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Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
Phone +353 1 6129900

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Chroma – A book of Colour (June 1993) by Derek Jarman is an intensely personal exploration of colour, written during the final year of the artist’s life as his eyesight fails him. Described as an AIDS autobiography, Chroma is also a work of visceral prose, merging aesthetic and queer thinking with the intensely personal and politically reactive. Published in the same year as the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland, Chroma subverts perceived populist norms and is, by default, an inclusive read.

Taking this as its cue CHROMA explores a prism of protest in various guises, through play, art, music, lecture, dance, film and politics. CHROMA will explore themes of body relations to colour and space, identity politics, cultural blindness, forced anonymity, and the theatrics of visibility and invisibility. Embracing the self-determination and quest for personal freedom that underlines many LGBTQ personal histories and experiences the project will build new alliances across the queer community, providing a platform for a co-hosted, multi-vocal, open programme of discussions, screenings, workshops and experimental performances.

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The project interweaves chromatic musings, evocative memories and archival reflections on continued desires to integrate and transform society. Featured projects include Club Chroma by artist and designer Niall Sweeney of Pony Ltd., who turns the gallery into a glittering stage for celebrating colourful community. This draws on Pony’s ‘Queer Notions’ and ‘Alternative Miss Ireland’ collective studio archive and longstanding manifesto of subverting conformity through dancing, dressing up and having fun. Featuring interactive agitprops and projected imagery from 25 years of the Alternative Miss Ireland scene, Niall calls on visitors to unite in becoming agitators, visionaries and glorious outsiders. Rooted in the domestic social and political contexts from which the self-organised, informal queer club scene of 1990s emerged and its role in mobilising the political drives of Ireland’s social movements, Niall creates a space for playful transformation,  experimentation and self-expression — inviting you to make Club Chroma your own.

In the adjacent room, Padraig Robinson’s new artist book Gaze Against Imperialism (Metaflux Publishing 2019) is presented on a custom designed table. The book began in 2014 in the Irish Queer Archive, housed at the National Library Ireland. There Robinson mined selected material from the archive, re-animating the plural and diverging politics of the gay liberation movement in Ireland at the beginning of the 1980s. In doing so, Gaze Against Imperialism expands on LGBTQ narratives through personal accounts and prose that is both journalistic and poetic. Robinson’s new book  exposes the fracturing of political consensus, its current day reflections and the importance of international solidarity for a queer future that has not yet fully arrived.

The Public Programme aligned with CHROMA offers a playful and unexpected environment for reading, discourse, restoring the “I” and the “we” of collective participation, bringing together creative practitioners, educators, activists and designers to respond to ideas of ‘intersectionality’ as it relates to IMMA’s current programme: Desire, A Revision; Derek Jarman, PROTEST! and IMMA Archive 1990s: From the Edge to the Centre

 

Events related to CHROMA in 2020:

21 March / Drag story time for families

22 March / Gays Against Guns/ Screening and discussion

24 Mach / Chromatics – An Evening of Hybrid Poetries


Public Programme

IMMA Programmes

CHROMA is a public discursive programme that brings together artists, creative practitioners, educators, activists and designers to respond to methodologies of queer thinking and ideas of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘Protest’ as it relates to IMMA’s current programme Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital AgeDerek Jarman, PROTEST! and IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre.

CHROMA Events

Reactive Practices
An Evening of Artists’ Responses
16 Jan 2020 / 18:30

Project Spaces
Through modes of thinking, making, writing and publishing, contemporary artists and writers consistently respond to other artists. The reactionary tool of ‘response’ has also become a familiar curatorial device and lens, for galleries, museums and archive programming. To explore this join us for an evening of artists and writers responses by Laura Fitzgerald, Ashley Taggart, Joanna Walshe, Suzanne Walsh, Emma Wolf-Haugh and others. More details here

Queering the Archive
Talks and Performance

Sat 1 Feb 2020 / 13:00 onward
Lecture Room
A special series of talks and events featuring artists who are working with queer archives, where processes of archive reclamation, disruption, interrogation and care will be discussed, performed and explored. Contributors include Sara Greavu (Outburst Arts, Belfast) ; artists Padraig Robinson, Eimear Walshe and Karol Radziszewski; Anu Production (Louise Lowe, Owen Boss, Lynnette Moran), and Nathan O’Donnell (Researcher, IMMA/TCD).

Glitter HOLE: Protest!
An Evening of Cabaret and Club Performance
Friday 14 February 2020, 19.00 – 21.00
Project Spaces
Glitter HOLE presents an evening of performance on the theme of Protest! and the pursuit of personal and collective freedoms, responding to and interacting with the work of Derek Jarman. With contributions from Chris Hinojosa, Rosa Tralee, Smilin’ Kanker, and Stefan Fae, we will celebrate the legacy of underground queer performance and collectivity in Dublin’s past, present and future.

Keynote Lecture by Sara Ahmed
Complaint as a Queer Method
Wednesday 18 March 2020 / 18:30 – 19:30

Offsite at JM Synge Theatre, Trinity College Dublin
IMMA presents a keynote lecture by internationally renowned feminist scholar and writer Sara Ahmed, who offers a critical reflection on the role queer methodologies play in disrupting the normative use of our public institutions.

Club Chroma On Tour
Saturday 21 March
Off Site at Project Art Centre
THISISPOPBABY invites you to join the Where We Live artistic family for a love in and shake out to mark the end of festivities. We’re yoinking Niall Sweeney’s sublime exhibition Club Chroma from IMMA and transposing it to Project Bar for one night only. Add to that a live soundtrack and pepper it with guerrilla performances, and together we’ll dance our way to a soft-landing post festival. Presented in partnership with IMMA and THISISPOPBABY.

Drag story time for families. IMMA’s first Drag Story Time
Saturday 21 March / 13.00 – 14.00
Project Spaces
Readers of all ages are invited to join us for IMMA’s first Drag Story Time. The stories read at Drag Story Time aim to inspire a love of reading while celebrating diversity, and promoting acceptance of differences in others.

Gays Against Guns/ Screening and discussion
Sun 22 March 2020 / 15:00 – 16:00
Project Spaces
In association with the screening of Paul Rowley’s film work with Gays Against Guns (GAG), this discussion looks at the use of art in LGBTQ+ activism, focusing on contemporary queer protest in the USA, from the AIDS crisis to the present day. Highlighting the work of GAG, speakers address how surviving the AIDS crisis informs queer activist today.

 

Chromatics – An Evening of Hybrid Poetries
Tues 24 March 2020 / 19:00 – 21:00
Project Spaces
IMMA invites “one of Ireland’s leading explorers of experimental poetics” Christodoulos Makris to co-curate an evening of playful experimentation, sampling poetry, readings, performance and artists’ moving image as they collide with fragments of club culture, in which to delight you in the sensual, visual and conceptual possibilities of word, sound and image. Guests include Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Kit Fryatt, James King, Vicky Langan, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Padraig Regan.

The CHROMA programme at IMMA is an evolving responding programme, and there are one or two other events still to come before the exhibition closes on 29 March 2020. Check back here for  latest updates.

 

Reading

Karol Radziszewski: Queering the Archive in Eastern Europe
By Nathan O’Donnell
Read an IMMA magazine article the prefaces Karol Radziszewski’s talk at IMMA on 1 February 2020.


Additional Resources 

 

Additional Resources

Queering the Archive: Talks and Events (1) Roundtable Discussion Soundcloud
Queering the Archive: Talks(2). Queer Archive Institute, Karol Radziszewsk Soundcloud