An exhibition of works by a number of young artists from America and Britain working with film and video installation opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Friday 14 February. Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art, organised by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and shown in collaboration with the Douglas Hyde Gallery, explores the use of film and video in the work of six artists. The museum show includes three specially commissioned installations – one by recent Turner Prize winner, Douglas Gordon, the others by Liisa Roberts and Isaac Julien, with a film piece by Marijke van Warmerdam. The Douglas Hyde Gallery exhibition, which also opens on Friday 14 February shows the work of Tony Oursler and Sadie Benning. The exhibition takes its title from a 1969 British horror film starring Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.

Although diverse in form and content, the work in the exhibition is united in its concern with the power of the project image. It ranges across the entire field of the moving image, from cheap, hand-held videos to Hollywood drama. Douglas Gordon’s Black and White (Babylon) epitomises the new fluidity which has developed between video and film in the work of a new generation of artists. His new commission uses a 1960s stag film of a stripper, dramatically slowed down and projected onto two large screens (one right way up, the other inverted). The inversion and the slow motion breaks the expected reading of the film and allows the spectator to become aware of what Gordon describes as the ‘unconscious’ content of film.

In Trap Door the New York based artist Liisa Roberts projects slow-motion silent 16mm films onto four free-standing screens. The installation creates a sculptural environment through which the viewer is able to move around and select a personal vantage point. Her work explores the perceptions of reality and representaton that we have become used to through the conventional cinema. The British film-maker, Isaac Julien’s new film Trussed is projected in duplicate onto the gallery walls. It identifies and explores the ambiguities of relationships and stereotypes from the position of the black gay male. Images of pleasure and pain alternate in tableaux of erotic, sado-masochistic play and sickness. Dutch artist, Marijke van Warmerdam, now based in New York, represented Holland in 1993 Venice Biennale. She works in 16mm film, creating installations that explore the politics of film and photography, in particular the power of the gaze.

At the Douglas Hyde Gallery Sadie Benning interweaves the 1950s Hollywood film The Bad Seed with footage of herself in various male and female guises, while the impact of commercial cinema and television on our psyche is the subject of System for Dramatic Feedback, a large video installation by Tony Oursler.

Scream and Scream Again is on show at the Museum from 14 February to 16 April and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery from 14 February to 12 April.

A major retrospective exhibition of the work of the distinguished Irish painter Louis le Brocquy opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 16 October. Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, the first retrospective showing of his work in Ireland since 1966, comprises more than 90 paintings, including early works, group portraits, head studies, the procession series and human presences. The exhibition will be officially opened by the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, at 6pm on Tuesday 15 October 1996.

Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-96 provides the first opportunity in 30 years to see an exhibition of le Brocquy’s work on this scale in Dublin and, for those more familiar with the work of the last few decades, to see the foundation paintings of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Bringing together an unprecedented number of early paintings, it explores the clear and rigorous critical path along which le Brocquy’s work has developed over the past 50 years from his early links with artists like Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, who first created and sustained an argument of modernism in Ireland to the later influences of post-war French art. It also demonstrates how this European tradition of painting and the human presence, with its echoes of Celtic and pre-modern influences, became and remain crucial to his practice. The latter has been most tellingly realised in his famous head portraits of writers from Shakespeare through Yeats, Joyce and Beckett to Seamus Heaney, the genesis of which can be seen in his earlier paintings where the figures, although grouped together, appear strangely isolated. This engagement with a contemporary European tradition within older strands of cultural continuity is crucial to an understanding of le Brocquy’s achievement in art.

Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. A self-taught artist, he left the family business in 1938 to become a painter studying on his own at the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, and in Venice and Geneva (then exhibiting the Prado’s collection). In 1947 he moved to London and began a long and successful association with the Gimpel Fils Gallery. He exhibited at Gimpel Fils that year, the first of some 50 international one-person exhibitions. In 1956 he won a major international prize at the Venice Biennale. Two years later he married the painter Anne Madden and has since lived and worked in France and Ireland.

The exhibition continues the series of retrospectives of Irish artists such as Mainie Jellett and Patrick Swift which IMMA has presented since 1991. These have been presented in the context of other retrospectives by key figures in 20th-century art like Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and Richard Hamilton and form an important part of IMMA’s programme.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, with a substantial essay, interweaving the artists life and work, by Alistair Smith, Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, is being published to coincide with the show.

Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-96 continues until 16 February 1997.

The first one-person exhibition in Ireland of the work of the American sculptor Beverly Semmes opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 2 October. Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture comprises 10 of Semmes’s characteristically large, dramatic clothing pieces, all created in the last four years, and 10 earlier photoworks of smaller wearable garments.

Beverly Semmes’s monumental sculptures and her smaller fabric creations are a delightful and provocative fusion of personal fantasy and social commentary. They explore the power of clothing and its ability to influence, and even define the self – who we think we are, how we choose to represent ourselves, and how we are seen and defined. The strangely distorted bodices and elongated arms of Semmes’s dresses, with their profusion of colours and fabrics, present rich psychological terrain. Her exaggeration of clothing forms to surreal extremes, result in sculptural creations that reflect a concern, shared by many contemporary artists, with the politics and psychology of identity.

Scarlett, 1994 is a typically striking work, a 71/2 foot long ‘dress’ of scarlet crushed velvet with skirt and arms flowing down the gallery wall and spilling luxuriantly onto the floor. In Green Braided Dress, 1992 the collar and shoulders are of a normal, though greatly enlarged, dress, which is then contorted into three pairs of plaits stretching to the ground. Two new works have been made especially for this exhibition. One, Twister, 1996 is one of the first works in which a kinetic element is introduced. In all of the larger, more recent works the human figure is absent – but made all the more visible by its very invisibility. This ‘presence of absence’ resonates throughout Beverly Semmes’s work with both dramatic and telling effect.

In contrast, the small scale photoworks and film stills each depict a costumed figure, frequently in a landscape with the shapes and textures of their costumes mimicking their surroundings. Figure in the Purple Velvet Bathrobe and Cloud Hat, 1991 depicts a figure standing on a sandy point overlooking the ocean. Her voluminous, purple robe falls in thick folds, like a waterfall or a stream that will lead to the ocean below, while her cloudlike hat is barely distinguishable from the sky.

Born in Washington, DC, Beverly Semmes lives and works in New York City. Solo exhibitions include shows at the Sculpture Centre, New York, ICA, Philadelphia, Camden Arts Centre, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, She has shown in many group exhibitions in the US and in Dusseldorf, London, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Her Four Purple Velvet Bathroles was one of the most memorable works in IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season in 1994-95.

Beverly Semmes: New and Recent Sculpture continues until 16 February 1997.

A season of exhibitions and artists’ projects exploring the current issues of national identity, immigration and cultural diversity in Europe opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 12 September. The Event Horizon takes as its central theme the belief that the ‘new’ Europe must be built on an amalgam of the old, the new, the past, the present and the future and that, in order to retain its viability, it must incorporate a flexibility and permanent ability to improvise, as the needs and demands of present and future communities and states evolve.

The season, curated by Brussels-based curator Michael Tarantino and organised to coincide with Ireland’s presidency of the EU, also includes a short season of films, selected by Pat Murphy, presented in association with the IFC. The Event Horizon takes its title from an essay by the distinguished film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni dealing with the relationship between landscape and personal identity.

The core exhibition is being shown in two parts – Part I from 12 September to 6 November 1996 and Part II from 21 November 1996 to February 1997 – and brings together works in a wide range of media. Tim Robinson’s View from the Horizon examines the narrative possibilities of landscape through sculpture and maps while film-maker Atom Egoyan addresses the same issues in a video installation based on a sequence from his 1992 film Calendar. Sigalit Landau’s installation deals with the relationship between public and private space and between personal and cultural identity.

The exhibition comprises works by 15 artists from Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Britain, Egypt, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland, though many are displaced, working outside their homelands. Once the preserve of academic debate, the issues addressed have in recent years become much more visible, in some cases violently, in everyday life. The questions of cultural identity they raise are now part of a far wider agenda.

Michael Tarantino describes the evolution of the season:
As an exhibition, The Event Horizon started with the concept of narratives: how do artists construct them? As the emphasis on narrative was developed through the planning stages of the exhibition, two other themes emerged: landscape and personal identity. The artists invited to participate have all dealt, in one form or another, with the issues of landscape, narrative and cultural identity. Their approaches are, of course, very different. In fact, these differences are another way of ‘unfixing’ the questions under discussion. As an exhibition, The Event Horizon poses these questions, suggests a few responses and leaves the resolutions open to interpretation.

As part of The Event Horizon a special season of films dealing with issues of identity is being organised by the IFC, concentrated on two weekends: 2 and 3 November 1996 and 18 and 19 January 1997. The film programme, which includes films by Antonioni, Jeremy Marre, Helma Sanders Brahms, Emir Kuristicaa, Declan Quinn and Vivienne Dick, Joe Comerford and Bob Quinn, has been selected by film maker Pat Murphy, who curated a highly successful programme in association with IMMA’s From Beyond the Pale season in 1994-95. In addition, two films Atlantean by Bob Quinn and Folding Landscapes by Tim Robinson, will be shown at IMMA.

A further aspect of the season is Nomadism Now and Then, a slide/tape presentation prepared by Pavee Point based on the lives and culture of travelling people in Ireland and eastern Europe.

A fully-illustrated magazine-style publication, incorporating installation imagery of the new work by the participating artists, will be published in January 1997 documenting the entire season.

The Event Horizon Part I will be on show from 12 September to 6 November 1996 and Part II from 20 November 1996 to February 1997.

Helena Almeida
Born in Portugal, 1936. Almeida’s work concerns the relationship between painting, photography and performance. At IMMA, she will exhibit a recent work, consisting of twenty photographs, in which the development of a gesture within a photographic series is explored.

Anna-Eva Bergman (see Part I)

Philippe Chavent
Born in France, Chavent is the chef and owner of the Lyon restaurant, La Tour Rose. Known for his inventive combinations of diverse products and preparations, he will create a special project for the opening of Part II of The Event Horizon, which examines the narrative properties of dining.

Atom Egoyan (see Part I)

Seamus Farrell
Born in 1965 (to Irish parents). Lives and works in Paris. Farrell has consistently created works in which he examines the influence of architecture and history on our lives, asking the viewer to approach actively the representation of a particular site of activity. His project for IMMA concerns the way in which an event (in this case, one staged in Paris this past summer) may be documented in many different ways and still remain elusive.

Ann-Veronica Janssens
Born in 1956 in Folkstone (to Belgian parents). Lives and works in Brussels. Janssens’ work explores the relationship that various artistic media (sculpture, photography, film, sound and light installations) can have with determining our experience of space. She will create a site-specific environment for the second half of The Event Horizon.

Michelangelo Pistoletto
Born in Biela, Italy in 1933. Lives and works in Turin. One of the foremost contributors to the movement known as Arte Povera, Pistoletto will work with Philippe Chavent to create a work which examines the theatrical possibilities of the ritual of dining.

Sam Taylor-Wood (see Part I)

Jean-Pierre Temmerman
Born in Zaire, in 1957 to Belgian parents. Lives and works in Antwerp. Temmerman’s work is frequently concerned with cinema, dreams and travel. He works with light projections, found objects, jigsaw puzzles, photographs, etc. His photoworks include a series of images related to the beginnings of photography and the cinema. Four of these photographs will be shown at IMMA.

Mitja Tusek
Born in Slovenia in 1961, Tusek has lived and worked in Switzerland and Belgium. His paintings, which are usually accumulations of beeswax mixed with pigment, are investigations into the relationship between figuration and abstraction, often times through the subject of a landscape.

Anna-Eva Bergman
Born in Stockholm (of Norwegian parents) in 1909. Died in 1987. Bergman spent most of her creative life in France, with her husband, Hans Hartung. Her paintings, often based on landscapes, were investigations into the nature of abstraction: how a fragment can be transformed, with the aid of the viewer, into a complete image. Examples from two of her series; Tombeaux (Tombs) and Horizons will be shown at IMMA.

Marie-Jose Burki
Born in Switzerland, 1961. Lives and works in Brussels. Burki’s most recent video installations have been concerned with the ways in which anthropomorphic interpretation may be used to construct narratives. Her installation, Translations, is also an Orwellian comment on the nature of constructing identities.

Atom Egoyan
Born in Cairo (to Armenian parents) in 1960. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Egoyan is known for his films which examine the influence that media has on our day-to-day lives: Family Viewing (1990), The Adjuster (1992), Exotica (1994). For The Event Horizon, he has created a video installation based on a sequence from Calendar (1992), a film based on the combined themes of cultural identity, landscape and narrative.

Immersion (Colin Newman / Malka Spigel)
Newman was born in England, Spigel in Israel. They now live and work in London. Newman has recorded with the band, Wire, Spigel with Minimal Compact. Together, they formed their own record label, Swim, in 1994. For IMMA, they will create a sound installation, using original and found material, which examines the ways in which music may work against narrative.

Sigalit Landau
Born in 1967 in Jerusalem. Landau’s work deals with the relationship between public and private space, between personal and cultural identity. She will exhibit works in the gallery spaces as well as in a shipping container that is positioned outside the museum reception area. The latter space functions as a site for showing artwork, while retaining its utilitarian characteristics. For the artist, it may be seen as a living space as well.

Nusret Pasic
Born in 1951 in Sarajevo, Pasic’s work Sarajevo Library: History of the World, combines painting and sculpture with found objects, such as burnt books, in order to create a sobering comment on how we treat and debase knowledge and history.

Tim Robinson
Born in England in 1935, Robinson studied mathematics in Cambridge. He later worked as a visual artist, under the name of Timothy Drever, first in Vienna and later in London. In 1972, he went to live on the Aran Islands and began writing and making maps. He now lives in Roundstone, Connemara, where he and his wife run the Folding Landscapes studio, which publishes his maps and related writings on the west of Ireland. His work View from the Horizon, examines the narrative possibilities of landscape through a combination of sculpture and text.

Sam Taylor-Wood
Born in London in 1967, Sam Taylor-Wood has participated in many exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including a solo show currently on view at the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the group exhibition, Manifesta I (Rotterdam, Summer 1996). She will be showing two works Five Revolutionary Seconds # 2 (1996) and Knackered (1996). The former, through the use of a large panoramic photograph and a sound installation, presents a fractured narrative. The latter, a film of a woman mouthing the words from the aria sung by a castrato, presents an equally disjointed activity.

An exhibition of new large-scale photoworks by London-born artist Hannah Collins opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Saturday 20 July. Hannah Collins: A Worldwide Case of Homesickness, Collins’s first one-person show in Ireland, comprises 12 large black and white photoworks made in response to a number of visits to Eastern Europe. Six of the works have been produced especially for the IMMA show. The exhibition will also include small-scale colour images and the texts of diary entries made by the artist while in Poland and Byelorussia.

Hannah Collins has been interested in Eastern Europe for some time and, when images from Eastern Europe began to appear in the press after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she decided she would travel there to make work. “I made four trips to different places which have quite different sets of references, both historic and contemporary. I deal with different subject matter in the work, but the inter-relationships are very strong between them.” The work continues Collins’s long-standing interest in the space occupied by those who exist on the margins or borders of society. “ I am interested in the in-between countries of Eastern Europe, whose status is dubious. The situation is complex, I can’t actually get a grasp on it. I enter it and allow it to have its own world. My work is about finding the site and allowing it to be.”

Space and scale are important considerations in Collins’s work – the space created by the piece, the space it occupies physically and how it relates to the space in which it hangs. The human figure is deliberately absent in much of her work. “The human figure would fix the overall scale of the image and would fix your relationship with the image. I want one to be able to move into the image.”

Born in London in 1956, Hannah Collins studied at the Slade School of Art in London, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to the USA. Her work has been shown in many one-person and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in notable public and private collections including the Weltkunst Collection of Contemporary British Art, on loan to IMMA for a period of ten years. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1993. She lives and works in Barcelona.

Hannah Collins: A Worldwide Case of Homesickness continues at IMMA until 6 October and leads into The Event Horizon, IMMA’s season of exhibitions, films and projects exploring European identity opening on 12 September. A publication including photographs taken by the artist and texts from the diary entries in the exhibition is being published to coincide with the exhibition. Price £3.00.