennial 7 (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003).

Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize (2008); the Herb Alpert Award (2011); and the Rome Prize (2015).

In 2003, O.K. Books published belongings. a monograph on a selection of Jacir’s work. A second monograph was published by Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg (2008). Her book ex libris was published in 2012 by Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln. In 2015 The Khalid Shoman Foundation published A Star is as Far as the Eye Can See and as Near as My Eye is to Me the most extensive monograph to date on Jacir’s work in English and Arabic. The most recent publication on her work is Europa which accompanies the exhibitions at Whitechapel and IMMA. Earlier this year NERO, Roma published TRANSLATIO about Jacir’s permanent installation Via Crucis at the Chiesa di San Raffaele in Milano.

She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 including PIVF and Birzeit University. Over the past ten years she has been a full-time professor and active member of the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah. She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She also curated a selection of shorts; “Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 -1982)” which went on tour in 2007.  Jacir is on the faculty of Bard MFA in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Talks and Events

Artist Talk: Emily Jacir Europa
Thursday 24 November / 6-7pm / Lecture Room / FREE
Emily Jacir will discuss her powerful artistic development and motivations in making her work. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historic material, performative gestures and in-depth research. Through an inquiry into processes of translation, the archive, resistance and movement, Jacir’s highly influential work asks us to consider what it means to be a political artist. Book here

The Artist & The State / International Symposium
Saturday 26 November / 10.00am – 5.30pm / The Chapel / IMMA / €6
In response to the centenary of the Easter Rising 1916 and the evolution of society and social ideology over the past 100 years, IMMA, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and Create’s 2016 programmes reflected on the role artists and creativity plays in society and the identity of the nation state. This international symposium takes a timely look at the potential of contemporary arts practice to critically address the challenges now facing our ever-changing global society and systems of governance. Emily Jacir will give a keynote presentation as part of this symposium. Further information and booking.

Curator Lunchtime Talk Series
Friday 9 December / 1.15pm-2pm / Meeting Point / Main Reception/  FREE
Join Head of Exhibitions, Rachael Thomas, for an insightful walkthrough of Emily Jacir’s exhibition Europa. No booking required.

 

Landmark exhibition of world renowned artist Lucian Freud opens in Dublin

21 October 2016 – October 2017

IMMA is delighted to present an exhibition of 50 works by one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th-century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011). The IMMA Collection: Freud Project features a selection of 30 of the artist’s finest paintings, and 20 works on paper. The works, on loan to the IMMA Collection from Private Collections, are presented in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries for five years, with all 50 works on display over the first 12 months.

During this unique five-year project IMMA will present a series of different and exclusive Lucian Freud related exhibitions, with a new programme of events and openings each year. In this first year all 50 works are on display, while subsequent exhibitions will include works and new commissions by other contemporary artists in response to Freud, revealing exciting new perspectives on his work for artists and audiences today.  With this extraordinary resource IMMA will become a leading International centre for Freud research with programmes, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this important opportunity for schools, third level students, artists and audiences all over Ireland and beyond.

Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Heather Humphreys T.D., said; “I am delighted that my Department has been in a position to support this extraordinary Freud exhibition at IMMA. This exciting and innovative project will provide a major boost to the National Collection for the next five years and will also allow IMMA to become a centre of learning and research. I am sure these important works will bring a great deal of pleasure and inspiration to the many people who will visit IMMA in the coming years. The Museum of Modern Art has been very successful in increasing visitor numbers in recent years and I hope this stunning new Freud exhibition will attract even more people to IMMA’s beautiful galleries.”

This ambitious project has been made possible by the generosity of the lenders and the support of the Department in conjunction with support from the visionary members of the Freud Circle; BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse who have each committed to the project for a period of three years. This commitment will ensure free access for audiences every Tuesday, in addition to the customary free access for full time students and those under 18.

Derek Kehoe CEO, BNP Paribas Ireland, said; “BNP Paribas is delighted to have the opportunity to work with IMMA once again, this time in sponsoring this significant Freud Project. We believe the Project will enrich audiences understanding of the visual arts bringing cultural, social and educational value while supporting the conservation of this very special body of work.”

Manish Vekaria, Dublin CEO of Credit Suisse, said: “As partner of IMMA, Credit Suisse is delighted to be supporting the Freud Project. This exhibition allows visitors to appreciate Freud’s far reaching influence on a generation of artists who were inspired by the realism of his paintings. The bank prizes innovation and creative thinking in the arts as we do in serving our clients around the world. We have a long-standing commitment to leading cultural institutions that share our resolve to widen access to music and fine arts, bringing great art and ideas to new audiences.”

Renowned for his portrayal of the human form, Lucian Freud is best known for his intimate, honest, often visceral portraits. Working only from life Freud’s studio was intensely private and he mainly worked with those he was close to, often asking subjects to sit for hundreds of hours over multiple sittings to better capture the essence of their personality. The works in the exhibition, mainly dating from 1970 onwards, explore several of the artist’s key themes – works that reflect his interest in the people and the natural world. Among those represented are members of his family; his children, grandchildren, his mother Lucie, other artists and friends and connections in the racing and business world.

The IMMA Collection Freud Project will also look at Lucian Freud’s role and legacy, not only in contemporary art and the history of figuration but also within specific themes around human existence, the self, aging, and the physical and psychological relationships between animals and humans. The project will explore his connections with Irish art developments from the early 1950s in particular both as a teacher at the Slade School, and as part of the Soho artistic milieu along with Francis Bacon, which drew Irish artists and writers including Patrick Swift, Edward McGuire, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and many others. Freud made several working visits to Dublin, where he found the rawness of the city of that time stimulating.

IMMA Director Sarah Glennie said of the project; “The Freud Project is the first time that IMMA has dedicated a series of galleries to a single collection for an extended period of time. The lengthy duration of the loan will mean that the audience can build a relationship with Freud, really get to know these works and understand how Freud painted, and in creating the dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries we are creating a space for looking, thinking, and learning with programmes that will provoke new reflection on Freud’s work and what it means in the contemporary world.”

This is the second major exhibition of Lucian Freud’s work to be shown at IMMA, in 2007 a major exhibition of his work resulted in one of the highest years for visitor attendance to IMMA to date.

During the five-year period of the Freud Project there will be only one other International exhibition of his work; making Dublin the most comprehensive representation of the artist’s work in any museum worldwide until 2022.

Admission for this exhibition is €8/5 (concession) with free admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s. There will be free admission for all every Tuesday.  Monies raised through admission charges will directly contribute to the care and development of the IMMA Collection. Due to the number and delicate nature of the works and the limited circulation space of the historic Garden Galleries, admission will be by timed entry. To avoid disappointment please pre-book your preferred time-slot online in advance of visiting. Online booking will be available from Saturday 15 October. 

The exhibition is supported by the Freud Circle – BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse – and those donors who wish to remain anonymous.

On the occasion of the opening of the project a book has been published which features plates of all 50 works and a series of responses to Freud by 31 contemporary artists including Tracy Emin, Antony Gormley, Sean Scully,  Ellen Altfest,  Kathy Prendergast, Daphne Wright and Amanda Coogan among others. The publication is kindly supported by Christie’s and Corrigan & Corrigan. Priced €18.00 it will be available in the IMMA Shop from 21 October 2016.

For further information please contact
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9922
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 612 9920

For images please contact John Moelwyn-Hughes, Bridgeman Images, London
E: [email protected] T: +44 (0)20 7727 4065

PRESS PHOTOCALL: There will be a photocall with Minister Heather Humphreys TD, IMMA Director Sarah Glennie and David Dawson – Artist, Lucian Freud’s studio assistant and friend of 20 years, on Wednesday 19 October at 10.30am. Please contact Monica or Patrice for details and accreditation. 

The exhibition will be formally opened by Minister Heather Humphreys TD on Thursday 20 October at 6.30pm (invitation only event). The exhibition opens to the public at 11.30am on Friday 21 October 2016.

– ENDS –

Additional Notes for Editors

About the artist
Lucian Freud, grandson of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, was born in 1922 in Berlin and immigrated with his family to the UK at the age of 10. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated painting The Painter’s Room, 1944. From the late 1950’s his highly detailed, linear style gave way to thicker pigment, more loosely applied, with bigger brushes, that characterised all of his subsequent work.  Since then Freud became one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of recent times. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit.

Freud painted notable figures including Elizabeth II, Lord Rothschild, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Kate Moss and fellow artists Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. Freud was the subject of numerous museum retrospectives and exhibitions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MOMA New York; the Museo Correr, Venice; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Tate Britain; the Scottish National Art Gallery; and at IMMA in 2007. A major retrospective took place at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012, a year after the artist’s passing.

Associated Talks and Events

Talks and events will be announced throughout the Freud Project. See www.imma.ie for the most up to date information.

IMMA Collection: Freud Project is made possible through the visionary support of the Freud Circle

 

Official Hotel Partner

IMMA is funded by:  

 

23 September 2016 – 15 January 2017

A major new commission for IMMA by Irish artist Jaki Irvine, If the Ground Should Open…, is presented here for the first time on the occasion of the centenary of the historic Easter uprisings of 1916. This new work takes as a point of departure Irvine’s 2013 novel ‘Days of Surrender’, which focuses on Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan. These were two of more than a hundred women who were ready to die or kill for the possibility of a different Ireland but whose stories were all but written out of official Irish history, consigned to the margins as the narrative was masculinised.

This new video and sound installation in the courtyard galleries uses their names as ‘the ground’ of a score for nine musicians. The eleven tracks were composed by Irvine using the canntaireachd system – originally developed as an oral scoring system for Scottish Highland pipes. The basic musical motif in classical piping (piobaireachd) is called ‘the ground’ of the piece, which is then built upon with additional notes and melodies. In If the Ground Should Open… the names of women involved in the 1916 Rising, form the ground. In this way they are performed and remembered, becoming part of the ground we walk on in 2016.  The project was also developed from the leaked Anglo-Irish bankers taped conversations.

Commenting on her work Irvine said “With If the Ground Should Open…, the legacy of 1916 is reconsidered in the light of a contemporary Ireland broken by corporate greed. Both the past and the present are reflected through a lens that is complicated, joyful, furious and hopeful”.

Irvine also goes on to acknowledge the contribution of the performers to the project “All of the performers brought their own extraordinary knowledge, generosity and musicality to this project and further developed it through personal interpretation and improvisation”. The nine performers include on vocals Louise Phelan, Cats Irvine and Cherry Smyth; bagpipes Hilary Knox; piano Izumi Kimura; violin Liz McClaren; cello Jane Hughes; double bass Aura Stone and drums Sarah Grimes. A one off live event of the work will be performed in full on Tuesday 13 December at the Great Hall in IMMA.

If the Ground Should Open… is part of the official Ireland 2016 Programme and is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

For further information, and images, please contact
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9921

– ENDS –

Additional Notes for Editors

About the artist
Jaki Irvine (b. 1966, Dublin) is an artist who lives and works in Dublin and Mexico City. She is concerned with how we come to imagine and understand ourselves from within our privacy and often uses video installation as a way to reflect on moments where this process, awkwardly and unavoidably, comes spilling into the public spaces of our lives.

Jaki Irvine’s solo exhibitions include Project Arts Centre (1996), Kerlin Gallery (2004) and the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1999, 2005) in Dublin, Frith Street Gallery (1997, 1999, 2011) the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany (1998) and Delfina Project Space (2001) in London, Henry Moore Institute (2004) Leeds and Galleria Alessandro de March (2004) Milan. In 1995 Irvine was included in the seminal exhibition of Young British Artists, General Release, at the Venice Biennale, and represented Ireland at the 1997 Biennale. In 2008 Irvine produced a major video installation entitled In a World Like This, which was produced in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London and The Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo. In 2011, a new solo exhibition of video works Before This Page is Turned, developed in the Dublin Graphic Print Studios, was presented at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. She has also participated in numerous group shows throughout Europe, Australia and Japan. Irvine is represented in the collections of IMMA, the Irish Arts Council, Tate Modern, FRAC and in numerous other collections, both public and private.

List of Tracks / If the Ground Should Open…. (2016)

1. Foreign Body 6:53
Text: Poem by Cherry Smyth,
written about Mairéad O’Farrell, in response to ‘Days of Surrender’.
Music: Canntaireachd based on Maire Ní Shiubhlaigh. 

2. Bankers Happen 6:12
Recordings : Anglo Irish Bank tapes: Peter Fitzgerald & John Bowe
Music based on
Elizabeth O’Farrell & Julia Grenan

3. Aoife de Burca 2:57
Text: extract from ‘Days of Surrender’.
Recordings : Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm
BBC interview with Alessio Rastani
Music based on Aoife de Burca 

4. Moolah 3:40
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm
Music based on Kathleen Barrett

5. Mrs. M. J. Rafferty 3:57
Recordings : Anglo Irish Bank tapes: Peter Fitzgerald & John Bowe
Music based on Mrs. M. J. Rafferty 

6. Nowhere to Go 4:34
Text: extract from ‘Days of Surrender’.
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm & John Bowe
Music based on Eileen Cooney, Annie Cooney, Lily Cooney & May Cooney

7. A Million Deaths 2:20
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm & John Bowe
Music based on Rose MacNamara

8. Buy it Quietly 4:13
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm & John Bowe; David Lyon& John Bowe
Music based on Jinny Shanahan & Florence Meade

9. Treason 4:38
Text: extract from ‘Days of Surrender’.
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm & John Bowe
Music based on Louise Gavan Duffy & Nora Foley 

10. Innocent 4:15
Text: extract from writing by Cherry Smyth in response to ‘Days of Surrender’
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: John Bowe & Matt Pass
Music based on Winifred Carney

11. Don’t Fuck it Up 4:30
Recordings: Anglo Irish Bank tapes: David Drumm & John Bowe
Music based on Helena Molony 

Performers:
Vocals Louise Phelan, Cats Irvine, Cherry Smyth, Bagpipes Hilary Knox, Piano Izumi Kimura, Violin Liz McClaren, Cello Jane Hughes, Doublebass Aura Stone, Drums Sarah Grimes.

Sound recording at Windmill Lane Studios, Sound engineer Ger McDonnell, House engineer/assistant studio manager Rachel Conlon, Additional assistance from Oisín & Jack. All video footage shot and edited by Jaki Irvine at IMMA and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios.

Associated Talks and Events

Artist Talk: Jaki Irvine, If the Ground Should Open…
Thurs 22 September, 6pm / Lecture Room
Jaki Irvine introduces her new work and discusses the ways in which the work, and the forthcoming live performance, experiments with the Canntaireachd oral traditions of bagpipe music and a spoken-sung score. Moderated by Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA. Book your free ticket here.

Curators Lunchtime Talk Series
Wed 30 November, 1.15-2pm, Meeting Point Main Reception, FREE
Join IMMA Director Sarah Glennie for an insightful walkthrough of this exhibition. No booking required.

Live Event
If the Ground Should Open…
Tues 13 December 2016 / 7.30pm Great Hall, IMMA / €8 
Jaki Irvine presents the entire work performed live by the project performers; Louise Phelan, Cats Irvine, Cherry Smyth, Hilary Knox, Izumi Kimura, Liz McClaren, Jane Hughes, Aura Stone and Sarah Grimes. Online booking opens 23 September 2016 and places will be limited so early booking advised. Ticket prince includes booking fee and glass of wine after the performance. For further details on the event and how to purchase tickets, please visit www.imma.ie

This exhibition is supported by

Additional Support from

Official IMMA Hotel Partner

 

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) launches its Autumn programme this week with two new exhibitions selected by two guest curators; Indian curator Sumesh Sharma (Clarkehouse Initiative, Bombay) and Irish curator Kate Strain (Grazer Kunstverein / RGKSKSRG). Both have been invited by IMMA to present new projects at the Museum that reflect their individual curatorial practices and in doing so bringing new curatorial perspectives into IMMA’s programme. The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday 15 September at 11.30am with a gallery talk from the curators.

Speaking about this initiative Director Sarah Glennie said “Core to IMMA’s mission is the support of artists’ work through exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions and other interventions in IMMA’s programme. We believe it is also vital to support the work of new curatorial voices in the museum, both from Ireland and from a more global perspective. There are often great differences in the activation of gallery spaces, and the types of exhibitions and indeed the types of work that are mounted outside of the Museum context. Invited Curators is a new programme that not only platforms the work of two exciting curators who each have very different, but very strong curatorial practices, but it also allows us to work in new ways as an institution and we hope will give our audiences an insight into how contemporary art is rapidly evolving internationally.”

This project is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

Kate Strain (IRL), in association with the Centre For Dying On Stage and Cow House Studios, presents The Plough and other stars (the title an homage to O’Casey’s renowned play The Plough and the Stars), an exhibition which proposes some alternatives to death, including space travel, time travel and reincarnation. New Works by featured artists Riccardo Arena, Richard John Jones, Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili are brought together in the immortal domain of the museum to explore strategies towards life extension, at the very least by artistic if not by other means. The exhibition functions as both a show, for people to come and visit, and a rehearsal space for the development of a new theatrical production.

In an separate space Sumesh Sharma (I) presents Historica – Republican Aesthetics, an exhibition that deals with the idea of the State and nation building as a context for art making.  It explores the relationships that people hold with identity and the nation, defined by other factors such as race, religion, tradition, cuisine, geography and history that together define culture. How do India and Ireland, both post-colonial societies that won independence from Britain, today celebrate many years of independence but still grapple with nationalism and false pride?  How do artists define republicanism and nationalism? What are the aesthetics of a modern secular state?

Featured artists include: Judith Blum, Krishna Reddy, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, Poonam Jain, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Yogesh Barve, Sachin Bonde, Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty, Nadine el Khoury, Aurélien Froment, Aurélien Mole, Caecilia Tripp, Kemi Bassene,  Naresh Kumar, Saviya Lopes, Seamus Nolan, and Amol K Patil.

Admission to both exhibitions is free of charge and there is a series of free talks and curators tours taking place during the year – see www.imma.ie for more details. These exhibitions will be closely followed next week by the opening of a significant new sound and film work from Irish artist Jaki Irvine entitled If the Ground Should Open…. Part of the official Ireland 2016 programme the work is based on her 2013 novel ‘Days of Surrender’ which tells the story of Elizabeth O’Farrell and her partner Julia Grenan, two out of several hundred women who took an active part in the Rising yet were almost erased out of history, consigned to the margins as the narrative was masculinised.

Later in the Autumn IMMA launches IMMA Collection: Freud Project, 2016 – 2021; a significant selection of 50 works by Lucian Freud (1922-2011), regarded as one of the world’s greatest realist painters, which are on long-term loan to the IMMA Collection; Europa, the first survey exhibition of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s work in Ireland which brings together almost two decades of sculpture, film, drawings, large-scale installations and photography with a focus on Jacir’s work in Europe, particularly Italy and the Mediterranean. IMMA closes out the year with another new commission; a new film by Turner Prize winning artist Duncan Campbell, his first to be filmed in Ireland.

For more information and images please contact [email protected] or 01 612 9922.

– ENDS –

EDITORS NOTES

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Kate Strain is the Artistic Director of the Grazer Kunstverein. Based between Austria and Dublin, ongoing curatorial projects include The Centre For Dying On Stage, an online research and commissioning body; Department of Ultimology, a new department established in 2016 in Trinity College Dublin; and RGKSKSRG, the paired curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain. Strain has worked at Project Arts Centre, the National College of Art and Design, and internationally on collaborative projects in Torino, Amsterdam and St Louis.

Sumesh Sharma co-founded the Clark House Initiative, Bombay in 2010 where he presently is the curator along with being the invited curator to the biennale of African contemporary art – Dak’Art 2016, Senegal. His practice deals with alternate histories that are informed by the Black Arts movement, Socio-Economics, Immigration in the Francophone and Vernacular Equalities of Modernism.

ABOUT THE WORK: THE PLOUGH AND OTHER STARS

Richard John Jones’s work takes the form of a series of fabric hangings and a ceramic floor sculpture made of unfired clay. These new works are inspired by medieval travel journals and Isolarii (‘island books’ that first appeared around the 5th century in Europe). Jones is interested in this body of literature as a mixture of embellished real accounts of foreign lands and extravagant fictional stories. Considered as factual at the time and often heavily illustrated, these manuscripts represented an early form of mapping – the ‘elsewhere’ in both political and geographical terms always being used as a way of imagining and defining the idea of ‘here’. For his fabric/ceramic works, which he often refers to as paintings, Jones imagines medieval monsters, islands and fictional travellers as avatars for species now becoming extinct through global warming, pollution and industrialisation. Jones enacts a queering of history by exploring how representation and story-telling act as a form of reproduction, in a time when humans are at the centre of what could be their own imminent erasure and perhaps subsequent fictionalisation.

Riccardo Arena presents a celestial collage based on his expansive research project Vavilon. This project began four years ago, in the Solovki Islands – a remote constellation of islands in the White Sea. Arena’s enquiries brought him into close contact with Russian cosmism, a philosophical movement that encourages practitioners to think beyond the limits of human possibility, and seek eternal life through science and space travel. Arena intuits narrative links between disparate things, moments, and energies. From the hard and ancient soil of the Solovki islands he reaches up into the celestial heights of aeronautical travel. His work as part of The Plough and other stars is an elaborate collage, a kind of exploded visual narrative that articulates his layered process of understanding, through the labyrinthine portrait of a voyage. Screenings of Arena’s video work Vavilon will take place at intervals during the exhibition. Please see www.imma.ie for updates.

In his silent video work, Yazan Khalili presents a series of photographs of masks he shot at two colonial museums – the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. He juxtaposes these mug shots alongside the moving image of a live human face. Both the ancient masks and the figure on-screen are scrutinised by basic facial recognition software in-built within the artist’s phone. The human tries to trick the technology with hopeless gestures that obscure her features, in an effort to make herself undetectable. The work is an exercise on how to disappear in the digital age, under the weight of history and against the flow of time. It is also a meditation on what it means to be seen, how we apprehend whose gaze, and the effect the mechanical eye can have on our future as well as our past.

Through Arena’s metaphysical enquiries, Jones’s material encounters with forgotten histories; Khaldi and Khalili’s efforts to communicate with bodies that have disappeared, and the ghostly presence of The Centre For Dying On Stage; the artworks and artists in this exhibition imaginatively explore the poetics of immortality.

Biographies on each of the artists featured in The Plough and other stars are available on our website.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS: HISTORICA – REPUBLICAN AESTHETICS

Judith Blum grew up in New York to Jewish parents who fled Vienna and the Nazis. She answers some of these questions with an autobiographical frieze called Misterioso – a mystery of identity and history, informed  by the many paths she has taken. She studied art in Paris, where she fell in love with the Indian printmaker and conceptual artist Krishna Reddy. Reddy trained under numerous masters including Ramkinker Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee, and Nandalal Bose. In this exhibition we see photographs of Reddy’s earliest sculptures which he made in terracotta or plaster when he reached London to study at the Slade and later in Paris to assist artists such as Joan Miró and Ossip Zadkine. These varied works speak the vocabulary of modernism.

Other historic works are those of Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee who combined the use of everyday contexts, with techniques that were not typically Indian, to present works that did not conform to what was taught by the Western Classical Fine Art academies that the British had established in India. These artists were abhorred by Rabindranath Tagore, who founded the Liberal Arts University of Santiniketan, where Judith Blum became a disciple of Bose and Mukherjee. Bose designed the murals that adorned the 1938 Haripura Congress where Indian nationalists asked the British to set India free. Later Reddy was to join them to assist on the murals that depicted India’s rich history for the newly independent India’s presidential palace.

Naresh Kumar, a member of Clark House Initiative, has created a Taziya, or a Shia celebration float using tracing paper and sawdust he collects from construction sites. He uses images of the domes of mosques and temples combined with the words of Babasaheb Ambedkar, the author of the Republican Indian constitution, about a secular state that promises equality; yet one that is often disrupted by religious riots. Using cheap LED lights and other paraphernalia drawn from motifs of popular religious culture, Kumar acknowledges the importance simple ritual holds the lives of the poor – particularly in his native state of Bihar but that these can quickly be made into vehicles for sectarian hatred.

In Lampedusa, (Italy) Caecilia Tripp records the voices and waves of those refugees and migrants that come from distant lands or where people have lost their nation through war. They are often unwelcome in Europe, so Kemi Bassene creates a shield, a device of shamanistic protection – one that was much needed by Thomas Sankara and Patrice Lumumba, two prominent anti-imperialist post-independence West- African leaders who were killed for resisting their erstwhile colonial masters. Nadine El Khoury colours the Mediterranean red on an antique map, thus destroying the map’s value but narrating an unending separation of death and hate defined by the sea – one that it is unspoken and feared as a story and unable to be told on the walls of European galleries.

Saviya Lopes makes a tribute to the idealisation of virginity in the church by representing a fish, an image with resonance over several religions. Institutional discrimination against women has a prominent space amongst all religions, here women narrate and weave their angst into stories like the quilt her grandmother makes.

Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty think broadly about female bodies in Irish history and folklore. Using a mirror as a sort of abstracted Morse signal, the reflected light communicates between performer and camera in order to momentarily transform the buildings around Cobh, where these images were created, into beacons (or temporary lighthouses) instead of symbols of colonialism and religion. They also attempt to conjure the melancholic image of the guarded daughter, trapped in a tower, who frequently appears in folk tales both in Ireland and abroad.

Seamus Nolan draws a comparison between the women’s movement Cumman na mBan and the Kurdish women’s militia the YPJ by thinking about the celebration of Ireland’s military/cultural revolution this year and how women have been re-appropriated within national history and their military contribution finally valued.

Aurélien Mole photographs Amma Kesava Naidu in the nude in the same poses she was asked to sit by portrait students in the Sir JJ School of Art, India’s oldest Western Classical Fine Art Academy. It was established a year after India’s first armed revolution against British colonisation. Mole imagines an objectifying gaze and the Greco-Roman traditions of aesthetics that propped up modernism. Naidu sat for many modern painters the most celebrated being Akbar Padamsee.

Poonam Jain makes a garland of stuffed tissue, of the type that adorns the statues of leaders, these are large to fit a statue of monumental size. Many are unveiled each year in India to celebrate dead politicians, sculpted in the tradition of those who colonised that country.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe erects door signs in brass and plastic that narrate seemingly nonsensical (but actual) accounts of Myanmar’s continuing denial of freedoms to its people.

Amol K Patil, has made his work on nineteen plates of glass. He draws his family and extended group of cousins who wake up every morning to form teams to clean the streets of the city. They come from a community of folk performers and bards, who are ‘untouchables’ the Dalits who sit at the bottom of India’s caste system. Social Justice for the Dalits is currently in fashion across all political scenes in India. Amol K Patil questions the sudden fetishisation of the Dalits, instead he etches into monumentality the daily performance of his cousin cleaning streets, a vocation that is etched into their lives.

Sachin Bonde brings to the museum an object rendered obsolete by digital technology; weighing scales made in brass which depended upon the honesty of the handler and the trust shown on him or her by the client. The Sikh religion described its principles of equality using the metaphor of an honestly balanced pair of scales.

Yogesh Barve turns the museum catalogue of the former Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay into a public art project. Objects from across the empire were brought there from present day Pakistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Egypt, Tibet and China. The museum was a colonial delight that defined the extent of the empire. As the objects have lost their significance as representations of visual culture so have colonial systems of nationhood that define identity fade away in a world connected by the internet – a world much larger than the tangibility of geography.

Aurélien Froment and his film with Somnath Mukherjee present the crescendo of the exhibition. Mukherjee travelled for three years on a bicycle from Calcutta to Dakar in Senegal, a journey that took five years from1982 to 1987. There he met the Senegalese singer Amadou Badiane, who had lived in India, had begun a Indo- Senegalese Music club. Mukherjee arrived in Senegal on a Lesse-Passe document and has lived there since, not holding any nationality, but making a living by teaching young Senegalese people lessons in Indian dance and music. He survives not on fees but on their gifts of food and shelter. Froment lets you inhabit Mukherjee’s gaze and what he sees with his art, thus defining modernism and conceptual practice outside the maze of the market and the museum and specifically in the spirit of non-nationality.

TALKS AND EVENTS

Opening Gallery Talks: Invited Curators Projects
Thursday 15 September, 11.30am, Main Reception, FREE
Join us for the opening of, The Plough and other stars curated by Kate Strain and Historica – Republican Aesthetics curated by Sumesh Sharma, presented concurrently in IMMA’s galleries. In two short gallery talks both curators will introduce their individual exhibition ideas and the artist’s they have selected to be part of their IMMA project. Conversations will continue over a coffee/tea reception afterwards.

Curators Lunchtime Talk Series
Friday 7 October, 1.15-2pm, Meeting Point, Main Reception, FREE
Seán Kissane, Curator Exhibitions, IMMA, introduces IMMA’s new invited curator’s initiative with current projects by Sumesh Sharma and Kate Strain.

Love Letter to Mars
Saturday 26 November 2016, time tbc, part of the IMMA Symposium, FREE
As part of the public events programme of the exhibition Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili present a new iteration of a live lecture performance. Love Letter to Mars is based on an exchange of letters between two earthly lovers and their fictional friend. This character, named Wa’ad, has left the dying ecosystem of planet earth, in search of a new life on Mars. Here the letter acts as a kind of time travel, transcending the limitations of linear time in space, to become the vehicle through which the pair reflects on ideas around loss and distance, the occupation of territories, and the inherent dangers of language as a tool for colonisation.

The Centre For Dying On Stage
Ongoing, times vary
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, at irregular, unannounced intervals, artists participating in the performance project – The Centre For Dying On Stage – will assemble in the space of the exhibition to conduct meditations, workshops and rehearsals, influenced by and responding to the artworks on display. The Centre For Dying On Stage is a research body and performance project that generates new artistic undertakings, anchored to notions around death and the stage. Participants will use artworks from The Plough and other stars as prompts and props for thinking through strategies to overcome death, through metaphor and artifice. In this manner the exhibition will feed into and inform the development of a new play, which will act as a reincarnation of some of the ideas explored in this exhibition. The play will be presented in association with Cow House Studios, at Wexford Arts Centre, on the 11th and 12th of November 2016.

The acting members of the performance project The Centre For Dying On Stage are:
Jessica Foley / Marjorie Potiron & Lisa Hoffmann / Steven Randall / The Artist and Himself at 29 (TAH29)

 

Exhibition supported by

Official Hotel Partner

 
 

A FAIR LAND or/and a Courgette based economy

Connect with your everyday creativity at IMMA this August 12 – 28

 IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) and Grizedale Arts (UK) have collaborated to create an extraordinary new project in 2016 that examines the function of art. Echoing the role artists and the European Arts and Crafts movement played in creating and articulating a new vision for Ireland pre-1916 this project takes shape as a visual and working installation in IMMA’s iconic courtyard from 12 – 28 August 2016.

Re-thinking the Royal Hospital of Kilmainham cobblestoned quadrant as a model village, the project – entitled A Fair Land – aims to develop a system for living using basic and simple resources used in a creative way. Todays professionalised culture has arguably moved to distance us from our inherent everyday creativity, instead promoting more systematised living, convenience and globalisation, all fundamentally based on the exploitation of ‘labour capital’ (other people’s labour).

The ambition with this new project is to create a complete living system that is elemental, immediate and sustainable based on your own individual and collaborative labour. In doing so, A Fair Land will create a model for a way to live, envisaged, enabled and operated by a collective creative vision which enhances dignity and self-determination and looks at how that that can be delivered through creativity – an inherent human function. A Fair Land argues that the use of creativity in the everyday is a means to enable change and empowerment.

The project is envisioned as a kind of way station, creating an instant no-frills system that acts as an empowering opportunity to re-educate, re-engage and re-vision from both a personal and societal perspective, be you war refugee, economic migrant, downsizer, opt-outer, affluence escapee or Brexiteer. The core function of the project is an ongoing education where the system itself is the school. To this end a number of artists will put forward their visions for education drawn from ‘village’ resources.

A Fair Land has been developed by a wide range of people, including artists and creative practitioners, with the aim of making a new vision for a functioning future society. Each day the village will offer its visitors opportunities to eat, make, think, or trade – and through that process to copy, assimilate and teach. With a focus on creating objects that are useful, desirable and achievable, A Fair Land will present an active and tangible representation of the place of creativity in society, creating a space for families, friends and strangers to gather, get involved, and experience alternative perspectives on living.

Artists and collaborators include: Eavan Atkin / Samuel Bishop / Kat Black / Bluebell Youth Projects / Tania Bruguera / Rhona Byrne / Marcus Coates / Common Ground / Emily Cropton / CREATE / Coniston village building team / Michelle Darmody / Eoin Donnelly / Vanessa Donoso Lopez / Drew and Middori / Firestation / Motoko Fujita / Ryan Gander / Liz Gillis / Nicola Goode / Irish Architecture Foundation / Brenda Kearney / Suzanne Lacy / Renzo Martens/ Jonathan Meese / Meg Narongchai / Deirdre O’Mahony / Seodín O’Sullivan / Debbie Paul / Rialto Youth Projects / Niamh Riordan / Kirsty Roberts / Katie Sanderson / Sarah Staton / St. Andrews Community Centre / Francesca Ulivi / Miranda Vane / Fiona Whelan / public works / NÓS workshop / NVA / Somewhere / Sweet Water Foundation / Villagers from the Swiss village of Leytron / Tom Watt & Tanad Williams, and many more.

The project has been delivered with the generous and creative support of construction collaborators Swift Scaffolding, Hentech Fabrication and Rilco Roofing and has received additional funding from the Goethe Institut Irland.

This project is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson,
which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a
strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging
talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

A Fair Land is part of the official Ireland 19 / 2016 Cultural programme

For further details and images please contact [email protected]

Additional Information / A Fair Land Programme

About the Project

A Fair Land began with IMMA taking the unique step of
inviting Grizedale Arts, an international commissioning and residency
agency, to take up residence in IMMA’s own residency programme
from March 2016. Whilst in residence Grizedale Arts, in collaboration
with IMMA, invited a range of artists and creative practitioners from
Ireland and beyond to use the residency as a base to research and
develop a major activated project for our 17th century courtyard which
is at the heart of our building.

A reflection of pre-1916 Ireland, A Fair Land
reveals a vision for society informed, and led by creativity and
artistic practice – whether through a Ruskinian reconsideration of
industry, a vision for education or culture as a mechanism for political
activism – where the creative voice was central to new visions for
modern society emerging in Ireland and internationally.
 
You can follow the development of the project by looking for the hashtag #AFairLand on Instagram or Twitter

For more details and a full weekly programme please visit the exhibition page /en/page_237103.htm

This project has been made possible with the support of:

Click here to view the 2016 Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection exhibition page. 

THE HENNESSY ART FUND FOR IMMA COLLECTION

Thursday, 14th July, 2016: Today, Hennessy Ireland and IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) announce a new multi-year partnership and acquisition fund to purchase works by Irish and Irish based artists that are not yet part of the IMMA National Collection of Contemporary and Modern Art. Entitled, The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection, this initiative has enabled IMMA to purchase multiple works for the Collection for the first time since 2011.

Artists will be nominated by a selection panel, including Director Sarah Glennie and Head of Collections Christina Kennedy, and each year will include an independent guest curator. This year’s guest panellist is Emma Lucy O’Brien from the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, with final recommendations approved by the IMMA Collection & Acquisitions Committee, in line with IMMA’s Collection policy.

Four works by four different Irish based artists have been selected, and the chosen artists for 2016 are Kevin Atherton, David Beattie, Rhona Byrne and Dennis McNulty. All of the works are installations that variously engage film, performance, new media, sound, found objects, everyday materials and audience participation.  They are being exhibited as part of IMMA Collection: A Decade, an exhibition which provides a snapshot of how the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary art has developed over the past 10 years.

Kevin Atherton’s video installation is a recurring engagement with his younger self through a filmed conversation first begun in 1978 when he was 27 years old, and was most recently conducted by his more mature self in 2014, 36 years on. Rhona Byrne’s interactive work invites people to reconstruct her life-size sculptural installation and make their own environments.  Through a kinetic juxtaposition of materials including a cymbal and piece of concrete David Beattie explores the physicality of sound and how we experience it in our everyday, while Dennis McNulty’s research for a commission in Norway has led to a layered, performative multi-component work that takes 1930s science writing and a 1980s pop song by a-ha to join ideas of universal time.

The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection will see artists based in Ireland and Irish artists living abroad eligible for selection each year. Works will be sought that show excellence and innovation within contemporary art developments and represent a signal moment of achievement within the artist’s practice. Work must also have been made within the previous five years.

Commenting on the Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA, artist Kevin Atherton said: ‘For me the recent purchase of my work by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, made possible by the generous sponsorship of Hennessy, means a great deal, acting as it does as a confirmation of the welcome I felt when I first moved to Dublin from London in 1999. Having chosen to come to a country with a vibrant and dynamic contemporary art scene seventeen years ago, I feel a part of that scene and am delighted that my work be viewed through an Irish optic that although rooted in Ireland is international in outlook.’

David Beattie added to this by saying, ‘The purchase of the work by Hennessy for the IMMA collection is a significant moment for myself as it is the first of my works to become part of a museum collection. I think being part of the IMMA collection has added significance because of the important role that IMMA plays in the wider art community in Ireland and internationally.’ 

Elaine Cullen, Market Development Manager for Moet Hennessy Ireland, said: ‘This new partnership with IMMA continues Hennessy’s long tradition of supporting and nurturing Irish talent within arts and culture. It’s a privilege to enable the acquisition of such high calibre work for the National Collection at IMMA.’

Sarah Glennie, Director of IMMA, said: “IMMA is, above all else, committed to supporting artists’ work. Together with artists, and visionary partners like Hennessy Ireland, the museum works to support the development, understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art in Ireland. As Ireland’s contemporary visual artists continue to strengthen, Irish artists’ work is increasingly recognised on the international stage as well as making an invaluable contribution to Irish society. Artists are an essential voice in any contemporary society and IMMA is committed to supporting Irish artists’ ability to live and work in Ireland. The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection is a key initiative in supporting this objective, making it possible for the museum to purchase work for the first time since 2011.”

Founded in Cognac, France in 1765 by Corkonian Richard Hennessy, Hennessy’s distinctly Irish heritage has stood the test of time and today draws on more than 250 years of knowledge, talent, expertise and passion. Highlights of the Hennessy cultural calendar include the Hennessy Portrait Prize with the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hennessy Literary Awards, one of Ireland’s longest running cultural sponsorships, and Hennessy Lost Fridays with the RHA.

For further information visit www.imma.ie and www.hennessy.com, log onto the Hennessy Cognac Ireland’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/HennessyCognacIreland, or follow Hennessy on Twitter @HennessyIRL and Instagram @HennessyIRL.

-ENDS-

The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection 2016 Artists

Kevin Atherton

Kevin Atherton is an artist who works with performance and new media in sculptural contexts. A fine art educator, his is a time-based practice with an ongoing interest in the relationship between the real and the fictional. Since 1980s he has created many large scale public sculptural commissions. He was Head of the Department of Postgraduate Pathways in the Faculty of Fine Art in NCAD and as such has influenced a whole generation of young artists.

In Two Minds premiered in 1978 at the Project Arts Centre  and recently has been included in the following group exhibitions:  2009: San Francisco MOMA; 2012: MOMA Vienna, Tate Britain, ICA London;  2014:  IMMA, Primal Architecture.

David Beattie

David Beattie is an artist who lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He has received a number of Arts Council bursaries, most recently 2015, and was awarded the Harpo Foundation Award in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (2011); The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh and Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Visual Art, Toronto, Canada (both 2010). Beattie has been included in numerous group exhibitions including In the Line of Beauty, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013), O Brave New World, Rubicon Projects, Brussels (2013) All Humans Do, The Model, Sligo and Whitebox, New York (2012); Holding Together, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2010); La Part des Choses, Mains d’Oeuvres, Paris, and in Quiet Revolution, Hayward Touring, UK (2009).

Rhona Byrne

Rhona Byrne lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Rhona makes sculptural objects and spatial environments combining sculpture, performance and processes of participation that explore a negotiation of object, place and social practice. Recent and upcoming projects and exhibitions include, Pathways, Education Hub, Art commission, Maynooth University; A Fair Land, Irish Museum of Modern Art; Mobile Monuments, Fingal County Council public art commission; Huddle Tests solo show at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios; Huddlewear, Facebook AIR program residency/commission; Mobile Monuments, Fingal County Council 1916 Public Art commission; On that Note, Heart of Glass, Liverpool; Moving Thresholds, National Gallery of Ireland; Ridge, Verksmi∂jan, Hjalteyri, Iceland; It’s All up in the Air, Norfolk and Norwich Arts Festival, Uk; Bolthole, Open Studio, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, IMMA
www.rhonabyrne.com   

Dennis McNulty

Dennis McNulty makes video works, sound works and installations, and in recent years, has produced a number of complex multi-layered performance works. His work is conceptual and research driven and often draws on aspects of cinema, sculpture, sound and performance to create hybrid forms.  How as human beings we unconsciously accumulate knowledge through our interaction with our environment, especially the built environment and how that has played out through history in terms of architecture and engineering – frequently provides the starting point for McNulty’s artworks.

Through research, McNulty looks for new frameworks for activity, to create works which propose a new kind of relationship to time and space, to histories, as well as our bodily experience of such forms.

I reached inside myself through time, 2015 was specially commissioned for the group exhibition LIAF 2015: Disappearing Acts, Lofoten, Norway’s International Art Festival, curated by Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen.

Recent and current exhibitions include The Time Domain, a site specific live work, presented during Liverpool Biennal 2016, co-commissioned between Bluecoat School and Liverpool Biennial;    2015: I reached inside myself through time, commissioned for LIAF, Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway, 2014: PROTOTYPES, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; A Leisure Complex, Collective, Edinburgh; 2013:  INTERZONE, The Box, The Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio; The Face of Something New, Scriptings, Berlin;  
A Stew of Universals, ZKU, Berlin;  2012:  PRECAST, off-site project, London;  INTERZONE, Seamus Ennis Center, Fingal, Co Dublin, 2011:  The Eyes of Ayn Rand, Performa 11, New York;  
Another Construction, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin;  Space replaced by volume, Granoff Centre for the Arts, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

About Hennessy
Immersed in Irish heritage, Hennessy has evolved to become one of Ireland’s most well-known and cherished brands. Founded in Cognac, France in 1765 by Corkonian Richard Hennessy, the brand’s distinctly Irish heritage has stood the test of time and today draws upon some 200 years of knowledge, talent, expertise and passion. It is a brand that is intrinsically linked to the Irish way of life and is complemented by Hennessy’s commitment to Ireland’s unique sociability and skill in creating unforgettable experiences.

Hennessy’s Savoir-Faire is evident from its unique heritage, tradition and exceptional craftsmanship which create Hennessy Cognac. Though the Hennessy brand has evolved throughout the years, the true art form of its traditions and methods remains timeless.

About IMMA
IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is Ireland’s leading national institution of Contemporary and Modern art. Based in its home at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, IMMA is celebrated for its vibrant and dynamic exhibition and education programmes.

IMMA is the home of the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary art. Now numbering over 3,500 works, IMMA ensures that this collection is accessible to visitors to IMMA and beyond, through exhibitions, collaborations, loans, touring partnerships and digital programmes.

Visited by over 475,000 people in 2015, IMMA is one of Ireland’s leading cultural institutions and a key source of creativity and inspiration for visitors of all walks of life. One out of every eight IMMA visitors experiences visual art for the first time through their IMMA visit. The museum is driven to inspire a curiosity and appreciation of Irish contemporary art amongst their audience and the wider Irish public.

 

 Listen, Hissen, Hessin!
The first live performance of six-piece experimental sound group Hissen at IMMA this June

6.30pm – 8pm, Wednesday 22 June 2016
The Passion According to Carol Rama, IMMA Galleries
Free, but advance booking required, to book click here 

Listen, Hissen, Hessin! is a one night live performance in response to The Passion According to Carol Rama; Italian artist Carol Rama’s current exhibition at IMMA. A roving soundscape performed by six Dublin based visual artists working under the aegis of Hissen, featuring Karl Burke, Jessica Conway, Teresa Gillespie, Jonathan Mayhew, Suzanne Walsh and Lee Welch. This will be their first public performance as a six-piece experimental sound group and will take place within the galleries at IMMA.

Deliberately contrasting with the aesthetic of Italian artist Carol Rama’s work (1918-2015), Listen, Hissen, Hessin! riffs off Rama’s strategies and approaches to making her work – instinct, experiment, materiality, the queering of perceptions, wit, contradictions, freedom, and sensuality. The evening seeks to capture this attitude, offering it an alternative form via sound and motion.

This performative soundscape is a response to the architecture of the space, the artworks on display, and between the artist/performers themselves. It is improvised, lo fi, and layered using a combination of digital sound, voice, musical instruments, human touch, and found objects – a hanging window blind, an air vent, a stool.

Through live scoring and choreography, Listen, Hissen, Hessin! seeks to agitate the viewers experience of the exhibition, to break a certain social order, and to question any conclusion you might come to in reading Carol Rama’s, or indeed Hissen’s, work. To echo Anne Dressen’s recent description of Carol Rama in Artforum (February 2016), the event plays off a sense of the artist as “trouble-maker”.

The title of the event Listen, Hissen, Hessin! references the urban phrase ‘hessin’, defined as a lack of motivation to do anything other than party, and a desire to do anything illegal.

Hissen is supported by the Studio 6 open programme at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin.

-ENDS-

For images and additional information please contact Monica Cullinane [email protected] 01 612 9922 or [email protected]

Additional Information

Carol Rama
Ignored for decades by official art history, Italian artist Carol Rama is now recognised as essential for understanding developments within contemporary art. Her influence can be seen in the work of a later generation of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith and Elly Strik. Rama was belatedly recognised in 2003, receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious international art exhibitions. The Passion According to Carol Rama is on show at IMMA until 1 August 2016.

This is the first substantial exhibition of Carol Rama’s work and comes to Dublin following exhibitions in MACBA, Barcelona, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and EMMA, Finland. With a selection of almost two hundred works, the exhibition offers a guide through the artist’s many creative moments. Neither exhaustive nor retrospective, The Passion According to Carol Rama is the most extensive presentation of the work of this artist to date. It acts as an attempt to recognise and restore a life’s work still unknown but nevertheless slated to become classic.

Born in 1918 in Turin, Carol Rama – never academically trained or faithful to individual art movements – developed a body of work over seven decades that is as unique as it is obsessive, Rama experimented with alternative materials, developing techniques for inventing new spaces of desire and her work challenges the dominant narratives around sexuality, madness, animalism, life and death.

IMMA Talks Seminar: Sexuality, Identity & the State
1.30pm – 6pm, Wednesday 22 June 2016
Also on Wednesday 22 June IMMA will present a free seminar Sexuality, Identity & the State which will address issues of gender, sexuality, identity and the state, as it relates to the work of artists Carol Rama and Patrick Hennessy, currently on exhibition at IMMA, amongst others. Comprising of presentations by artists, writers, curators, educators and psychoanalysts, the seminar will draw on queer theory, feminism and psychoanalysis across a range of disciplines, and consider wider research agendas that span the history of art, culture and society. For further details and booking click here

IMMA announces its Summer Party music programme, curated by Cillian Murphy, with Hauschka, Meltybrains?, Caoimhin O Raghallaigh and New Jackson (DJ). Tickets on Sale Fri 20th May at 10am.

Now in its third year, the IMMA Summer Party returns on Saturday 16 July with a truly unique night time celebration of music, performance, food and drinks in the buildings and grounds of IMMA.

In advance of tickets going on sale later this week, IMMA is delighted to announce highlights of the music programme, curated by Irish actor Cillian Murphy. Once the singer and guitarist with a rock band, actor Cillian Murphy has both a visceral love of music and an impeccable ear, leading to the selection of an exciting, experimental line up for IMMA.

While each act is musically very different, all of the artists selected by Murphy are known for their unique and mesmerising live performances. From the intense soundscapes of German pianist/ composer Hauschka through the refined elegance of Gloaming composer and fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh to the electronic disco explosion of New Jackson (DJ set) and the bewildering and energetic brilliance of Ireland’s own Meltybrains? audiences are in store for a creative and engaging night of live music. From the intimate to the epic, expect music to fill the Great Hall and stunning Baroque chapel, spilling out onto the formal lawns of the IMMA Gardens.

This may be Murphy’s first curation of a live music programme but it certainly isn’t his first involvement with music, having previously collaborated with the likes of Feist, Money, I Break Horses, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, Mark Garry, Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, Irish music blog Fractured Air, and fellow Cork musicians The Frank and Walters, on whose recent record he makes an appearance. 

We are also delighted to announce today that emerging curator Anna Gritz of the Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, and previously of South London Gallery, is the performance and film curator for the IMMA Summer Party and will be programming a series of live interventions to take place across the site throughout the night. Details will be announced over the coming weeks.

As always delicious food and drinks will be available to purchase on the night and the grounds and galleries of IMMA will be open to art and culture lovers during the night. A highlight of the summer calendar the IMMA Summer Party has sold out every year so we encourage you to get buying those tickets! Tickets go on sale on Friday 20th May at 10am, priced €18 and are available through www.imma.ie

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For more information and images please contact [email protected] or 01 612 9922 or [email protected] or 01 612 9920

Additional Information

HAUSCHKA
German pianist Hauschka (real name Volker Berttelmann) is one of the most recognisable 21st-century proponents of prepared piano. His first forays into public performance were with major label hip hop act God’s Favourite Dog and a drum and bass quintet Nonex. When you listen to his music this makes more sense than you might at first think: the sound of Hauschka is both instinctive and fuelled by a love of rhythm.

“One thing about Hauschka’s music is that once you’ve seen it performed live (..) it’s impossible to dissociate the visual from the sounds you’re hearing. (..)some of it even comes mid-song, and watching him reach one hand into his instrument’s guts to jam sticks into its strings—while still playing with his other hand—makes for one of the more visually interesting piano performances you’ll ever witness.” (Undertheradarmag.com)

NEW JACKSON (DJ set)
New Jackson is the new electronic/house project from Dubliner David Kitt. From his studio near the sea, he makes nocturnal house jams with a ghostly disco hint.

"New Jackson bashes through electronic pitch changes, dressed in funky rhythms and topped off with some mechanical synth work…his set was a masterclass in live-electronic performance."  –GoldenPlec

CAOIMHÍN Ó RAGHALLAIGH
One of the most exciting and innovative traditional musician of his generation and member of The Gloaming, Caoimhiìn Oì Raghallaigh makes music on a 10- string fiddle called the hardanger d’amore, and travels the world as a solo musician, in duos with Dan Trueman, Mick O’Brien and Brendan Begley, and as a member of The Gloaming and This is How We Fly. He has performed on some of the most beautiful stages in the world, including the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall and the Lincoln Center. He has made twelve recordings to date, ranging from quite traditional to fairly out there, and continues to explore the region where traditional music begins to disintegrate. His is currently musician-in-residence in the John Field Room at the National Concert Hall.

“[Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh is] the most imaginative and fascinating musician in all of trad” Earle Hitchner, Irish Echo

MELTYBRAINS?
The members of Meltybrains? are classically trained musicians Tadhg Byrne, Brian Dillon, Bernhardt Bix McKenna, Donnacha O’ Malley and Micheál Quinn, but their music is indefinable.

"They literally blew my mind. They’re such accomplished musicians. All I can say is see Meltybrains? when you can. They are incredible live" Niamh Hegarty (BBC NI)

CILLIAN MURPHY
Irish actor Cillian Murphy was once the singer and guitarist with a rock band, has both a visceral love of music and an impeccable ear. After leaving University, Murphy joined the Corcadorca Theater Company in Cork, and played the lead role in Disco Pigs. Having come to prominence first in Kirsten Sheridan’s film adaptation of Disco Pigs in 2001, Murphy’s career is both on stage and screen. He starred as Scarecrow in Batman Begins (2005) – a role he reprised in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – and also picked up a plethora of awards and nominations for his performances in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast On Pluto, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. He currently stars in BBC drama Peaky Blinders.

He has previously collaborated with a number of Irish and International musicians including Feist, Money, I Break Horses, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, Mark Garry, Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, Irish music blog Fractured Air, and fellow Cork musicians The Frank and Walters. This is his first live music curation.

Roger Casement – The Hollywood Biopic
Critically acclaimed artist Simon Fujiwara opens new work at IMMA

Simon Fujiwara, The Humanizer
20 May – 28 August 2016

A new work by Berlin based, British/Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara, titled The Humanizer, is presented by IMMA on the occasion of the centenary of the Easter Rising. The Humanizer is Fujiwara’s proposition for an imagined Hollywood biopic composed almost uniquely of sound and based on the life of historical Irish nationalist figure Roger Casement (1864-1916). Created with contemporary Hollywood movie professionals including renowned screenplay writer Michael Lesslie (Macbeth, 2015; Assassin’s Creed, 2016) and Oscar winning designer Annie Atkins (The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014; Bridge of Spies, 2015). The Humanizer is one of three major new works commissioned by IMMA that reflect on the legacy of the commemoration of the Irish State. New commissions by Irish artists Jaki Irvine and Duncan Campbell will be presented later this year.

Simon Fujiwara was drawn to Sir Roger Casement’s extraordinary life. Considered the world’s first human rights campaigner, he was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his fight for the rights of slaves, before turning against the British in the Irish nationalist cause that lead to the Easter uprisings of 1916. His fateful demise came at the hands of the British government and his execution was sealed following the discovery of a highly controversial diary, ‘The Black Diaries’, containing explicit “evidence” of Casement’s homosexual activities. Casement’s life was so full of drama that as early as 1934 there were plans to shoot a Hollywood Casement biopic, as Fujiwara discovered in letters sent from Universal Pictures to Casement family members. Although the life of Roger Casement provided enormous potential material for a film the movie was banned by the censorship laws in the nations involved. 

Inspired by the Universal Pictures letters which are housed in the archives of the National Library of Ireland, Fujiwara enlisted a group of contemporary Hollywood movie professionals to collaborate with him in imagining how the facts of Casement’s biography might be depicted through the lens of today’s multinational movie corporations. Fujiwara gave Casement’s biography to acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter Michael Lesslie who developed a movie script in which Casement’s life and character were adapted, manipulated and often completely reinvented to comply with the current models of the Hollywood biopic form. Leslie presents Casement as a righteous man born in the wrong age – a man who may have betrayed the country he worked for, but never betrayed his principals. In true Hollywood style, every character, action and line in the script underlines this overarching narrative construct.

The script was then enacted by a company of professional actors in Dublin, before being set to a musical score that evokes a prolonged Hollywood trailer. The sound element, which includes Hollywood style music and foley, was produced in Berlin in collaboration with artist and sound designer Moritz Fehr. Set across a series of four rooms that house objects and personal effects, the sound fragments of the biopic interject into the rooms at unexpected times, rupturing what appears to be, at first glance, an authentic historical exhibition of Casement’s life.  Fujiwara’s selection of objects did not belong to Casement, however, but are props loaned from Berlin’s renowned Babelsberg Film Studio where a number of historic movies from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927, to Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, 2009, have been filmed.

Accompanying the exhibition props are a series of replica documents from Casement’s life including love letters, an arrest report and of course the famous ‘Black Diaries’ all produced by Oscar winning designer Annie Atkins and historic handwriting specialist Jan Jericho (Valkyrie, 2008, Cloud Atlas, 2012). Here existing paper documents from Casement’s life are recreated through the lens of the Hollywood designer to make them appear, at times, even more authentic than their originals.

Through fragments of sound, a minimum of objects, documents, and an environment of red curtains and carpet reminiscent of a cinema, The Humanizer seeks to evoke the experience of a big budget Hollywood movie with the most modest means. Without the seductive moving pictures associated with movies to communicate exactly what we are seeing, the audience is no longer a passive recipient but an active agent in visualising the movie. The Humanizer asks if today’s audience, with its unprecedented reserves of visual information can picture an entire movie, its locations, cast and even its message without ever having to see it?

The Humanizer is presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

The work is supported by Ireland 19/2016 and is presented as part of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme.

Associated Talks

Artist Discussion with Simon Fujiwara and Michael Lesslie
Friday 20 May, 1 – 2pm / Lecture Room
Artist Simon Fujiwara and the renowned screenplay writer Michael Lesslie explore processes of script writing, heroism and conventional Hollywood narratives, as it relates to the historical biography of Roger Casement. Moderated by Rachael Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA. Book here

Curator’s Lunchtime Talk: Drop In
Wednesday 1 June, 1.15 – 2pm / Meeting Point / Main Reception                                                                                         
Join Karen Sweeney, Exhibitions, IMMA, for a free exhibition walkthrough, where background information on The Humanizer will be explored in detail. No booking required, drop in.

For a full programme of events and free tickets visit www.imma.ie

IMMA is delighted to announce DEAN DUBLIN as our Major Hotel Partner for 2016. Since they opened their doors in 2014, Dean Dublin has strived to create a fun and vibrant space for their guests, right in the heart of the city. An ideal partnership, both IMMA and Dean Dublin value cutting edge and contemporary art with Dean Dublin showcasing original artworks by Irish artists throughout the hotel. Their collection, curated by James Earley, features many artists whose work is also represented in the IMMA Collection; these include Irish artists Mark Francis, Richard Gorman, Patrick Scott and Samuel Walsh. The Dean Dublin Lobby features a glowing Neon LED sign I Fell in Love Here by British artist Tracey Emin, whose work is also included in the IMMA Collection, on long term loan from the Weltkunst Collection.

This partnership will allow Dean Dublin to offer their guests the unique opportunity to engage with IMMA’s creative and experimental programmes, while it enables IMMA to invite some of the most influential figures in the Irish and international art world, including artists, curators and collectors, to come to Dublin.

The Dean Dublin IMMA partnership begins with the opening of a new work by Simon Fujiwara, opening at IMMA on Friday, 20th May. Entitled The Humanizer, this new commission is an imagined Hollywood biopic of Roger Casement with contributions from scriptwriter Michael Lesslie (Macbeth, 2015, Assassin’s Creed, 2016) and Oscar winning designer Annie Atkins (Grand Budapest Hotel, 2013). Future partnerships include the IMMA Summer Party, curated by Irish actor Cillian Murphy.

IMMA Director Sarah Glennie said; “IMMA’s partnership with Dean Dublin is one of our most important and significant relationships for 2016. A major factor in the delivery of our ambitious programme is the ability to offer hospitality to our artists enabling us to host some of the most influential figures in the Irish and International art world here in Dublin; something we simply could not do without Dean Dublin support. We really value this visionary support of IMMA and look forward to growing our relationship with Dean Dublin in the future”.

Bryan Davern, GM of Dean Dublin, welcomed the partnership; “As IMMA’s Major Hotel Partner we are delighted to welcome leading figures in the Irish and international art world to stay and experience Dean Dublin. Our values are aligned with what IMMA does best, creating new experiences that engage visitors.”
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For more information and images for IMMA please contact [email protected] or [email protected] 01 612 9922

For more information on Dean Dublin please contact Aoife Kelly / Jenny Headen [email protected] / [email protected] 

Additional Information

IMMA
IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, is Ireland’s national institution of contemporary and modern art. Based in its home at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, IMMA is celebrated for its vibrant and dynamic exhibition and education programmes.

IMMA is the home of the national collection of modern and contemporary art. Now numbering over 3,500 works, we ensure that this collection is accessible to visitors to IMMA and beyond, through exhibitions, collaborations, loans, touring partnerships and digital programmes.

Visited by over 475,000 people in 2015, IMMA is one of Ireland’s leading cultural institutions and a key source of creativity and inspiration for visitors of all walks of life.

One out of every eight IMMA visitors experiences visual art for the first time through their IMMA visit and it is hugely important to us to create an enjoyable and engaging experience of contemporary art for everyone. We are driven to inspire a curiosity and appreciation of Irish contemporary art amongst our audience and the wider Irish public.

Dean Dublin
We don’t do conventional. We do fun. Cool & comfortable rooms filled with stuff that will make you smile. Spaces for work & play. Food & drink to tweet home about. Smack bang in the heart of Dublin city.

No fussy hotel formality, just book, arrive, say hallo, grab an elevator & settle in. We’ve fifty two bedrooms in our building. Some are small. Some are big. Some are really, really big. They’re all deadly sleeping spaces. We want you to feel like you’re staying over at a mate’s house so we’ve filled your room with fun stuff: big bouncy beds, super soft linen, blast power showers, Grafton Barber products, Marshall amps connecting to your gadgets, Netflix on your Samsung TV, loads of classic vinyl for your Rega turntable, munchies to make you grin, original new Irish art on the walls & much more. You might never leave your room. That’s OK with us.

We love to work, to play, to eat, to drink, to dance. So besides our sleeping places, we’ve got The Dean Bar, The Blue Room, The Loft, Sophie’s on the roof, Everleigh in the basement. Everyone is welcome, it’s an open house. You don’t need to be staying at Dean Dublin to hang out at Dean Dublin: a seven am Clement & Pekoe coffee grab; a quiet corner to use as a hot desk; rotisserie for lunch; an unbelievable New York-Italian dinner; a table full of classic cocktails; DJs on the decks; sunrise; sunset.

We are smack bang in the heart of Dublin City. We’ve done our best to keep the noise to a minimum but there’s always going to be a big buzz around here at night, that’s the location you’re staying in when you stay with us. Please make sure to consider this when booking. Stay in, head out, work, party, it’s up to you. http://deandublin.ie/

Image credit: Colm MacAthlaoich, Candy Forest