As Above, So Below
Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics

Major group exhibition and accompanying programme of events exploring spirituality in visual art to open at IMMA

13 April – 27 August 2017

Featuring an exciting selection of modern masterworks and landmark contemporary art works by Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Cameron – many being shown for the first time in Ireland – and new commissions created specifically for this exhibition by Linder, Matt Copson, Stephan Doitschinoff, Alan Butler and others.

Opening with a Vedic spiritual blessing at 12.15pm on Thu 13 April 2017, IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) presents one of its most ambitious and compelling shows exploring how the spiritual endures in our everyday lives. In particular, As Above, So Below considers the role played by certain spiritualist and alternative doctrines, such as the occult or mysticism, in the creation of abstract painting from its origins to the present digital age.

The arc of this exhibition spans a hundred years from the abstract masterworks of Kandinsky, af Klint and Kupka to contemporary work by Steve McQueen and Bruce Nauman and new commissions by Alan Butler and Linder among others. As Above, So Below resists becoming a comprehensive survey that traces the role of art and spirituality however. Instead, it presents perspectives on spirituality from a range of unique viewpoints in over 200 works, many of which have never been seen in Ireland before. It extends beyond the gallery space with new works made specifically for the IMMA site and a series of performances, events, talks and film screenings taking place during the exhibition. The exhibition’s historical gaze has a particular focus on female artists from the last century whose work remained uncovered until recently in the now shifting narrative of art history.

The title, As Above, So Below, echoes an often quoted saying, employed by artists, poets, writers and astrologers alike, as a means to describe and understand the mysterious but familiar world around us. To look at spirituality in such secular times is a provocation in itself, and the exhibition traces and questions the genesis of deep religious, mystical and occult beliefs that continue to shape the ideas of contemporary artists today. Writing in the 1960s, the critic Susan Sontag claimed that, “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself”, and through this exhibition IMMA asks what the project of spirituality looks like in 2017.

Transcending the limitations of what is traditionally perceived as ‘spiritual’, this exhibition embraces the occult, the otherworld, human consciousness, mysticism and ritual, creating a space to reflect and explore these gateways, or portals, to wonder.

Shown in ‘Chapters’ the exhibition groups works into four thematic sections. The opening chapter Portals looks at how spiritualism is often concerned with entrances into other worlds or other systems of thought. One central protagonist is the recently re-discovered Swedish artist Hilma af Klint who was working at the dawn of the 20th century. Now understood to be a key founder of abstraction, she was also a theosophist and a medium who understood her ‘automatic’ paintings to be guided by spirits; messages received from the ‘High Powers’. Steve McQueen’s elegant and absorbing film Running Thunder, 2007 (11 mins, 41 sec) also forms part of this chapter as a more contemporary exploration of spirituality. Depicting a motionless horse lying dead – or asleep? – in a meadow it questions stillness and movement, the line between life and death.

The second chapter Below takes us into the shadows, into the domain of the occult – of knowledge concealed and only accessible to the properly initiated. One talismanic presence is film maker Kenneth Anger who has a lifelong devotion to the adventurer-occulist Aleister Crowley, stretching back to the 1950s when he helped restore Crowley’s former temple in Sicily. Cameron, an artist, poet, actress and occultist was a follower of the religious movement Thelma, founded by Crowley, as well as being a close friend of Anger’s. Her dark yet whimsical paintings are displayed alongside Anger’s film still Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954-66, in which she also starred.  These works are presented alongside one of Bruce Nauman’s first walk-in ‘environments’, Natural Light, Blue Light Room, 1971. An intentionally disorientating space this work presents a confusing mixture of daylight and glowing neon. Nauman has said of the work; “The idea was that it would be hard to know what to focus on and even if you did, it would be hard to focus”. Indeed Nauman has claimed, through  a 1967 work, that “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”, a teasingly ambiguous sentence can be read as earnest, satirical, or both.

The third chapter Above is concerned with healing, animism, the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects, and transcendence. American born artist Susan Hiller describes her photographs of people surrounded by hazy auras as “metaphors for ourselves in the digital age”. These images pay homage to Marcel Duchamp’s curious 1910 portrait of his childhood friend Raymond Dumouchel, who is depicted surrounded by a dark red halo. These mysterious works are joined in this chapter by a new commission from Linder which draws on Victorian séances, which she calls “very performative affairs.” This new piece continues Linder’s unfinished conversation with the little-known surrealist writer and painter Ithell Colquhoun, who developed an ink-blotting process she called “mantic staining” to produce “mind pictures”. A key Irish artist in this section is the painter Patrick Pye, one of the most creative artists in the sphere of religious thought in Ireland in our time. His works, many of which haven’t been seen in public since his retrospective in 2000, infuse this section with heavenly themes which evoke the role of man and his biblical aspirations.

The final chapter Beyond includes artists who have challenged the notion of spirituality. This section concerns endings, death and alternative options. It is about leaving this world, about what dreams may come, and takes its cue from the digital age. The enduring ideas of the spiritual are brought into question in fantastical ways by artists such as The Propeller Group, presenting a journey through the funeral rituals of Vietnam. The film merges documentary footage of processions with stunning re-enactments– a rumination on death. This is presented alongside the transformative works of the American visionary artist and architect Paul Laffoley.

This exhibition 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.“ Nurturing new talent and thinking is central to what we do at Matheson. Our involvement in New Art at IMMA is an exciting way for us to support and connect with IMMA and with the artists who are involved in this element of its programme.” Tim Scanlon, Partner and Head of Corporate, Matheson.

Commenting on the exhibition Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA said; “IMMA is delighted to be staging such an ambitious and far-reaching exhibition at the core of our 2017 programme. Extending beyond the gallery space, As Above, So Below will invite visitors to IMMA to consider, through the compelling prism of over 200 works of art, what spirituality means to us today and the role it plays in our contemporary society. We are very grateful to Sam Thorne, and all the artists involved for their collaboration with IMMA and we remain indebted to our growing group of Corporate Partners, Patrons and Members whose invaluable support allows IMMA to realise projects of this scale and breadth. New Art at IMMA, supported by Matheson enables IMMA to support Irish and international artists to realise important new work and this visionary support remains central to IMMA’s ambitious programme.”

Commenting on the exhibition Co-Curator Sam Thorne said; "I am thrilled to be co-curating As Above, So Below with Rachael Thomas at IMMA. Exploring the relationship between art and spiritualism, the exhibition brings together an incredibly various combination of works from the last 100 years, from early abstract painting to new commissions. In our current moment of division, these artists and visionaries explore and imagine new worlds."

Curated by Sam Thorne, Director, Nottingham Contemporary, UK, and Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA.

ENDS

For further information, and images, please contact:
Patrice Molloy  [email protected] / +353 (0)1 612 9920
Monica Cullinane [email protected] / +353 (0)1 612 9922

Additional Notes for Editors

As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics will be open in the East Wing at IMMA from 13 April – 27 August 2017. Please note the Museum is closed on Good Friday, 14 April.

In accordance with the Vedic astral chart for the exhibition it will be opened with an opening ceremony conducted by Mayesvara das (Brahmacari Monk and Spiritual Teacher), Robert Phair (Spiritual writer and musician) and Gleb Konon (Philosopher and Musician) in the IMMA galleries at 12.15pm on Thursday 13 April. The way the world "below" reaches to the world "above" is through spiritual practices such as the devotional singing called Kirtan, which we present for our exhibition opening ceremony at an astrologically auspicious time. Immediately following the ceremony we are delighted to welcome John Cantwell, co-director of the Slí an Chroí Clinic and School of Shamanism, to conduct a number of free animal spirit readings for visitors. Readings will be conducted in the gallery on a first come first served basis from 12.30 – 1.30pm, and the relevant exhibition ticket fee will apply.

Later that evening, from 6pm – 7pm there will be a free introductory talk by curators Rachael Thomas and Sam Thorne with a panel of artists involved in the exhibition. Tickets to this talk are free of charge but must be pre-booked online. Visitors with a valid ticket for the talk can access the exhibition for free earlier that day.

The Opening Party, supported by O’Hara’s Irish Craft Beers, will take place from 6.30pm – 9pm with complimentary drinks by O’Hara’s, and music selected by artist David Beattie. Access to the exhibition will be free of charge on the night.

Admission: €8 / €5 concession (senior citizens and the unwaged). Free admission for IMMA Members, full-time students and under 18’s.  There will be free admission for all every Tuesday but tickets should be booked in advance from www.imma.ie.

Tickets
Please note that visitors who purchase tickets for either IMMA Collection: Freud Project or As Above, So Below can avail of free entry to the other exhibition when visited on the same day. Due to the number and delicate nature of the works and the limited circulation space of the historic Garden Galleries, admission to the Freud Project is restricted and is by timed entry. To avoid disappointment visitors should pre-book their preferred time-slot online in advance of visiting. Online booking for As Above, So Below, will be available from Monday 3 April 2017 on www.imma.ie

Museum opening hours are as follows:
Tues to Fri 11.30am – 5.30pm / Sat 10am -5.30pm / Sun and bank holidays 12 – 5.30pm. Closed on Good Friday, 14 April

A fully-illustrated book has been published to accompany the exhibition which features contributions from Erik Davis, Jennifer Higgie, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, Dr Tina Kinsella, Linder, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rachael Thomas, Sam Thorne and Maurice Tuchman, amongst others. Price €20.

Selected artists within the exhibition include Hilma af Klint, Kenneth Anger, David Beattie, Nora Berman, Annie Besant, Agnieszka Brzezanska, Alan Butler, James Lee Byars, Cameron, Marcus Coates, Ira Cohen, Ithell Colquhoun, Matt Copson, Stephan Doitschinoff, Hayden Dunham, Stephen Dunne, Susan Hiller, Koo Jeong A., Alejandro Jodorowsky, Wassily Kandinsky, Rachid Koraïchi, Emma Kunz, Frantisek Kupka, Paul Laffoley, Liliane Lijn, Linder, Josiah McElheny, Steve McQueen, Henri Michaux, Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, Pádraic E. Moore (curatorial advisor), Bruce Nauman, Austin Osman Spare, Sigmar Polke, The Propeller Group, Patrick Pye, John Russell, Eoghan Ryan, Aura Satz, Suzanne Treister, Grace Weir, amongst others.
Biographies and images available on request

Associated Events
A programme of talks, performances and participatory events will take a fresh look at the role of spirituality and transcendence in our global and sceptical present. Event highlights include;

Curator’s Lunchtime Talk Series  / 19 May, 1.15-2pm / Drop-in
Meeting Point/Main Reception, Free (Exhibition fee applies). Join Rachael Gilbourne, Curator Exhibitions, IMMA, for an insightful walkthrough of this exhibition.

Even the Dead Rise Up / Francis McKee / 23 May
A discursive mediation on mysticism, the occult and political dissent. Drawing on a personnel journey of becoming a spiritual medium, and the people and practices encountered. Convened by Francis McKee, Irish writer and renowned curator working in Glasgow as Research fellow at the Glasgow School of Art, and Director, Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, UK. Book launch to follow. 

Faith of the Faithless / Simon Critchley / 7 June
How do beliefs lead people to act in the world? From the paradox of politics and religion, this talk contemplates structures of faith and the deficit of moral life and ethical action in neoliberal society. Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York, and prolific writer, scholar of continental philosophy and phenomenology.

Art as Compass towards the Future / Dom Mark Patrick Hederman / 21 June 
Benedictine monk and writer Mark Patrick Hederman addresses the role artists can play in the future. Hederman discusses his proposition that art is its own kind of religion and therefore is prophetic.  Hederman draws on his scholarship of art and psychology and living a monastic life in the 21st century.

The Lure of Lakes / Michael Harding / 4 July
Michael Harding, author, playwright and Irish Times columnist, talks with great honesty and wit about, life, love, the sublime and pursuits of spiritual transformation. The talk offers reflection on Harding’s bestselling books Staring at Lakes, 2014 and Walking with Strangers, 2016.

IFI / IMMA Screening Series / May – July
In response As Above, So Below, the IFI and IMMA present a special series of selected films that looks at narratives of mysticism, occult and transcendence in feature titles and artists experimental Film. This opens with rare screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult classic The Holy Mountain.

Live Event / Wilder Beings Command / 29 July / All Ages / Free
Great Hall, Chapel, Formal Gardens & Meadow
Wilder Beings Command is an evening of live performance, music and choreography, to reach out and involve generations both young and old. Celebrating the outdoor site of the museum as an activated space, the evening stretches across the meadows, laces through the Formal Gardens and culminates within the Great Hall and the Chapel. It features moments of procession, ritual and collectivity, where visitors can play an active part in its unfolding. Artists will include Stephan Doitschinoff, Emily Mast, Edward Clydesdale Thomson, Mark Titchner and Stephen Dunne, amongst others.

Eoghan Ryan performance / The Modern Dance (In the Light of Today’s Questions) / 17 Aug / Galleries
An intimate performance work by Berlin-based Irish artist Eoghan Ryan, which runs over the course of an evening, The Modern Dance (In the Light of Today’s Questions) questions what constitutes the sacred and divine within secular western culture. It looks at ideas that are inherited from previous generations and how this forms our personal identities, specifically within an institutional setting. Incorporating sound, song, sculpture and moving image, the performance becomes a live multi-disciplinary installation in motion.

About the Curators

Rachael Thomas Biography
Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, Thomas is a Leonardo fellow at Trinity University and contributor to MA/ Art in the contemporary world at NCAD. Thomas has curated various exhibitions including solo surveys of Jac Leirner, Emily Jacir, Simon Fujiwara, Etel Adnan, Hélio Oiticica, Haroon Mirza, and Tino Sehgal, the American Fluxus and feminist artist Eleanor Antin, Thomas Ruff, Karen Kilimnik, Margherita Manzelli, Willie Doherty, Sophie Calle and Mark Manders. She initiated and organized with Philippe Parreno the seminal group show of post relational aesthetics .All Hawaii eNtrées / LuNar Reggae, artists included Thomas Demand, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller and Rirkrit Tiravanija and Garrett Phelan. She has introduced a new project strand to IMMA bringing to Ireland solo and group projects and new commissions by young international artists such as Gerard Byrne, Franz Ackermann, Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Demand and ground breaking virtual retrospective with artist Jorge Pardo. Critically acclaimed International group shows such as Primal Architecture, which included Mike Kelley, Linder and Conrad Shawcross, Bedwyr Williams and What we Call LOVE, from Surrealism to Now, 2016, co-curated with the Director of Venice Biennale, 2017, Christine Macel included artists such as Picasso, Abramović, Brancusi, Dalí, Duchamp Ernst, Wolfgang Tillmans, Giacometti, Oppenheim, Picasso, Warhol and Yoko Ono.

Thomas was awarded a Millennium Fellowship to produce papers on global frameworks of contemporary art practice at Tate Britain, London. In 2006, she curated the Irish Pavilion, New Territories, ARCO ’06, Madrid. Curated Biennales include the Welsh Pavilion with Cerith Wyn Evans in 2000 at the Biennale di Venezia and the Lyon Biennale, with Gerard Byrne, 2008. She has lectured on the role of the curator at various symposia such as Curating Now and The Role of Painting in the 21st Century. As a writer, she has published widely in journals and exhibition catalogues including an interview with Michael-Craig Martin and texts on artists such as Dorothy Cross, Gerard Byrne, Eleanor Antin, Sophie Calle, Pierre Huyghe, Alex Katz, and Thomas Scheibitz. She is actively pursuing research on the politics of space with philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. She has lectured on the role of the curator at various symposia and on contemporary Irish art at the Guggenheim with Nancy Spector. As a writer, she has published widely in journals and exhibition catalogues. Currently Thomas is curating a solo exhibitions of Nan Goldin and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and researching contemporary performance and Fluxus interventions.

Sam Thorne Biography
Sam Thorne is director of Nottingham Contemporary. From 2014–16 he was artistic director of Tate St Ives. Prior to that, he was associate editor of frieze magazine, where is currently a contributing editor and columnist. He is a co-founder of Open School East, a free-to-attend study programme in London / Margate, and his book School will be published by Sternberg Press this summer.

14 February – 5 June 2017, Courtyard Galleries, Admission Free

One of Brazil’s most internationally renowned contemporary artists, Jac Leirner presents Institutional Ghost at IMMA. Leirner emerged on the international art scene in a number of high-profile exhibitions in the early 1990s, at the forefront of a generation of artists looking to the art of the 1960s and 1970s as a point of departure. For this, her first solo exhibition in Ireland, Leirner responds to the particular architecture of the courtyard galleries at IMMA to adapt and present work specifically for these rooms. Since the mid-1980s, Leirner has collected specific temporary and incidental products of everyday life, tapping into what she has described as the ‘infinity of materials’. Some are derived from her own personal use and consumption, while others are found objects. This exhibition includes recent sculpture, installation and works on paper made from these everyday objects such as spirit levels, plastic rulers, cigarette rolling papers and luggage tags. Their appearance in her meticulously constructed work, separated but not entirely dislocated from their original use, provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which we interact with, travel through and embrace our environment in our daily lives. 

Curator and IMMA Head of Exhibitions Rachel Thomas has said about the exhibition that “It is exciting to have the work of Jac Leirner at IMMA, as she saliently references the Brazilian legacy of constructivism and appropriates her works with this vibrant history into visually compelling sculptures and installations that demand to  be seen and enjoyed.”

Indeed Leirner’s choice of materials is carefully selected and, as evident in the exhibition, she adopts a formal rigor and aesthetic to the way she collects, arranges and assembles these objects. Leirner describes her work as a reflection on materiality, space and colour and she orders her vast quantities of materials in accordance with their shape, colour, texture, size, weight and other characteristics that are in keeping with their function. By re-purposing these everyday materials into visually compelling and frequently playful sculptures and installations, Leirner creates new and unexpected associations that provide a statement on the unfolding of art in recent decades. Although her choice of particular materials might point to issues related to consumer culture and the by-products of consumption, Leirner’s issue is art as its main concern.

This interest can partly be attributed to the important collection of Brazilian constructive art from the 1950s and 60s held by her parents Fulvia and Adolpho Leirner. It included works by leading artists responsible for making this tradition one of the most fertile in Brazil, and growing up amongst these pieces became paramount to Leirner’s early visual education. Leirner’s work draws on a multiplicity of artistic traditions however, including referencing specific moments in art history such as Minimal Art, where the artwork endeavours to reveal the essence of a subject by taking away all non-essential forms or concepts. Her practice also references Conceptual Art, as well as Arte Povera in its use of unconventional materials and style. Leirner is also indebted to the legacy of Brazilian Constructivism and its approach to aspects of the environment in which we determine ourselves.

As part of her exhibition at IMMA Leirner presents selected uv inkjet prints and works on paper from the Junkie series, which reference her addictions and document a haunting, compulsive habit as well as visualising notions of dependency. Together they create a compelling series of associations and narratives that chart the passing of time and the dynamic associated with taking drugs and the promise of euphoria they might pose to an addict. During binges along three separate nights in 2010 Leirner sculpted miniature figures, including a head and heart, from lumps of cocaine, before juxtaposing them with objects found to-hand around her house and documenting them. The somewhat hazy quality of the prints evokes the sensations of a drug-fuelled binge. Arresting, unsettling and occasionally humorous, Leirner’s juxtapositions relate the curious presences of the cocaine-sculptures to other, more banal objects such as coins, stones, a blood-soaked bandage and a tiny horse sculpture, in terms of scale, weight, function and surface. The titles, which include Oh Yes Yes, Mental Case, About Men and Animals, Hide and Seek and So Male, reference these juxtapositions and associations of the objects to the sculptures, adding humour to the drama.

The works in this exhibition are informed by Leirner’s interest in the visual expressions of consumer culture and the re-configuration of her materials into formal arrangements. Skin (Raw King Size Slim), 2013 comprises 297 meticulously aligned cigarette rolling papers (silk papers) gummed directly onto the gallery wall in a pattern that evokes the grid structures and clarity of space inherent in Minimalism. This installation references both the habitual, repetitive activity of rolling silk papers and the tangible nature of this delicate material used to contain tobacco and pot. Leirner draws on her own experiences: she has been an avid smoker for much of her life and consequently is acquainted with products related to the tobacco industry and the various types, colours and formats of these rolling papers. The Skin installations act as a sort of self-portrait of the artist and her participation in and commentary on the accumulation and circulation of commodities, a comparable role we each play in this.

Leirner engages with the spirit of Minimalism in the new work incorporating rulers tailored at IMMA’s space. Rulers are unexceptional utilitarian presences in our everyday lives. Here they are transformed, with the minimum of artistic manipulation into rhythmic patterns bursting with rich visual dynamism that suggests mathematical operations, systemic structures, patterns and circuits. A wall-based spirit level work is an example of the homage Leirner makes to industrial materials and tools and their inherent industrial finish. Her ongoing dialogue with artists whose work she admires is also evident in this work as it engages with the sculptural language of Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) – exhibited at IMMA in 2014.

Leirner’s enduring engagement with colour and love of music is apparent in Hip Hop Around the Fireplace, 2017. Her immersion in São Paulo’s punk-rock culture and her involvement in the punk-rock band UKCT during her youth also shaped her artistic sensibility. The continuous line of colour encircling the chimney breasts is articulated by dynamic pattern, stuttering, pulsating pathways that suggest movement or the rhythm of music. Her passion for music goes from hard-core punk to classical and contemporary music.

The delicate suspension of luggage tags which constitute Cloud are reminiscent of works in Leirner’s Corpus delicti (Body of Evidence) series (1992–3). During this time, at a moment in which the discourse on globalisation was taking hold in the art world of the 1990s, the artist was frequently flying across the globe. This experience led her to remove, in some cases surreptitiously, the highly specific and particular objects found in airplanes and airports. The luggage tags, air-sickness bags, earphones, napkins, boarding passes and (now defunct) ashtrays amassed and reconfigured as artworks in the Corpus delicti series act as an archive of a time, in the not-too-distant past, when smoking was permitted on airplanes. Crime in this case becomes institutionalised, and this is a statement of the series.

–  ENDS –

For additional information to arrange interviews or for images please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]  T:+353 (0)1 612 9922 /
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 612 9920

About the Artist
Jac Leirner was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961, where she lives and works. She graduated in visual arts from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) São Paulo in 1984. Leirner has exhibited extensively both within and outside Brazil and America since the beginning of her career. Selected solo exhibitions include: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderna, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Museo Tamayo, Mexico (both 2014); Yale School of Art Edgewood Gallery (2012); Centre d’Art de Saint Nazaire, France and the Estação Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2011); Miami Art Museum (2004); the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2002),Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1999); the Bohen Foundation, New York (1998), Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1991) and exhibitions and residencies at Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (both 1991). In 1997 and 1990 her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale and she participated in dOCUMENTA (IX), Kassel (1992). In 1989 and 1983, Leirner participated in the São Paulo Biennial. Her work in included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Walker Art Centre, Tate and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Residencies and Awards include 2012 APCA Award: Best Exhibition of the Year – Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo and Yale University School of Art (both 2012), teaching and artist in residence at Yale University School of Art; John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2001); Ryjksakademie Beeldende van Kunsten, Amsterdam (1998) and University College, Oxford; Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, Oxford University; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, United States (all 1991).

Associated Talks and Events

Curator’s Lunchtime Talk: Drop in
Wednesday 15 March, 1.15 – 2pm / Meeting Point / IMMA Main Reception / Free
Join Karen Sweeney, Exhibitions, IMMA, for an insightful walkthrough of this exhibition.
For a full programme of events visit her exhibition page.  

This exhibition 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.

IMMA announces a major international group exhibition in 2017
examining the role of spirituality in art
As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics
alongside landmark solo exhibitions from Nan Goldin (US),
Vivienne Dick (IRL), Jac Leirner (Brazil),
Rodney Graham (CA) and William Crozier (UK/IRL).

Today, Tue 14 February 2017, IMMA is pleased to announce highlights from the 2017 exhibition programme. Click here to watch the 2017 film with contributions from artist Vivienne Dick and IMMA Director Sarah Glennie.

At the launch in IMMA this afternoon Sarah Glennie, Director of IMMA said: “We are delighted to announce today that IMMA will be bringing the work of several leading International artists to Dublin audiences this year, including Rodney Graham (CA), Nan Goldin (USA) and Jac Leirner (Brazil) all of whom will have their first solo exhibitions in Ireland at IMMA.  Through our landmark international group show As Above So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics we are also especially pleased to bring to IMMA the work of several 20th century masters including Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, František Kupka and Sigmar Polke. Also featured are the works of cult artists James Lee Byars, Ira Cohen and Cameron, and some of the most influential artists living and working today, including Steve McQueen and Bruce Nauman among others. Many of whom have never exhibited in Ireland before.

“Throughout 2017 we will continue to develop new platforms in our programme through which we can support artists to make new work, realise their ambition and develop new thinking; whether through exhibitions, commissions across our programme or our artist residency programme. We saw in 2016 the valuable role contemporary artists can play in helping us to understand our times, and the opportunity for their work to create a space for reflection, debate and difference. We are committed to creating this important space within Irish life and to welcoming audiences, from across Ireland and beyond, into a dynamic and evolving experience of contemporary art and contemporary life. Our programme extends beyond the gallery space to encompass talks, performances, engagement and learning opportunities, research programmes and residencies and with the IMMA Collection: Freud Project remaining at IMMA through 2017, we look forward to sharing the work of these extraordinary artists with our audiences through the year.”

Opening just before Easter As Above, So Below is a large show with over 200 works, including an exciting series of new IMMA commissions, supported by Matheson, from Irish artists Grace Weir, Alan Butler and Eoghan Ryan and international artists Linder Sterling, Hayden Dunham, Nora Berman, John Russell and Stephan Doitschinoff, among others. These new works will address what spirituality means to people today, particularly in the increasingly secular times we are living through, while the wider exhibition considers the role played by certain spiritualist and alternative doctrines in the creation of abstract painting from its origins to the present digital age. It will trace and question the genesis of deep religious, mystical and occult beliefs that continue to shape the ideas of contemporary artists today. Glennie commented “I think these are questions we all grapple with in contemporary society and, much like with our 2015 exhibition What We Call Love, audiences can use the prism of contemporary art to consider what spirituality means to them.”

Many of the works in As Above, So Below explore relationships between artists; the power of collectives and the influence artists have on each other’s practice. This is a theme that we pick up again in the summer with solo exhibitions from two internationally significant lens-based artists Vivienne Dick (IRL) and Nan Goldin (USA). Goldin and Dick have been friends for over 40 years and have influenced each other’s work over that time, often appearing as subjects in each other’s photographs and films. Indeed it is through their friendship that Goldin first came to Ireland in the 1970s and we are particularly pleased to be presenting a series of Donegal photographs that have never been publicly exhibited before. These IMMA exhibitions will also mark the first major Museum exhibitions for both artists here in Ireland.

These new art projects are presented as part of an exciting ongoing initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allows IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work through a strand of programming that recognises and nurtures new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making. Tim Scanlon, partner at Matheson, said, "Nurturing new talent is central to what we do in Matheson. Our ongoing involvement with IMMA on the New Art at IMMA programme continues to be an exciting way for us to support new and emerging talent."

Another ongoing theme in IMMA’s programmes each year is the examination of the art historical from the position of the contemporary, as evidenced through our Collection exhibition, the Modern Masters series and upcoming project ROSC 50. 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first ROSC; the first major series of exhibitions of international art in Ireland. ROSC had a significant impact on the development of contemporary art in Ireland, and for ROSC 50 (1967/2017) IMMA and NIVAL (the National Irish Visual Arts Library) are undertaking a collaborative research project to revisit the Irish art historical account of ROSC. In a year-long engagement commencing with a display in early May, ROSC 50 will examine the ambition, reception, controversies and legacy of the ROSC exhibitions. Unfolding over the course of 2017 the programme will involve talks, events, screenings, displays, presentation of material and a number of artist commissions. 

Another key moment to re-examine the changing narrative of Irish art history will be the October retrospective of Anglo-Irish artist William Crozier (b. Glasgow 1930 d. Cork 2011). Crozier is perhaps best-known in Ireland for the lyrical landscapes made of the setting close to his home in West Cork from the mid-1980s. His early work, however, is imbued with a darkness and pessimism that reference contemporary political events and weave concerns with religion, violence and society. The exhibition is curated by Seán Kissane (IMMA) and is presented in association with West Cork Arts Centre who will present Crozier’s later landscape works over the summer. The IMMA exhibition of Crozier’s early work will open in October.

Also opening in October is IMMA Collection: Coastlines which throws a line around a display of diverse artworks and archival materials that explore similar ideas of geographical place and physical space, perception, representation and memory, as well as language and systems that map human experience. Featured works include the immense Tabernacle (2013) by Dorothy Cross, Folded/Unfolded (1972) by Ciaran Lennon, reworked in a new iteration for the IMMA galleries, and Aspen 5+6 (1967), the ground-breaking edition of the avant-garde ‘exhibition in a box’, edited by Brian O’Doherty in New York in 1967; the same year ROSC commenced in Ireland. 

Another Collection highlight this year is sure to be the Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection exhibition in July, which will take place in the Courtyard Galleries. This invaluable fund, supported by Hennessy Ireland, has permitted IMMA to start purchasing works for the Collection for the first time since 2011, with a particular focus on artists not already represented. The chosen artists for 2016, the first year of the fund, were Kevin Atherton, David Beattie, Rhona Byrne and Dennis McNulty. The chosen artists for 2017 will be revealed in July. The independent curator on this year’s Hennessy Art Fund selection panel is Linda Shevlin.

The IMMA Collection: Freud Project (2016 -2021) continues throughout 2017. Lucian Freud is one of the greatest exponents of figurative painting in the 20th century and the 50 works on loan to IMMA include a selection of Freud’s finest paintings, as well as numerous etchings. This important body of work, on loan to IMMA from a number of private collections, is the focus of several major programming initiatives for the next five years. The first exhibition has already proven immensely popular and we look forward to continuing to make this great work accessible to the public throughout the year. The current display will close at the end of October and a new contemporary intervention to the Freud Project, and how it relates to works in the overall IMMA Collection, will open in late November, furthering our ongoing investigation into the resonance of Freud’s work for contemporary art practice. We are also delighted to announce a new Freud Residency for 2017, which invites cultural practitioners to explore, contest, complement or radicalise the work currently on display, and a deepening partnership with NCAD and Trinity College Dublin which will deliver new research perspectives on Freud over the duration of the Freud Project.

As a museum IMMA has a unique onsite facility to provide studios and/or accommodation for 12 artists or cultural practitioners at any one time. Access to work space has been identified as a fundamental challenge for artists in Ireland and we have been exploring new ways to best use our invaluable resource. With the support of IMMA 1000 and a number of other fundraising initiatives, we are delighted to announce a series of new strands in our residency programme that will both create opportunities for in-depth research and support for Irish artists through dedicated residencies and bursaries. These will create an invaluable break from day-to-day financial pressures facing many artists in Ireland today by providing both a rent free space at IMMA, and a financial stipend to support living expenses for the duration of the residency. Time on supported residencies allows artists the space to think, research, test new ideas and make work without distraction; a vital support for the development of artists work. Crucially, the residency programme also stimulates dialogue and exchange with artists internationally, and another exciting new initiative for 2017 is a new international residency partnership between IMMA, Create (National Development Agency for Collaborative Art), Sweetwater Foundation and Hyde Park Arts Centre (Chicago) creating an exciting opportunity for exchange and dialogue between Irish and Chicago based artists.

Glennie continued; “Part of IMMA’s core mission is to support artists making the work they want to make, and we increasingly see contemporary art practice moving out of the gallery space and into the public realm, engaging with audiences in new and participatory ways. We really saw this in 2016 with our summer programme A Fair Land and several live performance art pieces including Listen, Hissen, Hessin, Jaki Irvine, Jonathan Meese, Tino Seghal at IMMA in the past and of course the IMMA Summer Party which has been so successful at opening up the entirety of the beautiful and historic IMMA buildings and grounds to artists and audiences alike. The IMMA Summer Party will return again on Sat 15 July 2017 with distinct Before Dark // After Sunset programmes. Before Dark will make the most of the beautiful gardens and historic grounds of the Royal Hospital with performances, readings, screenings and food, while After Sunset will explore the night time charms of the Great Hall and Baroque Chapel with a programme of live and electronic music into the small hours. Tickets will go on sale in May. We are also delighted to announce a new live art performance night on Saturday 29 July as part of the expanded programme around As Above, So Below.”

As always IMMA’s exhibition programme will be accompanied by a rich and varied programme of live performance, events, talks, and learning programmes which will provide audiences of all ages exciting opportunities to enjoy our programme, opening up conversations and bringing the audience deeper into the thinking and making of contemporary art.  A particular highlight this year will be the ongoing examination into the social, political and economic landscape that shaped ROSC and its subsequent impact on contemporary art developments in Ireland, which will culminate in a major symposium in November 2017, our ongoing provision of programmes for people living with dementia through the AZURE initiative and the launch of a new digital digest that will develop new content about our programmes, giving people new ways to find out more about the work, and to personally connect with art and artists at IMMA. 

A full programme of events is available on www.imma.ie

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

Additional Information – IMMA Exhibition Highlights 2017
For additional information on each exhibition please click the hyperlink to reach the exhibition page.

Duncan Campbell, The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy
25 November 2016 – 7 May 2017
Commissioned by IMMA, The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2016) is a major new work by Duncan Campbell (Turner Prize, 2014). Campbell’s work is underpinned by extensive research, and this new film uses anthropological studies of rural Kerry, including Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty’s 1968 UCLA documentary The Village (IFI Irish Film Archive), as a starting point to investigate and reframe modern Ireland.  As in The Village, this new film is set against a visit by two American anthropologists to the village of Dún Chaoin. Campbell combines footage from Hockings and McCarty’s film with newly scripted material. Echoing and revisiting key scenes from the documentary Campbell looks at ethics and misconceptions that frame the relationship between the anthropologists and the villagers and how the societal shifts they explore still resonate today.

Jac Leirner, Institutional Ghost
14 February 2017 – 5 June 2017
Considered one of Brazil’s most important contemporary artists, this solo exhibition from Jac Leirner comprises of exciting recent and new work made in response to the architecture of IMMA. Leirner works across disciplines including sculpture, painting, installation and works on paper. Since the mid-1980s, Leirner has collected the temporary and incidental products of everyday life, tapping into what she has described as the ‘infinity of materials’. Stickers, rulers, plastic bags, business cards, cigarette ends and even bank notes make their appearance in her work, removed but not entirely dislocated from their original function. By repurposing these everyday materials into visually compelling sculptures and installations, Leirner creates new and unexpected associations that provide a sharp statement on the unfolding of art in recent decades.

As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics
13 April 2017 – 27 August 2017
Featuring an exciting selection of modern masterworks, contemporary art and new commissions, IMMA presents a major international exhibition that looks at the role of spirituality in visual art. In particular, it considers the role played by certain spiritualist and alternative doctrines in the creation of abstract painting from its origins to the present digital age. The arc of this exhibition spans a hundred years from the abstract masterworks of Kandinsky, af Klint and Kupka to contemporary work by Steve McQueen and Bruce Nauman and new commissions by Alan Butler and Linder Sterling among others. As Above, So Below resists becoming a comprehensive survey that traces the role of art and spirituality however. Instead, it presents perspectives on spirituality from a range of unique viewpoints in over 200 works, many of whom have never exhibited in Ireland before. The exhibition traces and questions the genesis of deep religious, mystical and occult beliefs that continue to shape the ideas of contemporary artists today. Transcending the limitations of what is perceived as spiritual, it embraces the occult, the otherworld, human consciousness, mysticism and ritual, creating a space to reflect and explore these gateways to wonder.

Admission is €8/5. Children, Students and IMMA Members are always free, and everyone is free on Tuesdays. Booking will open on 13 March on www.imma.ie.

ROSC 50 ‑ 1967 / 2017
5 May — 18 June 2017
ROSC was the first major series of exhibitions of international art in Ireland. They took place in a range of venues approximately every four years between 1967 and 1988. In 2017, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first ROSC, IMMA and NIVAL (the National Irish Visual Arts Library) are undertaking a collaborative research project to revisit the Irish art historical account of ROSC. ROSC 50 will examine the ambition, reception, controversies and legacy of the ROSC exhibitions, which had a significant impact on the development of contemporary art in Ireland. This programme will unfold over the course of 2017 and will involve talks, events, screenings, displays, presentation of material and a number of artist commissions.

IMMA Collection: Freud Project 2016-2021
Until October 2017
IMMA has secured a significant five-year loan of 50 works by one of the greatest realist painters of the 20th century, Lucian Freud (1922–2011). Renowned for his portrayal of the human form, Freud is best known for his intimate, honest, often visceral portraits. IMMA Collection: Freud Project features a selection of 30 of the artist’s finest paintings, and 20 works on paper. The works, mainly dating from 1970 onwards, explore several of the artist’s key themes such as Portraiture, Self-Portraiture, Still-life, Animals and Nature, works that reflect his interest in the people and the natural world. During this unique five-year project IMMA will present a series of different and exclusive Freud related exhibitions, each year. All 50 works are on display until the end of October 2017. The current display will then close at the end of October and a new contemporary intervention to the Freud Project, and how it relates to works in the overall IMMA Collection, will open in late November, furthering our ongoing investigation into the resonance of Freud’s work for contemporary art practice.

Time-slotted entry is €8/5. Children, Students and IMMA Members are always free, and everyone is free on Tuesdays. Book online.  

IMMA Collection: A Decade
Until 7 May 2017
IMMA Collection: A Decade provides a snapshot of how the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art has developed over the past 10 years. IMMA’s remit is to collect the art of now for the future and to keep it in the public domain for future generations.  A changeover in the displays from March will include the Janet Mullarney’s My Minds i  (2016), on loan from the artist, and Alice Maher’s The Music of Things (Sleep) 2009.

Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection
Until 7 May 2017
The Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection supports the acquisition of works by Irish or Irish based artists who are not yet in the IMMA Collection. Works are sought that signal a moment of achievement within an artist’s practice. The chosen artists for 2016, the first year of the fund, were Kevin Atherton, David Beattie, Rhona Byrne and Dennis McNulty, and the exhibition remains open until 7 May 2017. This year’s independent curator on the Hennessy Art Fund panel is Linda Shevlin. The chosen artist(s) for 2017 will be revealed in the summer, with a new exhibition in the Courtyard Galleries in July.

Vivienne Dick, 93% STARDUST
16 June 2017 ‑ 15 October 2017
Irish artist Vivienne Dick is an internationally celebrated film-maker and artist. A key figure of the ‘No Wave’ movement in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dick has gone on to develop an extraordinary body of work which has been shown in cinemas, films festivals and art galleries around the world. Dick’s work is marked by an interest in individual transgression, urban street life, kitsch and pop culture, social and sexual politics, female representation and philosophy. Including selected works from 1977 to the present, the exhibition serves as an introduction to the breadth of Dick’s practice which encompasses video, Super-8 and 16mm film. This hybrid of media is indicative of the crossover of forms in Dick’s films. They do not sit easily in the usual distinctions of documentary, fiction, video art or music video, yet owe something to each.

Nan Goldin, Sweet Blood Call
16 June 2017 ‑ 15 October 2017
Nan Goldin is known for intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs. This exhibition presents pivotal works from Goldin’s oeuvre including drawings, portraits of women as family, friends and lovers, as well as a collection of evocative and previously unseen work from Ireland. In 1979 Goldin presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub; her richly coloured, snapshot-like photographs were soon heralded as a ground-breaking contribution to fine art photography. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—the name she gave her ever evolving show—eventually grew into a forty-five minute multimedia presentation of more than 700 photographs, accompanied by a musical soundtrack. This is the first solo exhibition at IMMA by Nan Goldin.

William Crozier: A Retrospective
October 2017 – Spring 2018
Best-known in Ireland for the lyrical landscapes he made close to his home in West Cork from the mid-1980s, William Crozier (b. Glasgow 1930 d. Cork 2011) began to exhibit in the early 1950s and his bleak views of the British landscape from that time are imbued with a darkness and pessimism that is immediately apparent. Crozier’s time spent in Paris in the 1940s, and his encounter with the Existential writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, gave a voice to this post-war malaise and became a touchstone for the work he would make over the next fifty years. In the early 60s the human figure enters the work, but is often interred in the blasted landscape or, later in the 70s it is flayed and skeletal. Reference is made to contemporary political events such as the Northern Troubles in major works like Crossmaglen Crucifixion (1975) that weave concerns with religion, violence and society. The exhibition is presented in association with West Cork Arts Centre who will exhibit Crozier’s later, landscape works, during the summer .

Rodney Graham
23 November 2017 – Spring 2018
Since the early 1980s, Rodney Graham (b.1949 Canada) has shown himself to be a distinctive artist whose diverse practice encompasses many things – a painter, photographer, sculptor, video-maker, actor, performer, producer, historian, writer, poet, sound engineer and musician.  Defying easy categorisation, his works are informed by psychology, literature and story-telling. His cyclical narratives are layered with puns and references as various as Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Roussel and Kurt Cobain, and are all infused by a sense of humour that betrays Graham’s place in the post-punk scene of late 1970s Vancouver. Avant-garde experimentation has always informed Graham’s practice demonstrated here with a survey of film works and an important presentation of photographic light boxes. Astute, contained and profound, Graham’s work has a strong contemporary relevance. This major exhibition includes work made from 1993 through to the present, and is organised in partnership with the Baltic Centre, Gateshead.

IMMA Collection: Coastlines
October 2017 – Spring 2018
The Winter display from the IMMA Collection throws a line around a display of diverse artworks and archival materials that explore similar ideas of geographical place and physical space, perception, representation and memory, as well as language and systems that map human experience. Featured works include the immense Tabernacle (2013) by Dorothy Cross, Folded/Unfolded (1972) by Ciaran Lennon, reworked in a new iteration for the IMMA galleries, and Aspen 5+6 (1967), the ground breaking edition of the avant-garde ‘exhibition in a box’, edited by Brian O’Doherty in New York in 1967, the same year as ROSC commenced in Ireland.  Read more about this exhibition, which includes work by Dorothy Cross, Clare Langan, Ciaran Lennon, Richard Long, Brian O’Doherty, Noel Sheridan, Jesús Rafael Soto, Donald Teskey, Bridget Riley, Timothy Drever/Robinson and Alexandra Wejchert, among others.

About IMMA
IMMA is the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland’s leading national institution for the presentation, production and collection of contemporary and modern Art. IMMA was the third most visited free attraction in Ireland in 2015 with 485,000 visitors, and saw a further increase of visitors in 2016 to over 584,000.  IMMA presents a dynamic programme of exhibitions, commissions, talks, films, live events, and engagement and learning programmes from its home in Royal Hospital Kilmainham. IMMA is funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and supported by Matheson, Hennessy, Goodbody, Dean Dublin and our Corporate and Individual members and patrons.

25 November 2016 – 7 May 2017

Following his first major exhibition in Dublin at IMMA in 2014, IMMA is delighted to present a new film work by Irish-born artist Duncan Campbell. Entitled The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy this is the artist’s first film based in the Republic of Ireland and his first new work since winning the Turner Prize in 2014; when he was the first Irish born artist to do so. Funded in part by the Irish Film Board this is also the first of Campbell’s films to feature actors and scripted scenes and marks the first time that IMMA and Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board have collaborated on a film work.

Commenting on the collaboration James Hickey, Chief Executive, Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board said "We are delighted to have had an opportunity to work with renowned Irish artist Duncan Campbell and for his work to be seen not only in art galleries but potentially by audiences at film festivals and markets around the world.  The IFB is open to supporting filmmakers from all artistic disciplines with the aim to further developing their talent in film.  We are also delighted to work in partnership with IMMA on this project."

This commission 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. Duncan Campbell will be speaking to staff to Matheson this evening about his new work and Tim Scanlon Corporate Partner, Matheson commented today “Ireland is world renowned for its rich culture, heritage and, most notably, the creative talent that exists here. Recognising and nurturing this talent is key, and Irish business has a role to play in further developing the work of our cultural institutions and our talented and aspiring individuals. As a leading Irish law firm, Matheson is proud to partner with IMMA in supporting and encouraging the arts. Duncan Campbell, recipient of the 2014 Turner prize, is testament to the wealth of talent that exists here and we are privileged to have Duncan at our offices this evening speaking about his new work.”

As with many of Campbell’s films this new work is underpinned by extensive research into archival and documentary material. In this instance, stemming from research in the archive of the IFI (Irish Film Institute), the work takes Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty’s 1968 documentary film The Village as a starting point alongside three influential anthropological studies; Inis Beag by John C. Messenger, Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland by Hugh Brody and, in particular, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Commenting on this new work Ross Keane, Director of the Irish Film Institute said; “The Village is a fascinating ethnographic documentary looking at how modernisation affected the inhabitants of Dún Chaoin and their relationship with the unpopulated Blasket Islands, and we are delighted that Duncan Campbell found inspiration for his latest work from this film and through his research into our collection at the IFI Irish Film Archive.”

The Welfare of Tomas Ó Hallissy is filmed in and around the Kerry village of Dún Chaoin and directly integrates newly scripted material shot with actors with footage from The Village which was also set in Dún Chaoin.  Indeed this new film is set against a fictional visit by two American anthropologists to Dún Chaoin, mirroring the premise of Hockings and McCarty’s 1968 documentary. Campbell’s original material also echoes key scenes from documentary that captured the day to day routine of the village; the creamery, turf cutting, rabbit hunting and gatherings in the local pub. In revisiting these scenes Campbell looks at some of the assumptions, ethics and misconceptions that frame the relationship between the filmmakers and the villagers.

As with many of Campbell’s works The Welfare of Tomás ó Hallissy questions the validity of documentary form as historical representation, blurring fact, and fiction, recording and interpretation. His extensive research into a specific time and context uncovers the unknown and unexpected in a representation of Ireland that at first seems familiar. On one level The Welfare of Tomás ó Hallissy represents the uses and misuses of the past as the implications of the societal shifts and misrepresentations it explores still resonate and inform contemporary Ireland today.

The Welfare of Tomás ó Hallissy takes into account the long history of ethnographic study in rural communities in the west of Ireland. In particular Campbell is interested in the moment when the revered Gaelic speaking peasant culture society of places like Dún Chaoin came to be seen as an obstacle to progress. In various ways the anthropological studies he draws on link the increasing predominance of the ‘bachelor farmer’, sexual repression, the breakdown of the traditional family structure and conflicts over farm inheritance as contributing to the high levels of mental illness in rural Ireland at the time. In Campbell’s film the rural traditions continue but are coloured by sense of the subjects are either acting out or resisting the roles expected of them by their visitors. The depiction of village life is mediated by attempts by the anthropologists to say what is not said and a simmering anger and impotence that fleetingly appears in a drunken scuffle that closes the film.

Duncan Campbell himself says of the work “the film is set at the interface of the activist perspective of the two American anthropologists and their focus on individual minds to be saved; and the communal but conservatively Catholic perspective of the people they are studying. The main character in the film is a speechless 10 year-old boy, Tomás, who is seen in the light of the tension between these two perspectives.’ At the heart of the film is the question of Tomás’ welfare and, if he is in need of salvation – whether this lies in tradition or modernity.”

The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy is commissioned by IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) Dublin with co-commissioners Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Western Front, Canada. This new work has been made possible through the support of commissioning partners; Irish Film Board; the IFI Irish Film Archive; Creative Scotland; Nakba Filmworks; Fastnet Films, the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and Matheson, who proudly support New Art at IMMA. The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy is part of the official Ireland 2016 programme.

This commission is one of three major new works that have been commissioned by IMMA as part of their 2016 programme. Other works include The Humanizer by Simon Fujiwara; a sound and installation work of an imagined Hollywood biopic of Sir Roger Casement and If the Ground Should Open… by Jaki Irvine, a sound and film work currently on view in IMMA that traces our past and present from the forgotten women of the Rising through to the leaked Anglo Irish tapes of recent years.

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For additional information to arrange interviews or for images please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected]  T:+353 (0)1 612 9922 /
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 612 9920

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION / Artist’s Biography
Duncan Campbell (b.1972 in Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Glasgow. He is best known for his films which focus on particular moments in history, and the people and objects at the centre of those histories. He uses archive material as a route to research subjects and histories that he feels are important. The process of making the films becomes a means to further understand his subjects and reveal the complexity of how they have been previously represented. Although these histories are located in specific times and geographies they resonate with and inform our present. Extensive research into the subjects through archival material underpins all of the films and the histories Campbell chooses to focus on reflect his interest. Using both archival and filmed material, his films question our reading of the documentary form as a fixed representation of reality, opening up boundaries between the actual and the imagined, record and interpretation.

He completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in 1996. Campbell was the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize (Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell) and was one of three artists representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale as part of Scotland + Venice 2013 (Corin Sworn, Campbell, Hayley Tompkins). In 2012 Campbell took part in Manifesta 9 curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, Belgium and in 2010 he took part in Tracing the Invisible, Gwangju Biennale. In 2017, Wiels, Brussels will host a solo exhibition on Duncan Campbell.

Recent solo exhibitions include Arbeit, Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo (2015); Duncan Campbell, Irish Museum of Modern Art; Generation, Common Guild, Glasgow; Bernadette, G.MK Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia (all 2014), Duncan Campbell, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylanvia; Arbeit, HOTEL, London; Make it new John, Artists Space New York (all 2012) and Chisenhale Gallery, London, touring to Tramway, Glasgow (2009 – 11); The Model, Sligo; Belfast Exposed, Belfast; Bernadette, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; HOTEL, London and Baltic, Gateshead (all 2008–9); 0–60, ICA, London (2006); Something in Nothing and TART Contemporary, San Francisco (2005). Recent group exhibitions include Year of Cooperation, curated by Christabel Stewart and Anke Kemkes, Broadway 1602, New York and Critique & Clinic, Berlin Film Festival, Berlin (2012); British Art Show 7, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham and Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Asking, Not Telling, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009); You have not been honest, Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples (2007); Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London (2006); Archaeology of Today, Els Hanappe Underground, Athens (2005); Revolution is Not What it Used to Be, S1 Artspace Sheffield (2004); Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2004); Emotion Eins, Frankfurter Kunstverin, Frankfurt am Main (2004); Fresh and Upcoming, a project with Luke Fowler at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2003) and Old Habits Die Hard, Sparwasser HQ Berlin and Norwich Gallery (2003).

Associated Events

The Artist & the State/ International Symposium
Saturday 26 November 2016 / The Chapel, IMMA / 10am – 5.30pm 
In response to the centenary of the 1916 Rising and the evolution of society over the past 100 years, IMMA, 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 at IMMA 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. Duncan Campbell is one of the contributors at this symposium.

The Artist & the State Symposium is organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin City Gallery – Hugh Lane and Create-National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts and coincides with the opening of IMMA exhibitions, Emily Jacir – Europa, Duncan Campbell and the Dublin Gallery Opening Weekend. Tickets are €6 each and include complimentary tea/coffee and a closing drinks reception. Book here.  

This Dublin Gallery Weekend we ask how contemporary arts practice can address the concept of national identity and statehood in a globalised world.

Leading speakers and art practitioners from Ireland and around the world will gather in IMMA this Saturday 26 November as part of an international symposium that seeks to examine the very timely and relevant topic of national identity. This one day will interrogate how artists are helping us to conceive new formations of the state while looking at the legacies of how we have been governed. Through research presentations, discussions and artists’ performance The Artist and the State will examine the identity of the nation state and look at the role of creativity in reimagining a new social and cultural order, asking what artists can bring to the table when imagining our future.

2016 has represented a time of remembrance and reflection in Ireland, with 1916 centenary commemorations taking place in the country’s foremost cultural institutions. In arts organisations like IMMA, The Hugh Lane, Create, and many more besides, these commemorations have taken the form of projects that dissect the evolution of Irish society and social ideology over the past 100 years. Looking further outside of our own nation issues such as mass mobility of people and goods, the digitising of communication and knowledge, migration, climate change and the increasing global economy have all radically changed perceptions of territories, borders and individual identity in relation to one’s nation state. In addition to this, colonial legacies of emigration, displacement and ongoing indigenous struggles create an even more profound crisis of social, cultural and political agency.

Throughout 2016 Irish art projects have reflected on our recent past as a provocation in order to better understand our present and to reframe our future. The programme for this one-day symposium draws on these works, and projects from artists whose practices advance historical and interdisciplinary research, while taking into account the unstable relationship between identity, territory, and borders in the so called age of shared ‘global territories’, ‘new Institutionalism’ and Ireland’s ‘decade of centenaries’.

For example, Jaki Irvine, in her landmark exhibition for IMMA If the Ground Should Open… has created a new sound and film work which reverberates across four interconnected rooms at IMMA. Weaving our histories past and present from the women in the Easter Rising to the modern leaked Anglo Bank tapes, Irvine’s work has been called “an inspired and essential show” by the Sunday Times, where Cristín Leach described the exhibit as being “about who we are and who we might want to become, collectively, as a nation.” Jaki will be giving a keynote speech alongside artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne, whose work In the Shadow of the State has been examining the concept of touch as a political action through immersive performance, soundscapes and scores. One piece, The Touching Contract, looks at how maternity hospitals and the act of labour create a new instance of interaction between women’s bodies and the State. We will also hear from Turner prize-winner Duncan Campbell, whose exhibition The Welfare of Tomás O’Hallissy – which opens in IMMA on November 25 – seeks to reframe a 1960s anthropological film on rural Kerry through a contemporary lens. Campbell scrutinises the town of Dun Chaoin, perceived as being at a crossroads between the past and the future, divesting itself of cultural markers such as language and subsistence techniques.

Throughout the day diverging propositions on the changing role of the artist and the state will be presented by: Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator, Van Abbemuseum / Mick Wilson, artist, Head of Fine Art, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg / Emily Jacir, artist / Jaki Irvine, artist / Duncan Campbell, artist / Sarah Browne, artist/ Jesse Jones, artist / Tina Kinsella, Lecturer, Critical and Contextual Studies (Fine Art) IADT/ Lisa Godson, Historian of Design and Material Culture, NCAD / Vivian Ziherl, Curator Frontier Imaginaries / Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, artists duo / Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA / Barabara Dawson, Director, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane/ Ailbhe Murphy, Director, Create, National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.

The symposium will close with a performance of Love Letters to Mars by Palestinian artists Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, as part of current exhibition The Plough and other stars. Khaldi and Khalili have imagined an extra-terrestrial correspondence that investigates immortality and origin outside of our earth. There will be a limited number of tickets available for those who wish to view the performance separately, spaces are free and can be booked through the IMMA website here

Artists’ projects throughout 2016 have reflected our recent past as a provocation to better understand our present and to reframe our future. On Saturday 26 November join curators, artists and researchers for a day of lively debate on some of the most pertinent issues we are experiencing today while offering creative and critical tools for thinking collectively. We will examine how we can act together to achieve a better sense of community and gain a deeper understanding of what a civil society and the state might mean from a past to a future generation.
A full symposium programme and schedule will be made available to all ticket holders. Tickets cost €6 and include complimentary tea/coffee and a closing drinks reception. Book here.

The Artist & the State Symposium is organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and Create-National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts and coincides with the opening of IMMA exhibitions; Emily Jacir, Europa and Duncan Campbell, The Welfare of Tomás O’Hallissy and is part of the Dublin Gallery Weekend 2016. Convened by Annie Fletcher and Sarah Glennie, co-curators of the exhibition El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State, this symposium is part of the Official Ireland 2016 Programme.

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For additional information, press accreditation or images please contact
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T:+353 (0)1 612 9922 /
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: +353 (0)1 612 9920

FURTHER INFORMATION ON SPEAKERS

Annie Fletcher (Chair) is currently Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, where the exhibition Positions #2 (with Anna Boghiguian, Chia-Wei Hsu, Nástio Mosquito and Sarah Pierce) is currently on show. She recently worked on the “Museum of Arte Util” with Tanja Bruguera, and a retrospective of Hito Steyerl. She curated “After the Future” at eva International Biennial of Visual Art in 2012. Other projects include solo exhibitions or presentations with Sheela Gowda, David Maljkovic, Jo Baer, Jutta Koether, Deimantas Narkevicius, Minerva Cuevas, and the long term projects, Be(com)ing Dutch (2006-09) and Cork Caucus (2005) with Charles Esche. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform “If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution” with Frederique Bergholtz (2005-10). As a writer she has contributed to various magazines including Afterall and Metropolis M.

Mick Wilson (Chair) is currently employed as the first Head of the Valand Academy of Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2012- present); was formerly founder Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Ireland (2008-2012); and prior to this was first Head of Research, National College of Art and Design, Ireland(2005-2007). Mick Wilson completed his doctoral thesis ‘Conflicted Faculties: Rhetoric, Knowledge Conflict and the University’ (NUI, 2006) and has been active in developing doctoral education across the arts as Chair of the SHARE Network (2010-ongoing); as a member of the European Artistic Research Network, EARN (2005-ongoing); and as Editor-in-Chief for the Platform for Artistic Research Sweden: PARSE (2015-).

Emily Jacir (Keynote) is an artist who lives and works in Italy and Palestine. She is renowned for works about transformation, the act of translation, and the logic of the archive. As poetic as it is political and biographical, her work investigates various histories of colonization, exchange, resistance, and migration. 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. In her practice she also explores personal and collective movement and its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean space and time in particular between Italy and Palestine. Jacir’s works have been shown at numerous museums and venues in Europe, the Arab world and the Americas since 1994. 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).

Jaki Irvine 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. Her 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.

Duncan Campbell is best known for his films which focus on particular moments in history, and the people and objects at the centre of those histories. He uses archive material as a route to research subjects and histories that he feels are important. The process of making the films becomes a means to further understand his subjects and reveal the complexity of how they have been previously represented. Although these histories are located in specific times and geographies they resonate with and inform our present. Extensive research into the subjects through archival material underpins all of the films and the histories Campbell chooses to focus on and reflect his interest. Using both archival and filmed material, his films question our reading of the documentary form as a fixed representation of reality, opening up boundaries between the actual and the imagined, record and interpretation.

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones are both based in Dublin and studied at the National College of Art and Design. Their collaboration, as a feminist practice, brings together mutual concerns. They have each made numerous works within and outside gallery spaces, and have extensive experience working in collaborative contexts and through public art commissions. Their exhibitions, films and public projects have been produced on a national and an international level, for institutions such as Project Arts Centre, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Istanbul Biennale, Artsonje Seoul, the Daimler Art Collection and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Most recent projects include Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones: In the Shadow of the State. Also see Jesse Jones – No More Fun and Games ; Sarah Browne – The Show Room

Dr. Tina Kinsella is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies (Art) at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Her research institutes conversations between psychoanalysis, affect theory, gender studies and artistic practice to explore the performative intersections of aesthetics, ethics, subjectivity and politics. Recent publications include: ‘Liquidities – Transactive Border Spaces and Threshold Structures (Between the Harbour and the Sea)’, Performance Research Journal, Volume 21, Issue 2, co-authored with Dr. Silvia Loeffler, (2016); ‘This is the fluid in which we meet … On Alice Maher’s Recent Drawings, The Glorious Maids of the Charnel House’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2016); ‘Representing Desire? Reconsidering Female Sexuality and Eroticism in Umbilical’, Performance Ireland Journal (2016); ‘Sundering the Spell of Visibility: Bracha L. Ettinger, Abstract-Becoming-Figural, Thought-Becoming Form’, in And My Heart Wound-Space Within Me, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).

Lisa Godson is a historian of design and material culture, and also researches and writes about contemporary design. She studied History of Art at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1994) and History of Design at the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, London (MA 1998, PhD 2008). Godson has held tenured lecturing posts in a number of institutions including DIT and the Royal College of Art, where she was lead tutor in critical studies for MA design interaction, product design and industrial design. She was RCA Teaching and Learning Fellow and devised the college Virtual Learning Environment RCAde. She was NCAD Fellow at the inter-institutional Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) 2009-13, where she was part of the team that developed and taught a pioneering structured doctoral research programme and chaired two research seminars, in historiography and theories of contemporary design. One characteristic of Godson’s teaching involves devising student research projects in collaboration with institutions, recently with the Little Museum of Dublin for the Secret Lives of Objects exhibition, symposium and publication (2015), and (alongside UCD Art History) with the National Library of Ireland on their ‘large books’ collection, leading to a public symposium (2012). Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Making 1916: material and visual culture of the Easter Rising (Liverpool University Press: 2015); Design learning in an age of austerity (Cumulus: 2015); the co-authored 10,000-word essay ‘Design in Twentieth Century Ireland’ in volume 5 of the History of Art and Architecture of Ireland (Yale/RIA: 2014).

Vivian Ziherl is an Associate Curator at ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution’ (Amsterdam) and Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane). Her recent projects include the ongoing research project Landings curated with Natasha Ginwala and initiated in partnership with the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and well as the performance series ‘Stage It! Parts 1 & 2’ commissioned for the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and curated with Hendrik Folkerts. Vivian has presented programmes with the ICA London, teaches with the Sandberg Institute Department of Critical Studies, and is editor of The Lip Anthology (Macmillan Art Publishing and Kunstverein Publishing). Her writing has been published in the Curating Research anthology (eds. Paul O’Neil and Mick Wilson) and has appeared in periodicals including the e-Flux Journal, Art Agenda, Frieze, Metropolis M, Discipline, and the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand), among others.

Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili have been collaborating in the development of performance lectures and other works since 2009. Collaborative work includes’ Love Letter to Mars’, iterations of which were presented previously at Medrar, Cairo, 2013 and OCA, Oslo, 2014; ‘Love Letters to a Union: The Falling Comrades’, at Forum Expanded, 2015; ‘Love Letters to a Union’, at HomeWorks 6, Beirut, 2013; ‘All the Other Lovers’, at the NEME symposium ‘Through the Roadblocks’, Limassol 2012. A new iteration of ‘Love Letters to Mars’ will be presented at IMMA, Dublin, 2016, as part of the exhibition ‘The Plough, and other stars’.

Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA.
Barbara Dawson, Director, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.
Ailbhe Murphy, Director, Create, National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.

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