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Royal Hospital Kilmainham
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Created by artist, designer and nightclub pioneer Niall Sweeney, Club Chroma Chlorologia is a newly commissioned series of site-specific works installed in the gardens and grounds of the 17th-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham, which combine to create unlikely interventions that you can encounter, discover and take part in over the Summer.

Over the Summer months, Club Chroma Chlorologia expands beyond its dazzle-patterned gateway — located at the north-facing aspects of the RHK, where the giant Club Chroma manifesto calls visitors to action — and down into the historic gardens at IMMA.

Born on the grassroots dancefloors of the marginalised, Chlorologia merges the mythologies and desires of the combined settings of the formal garden and underground nightclub — as a place of projected fantasy, collective emancipation and transformational power. The title Chlorologia makes playful reference to the energy transformations of light in plant biology, tuning in to the diverse forces of nature in a universal desire to dance freely again.

With its language of signs set amongst the flickering eyes and raging tongues of the polychromatic creatures of the labyrinth, Chlorologia lures you through the geometries of the garden with theatrics of visibility & invisibility, protest & parade, joy & disorientation — inviting you to be present, to show your colours, to move together, and to have some fun.

“Come into the garden with Chlorologia and dance amongst the divine communications of the iridescent oracles of Club Chroma in a dazzle of anti-camouflage. Here you parade as deities of the good times, spirits of the marginalised, lovers of the exquisite bodies of the living and the dead. Chlorologia compels all fantastical creatures to rise up against gravity and vibrate into life.” — Niall Sweeney

This latest iteration by Niall features several new artwork configurations that draw on an array of sources that includes DIY clubbing, signage, placards, protest and public speech. Niall’s graphics have beaten the radical hearts of some of the most pivotal campaigns for equal rights of the LGBTQ communities in Ireland. To coincide with Dublin Pride on 26 June 2021, IMMA is delighted to unwrap its second phase of Club Chroma Chlorologia in the formal gardens, where some other surprises are still to come.

The presentation of this project is kindly supported by the Office of Public Works (OPW).


Artist Editions

CHOREOGRAPH OF CHLOROLOGIA
On the occasion of celebrating IMMA’s 30th Birthday, Niall Sweeney creates a free downloadable digital artwork as a companion to his site installation presented in the Formal Gardens. Designed as a collectible atlas, this offers a unique insight into the internal world of featured works in the Club – Chroma Chlorologia installation. This downloadable artwork is for all to print, collect, and colour in.  A guide for all to rejoice in the social pleasures of joy, play and disorientation, and dizzying delights of navigating the dance floor and gardens,  captured here for all to download.
Download this free digital artwork here.

CHLOROLOGIA – 3D spectaculars
To enhance your photosynthesis vision of several artworks presented amongst the plants and fauna of the formal gardens, you can also avail of 3D glasses created by Niall Sweeney, an emblem of the artist’s guiding motto; “No colour is the wrong colour, no vision is impossible,  no one is less’’.
Niall Sweeney’s 3D spectaculars cost 1euros to purchase in the IMMA Shop. All proceeds go to the artist’s nominate charity, BeLonG To; whose mission is to support LGBTI+ young people as equals through youth work, changing attitudes, and research, promoting human rights, social justice, solidarity, and intersectionality.
Collect your free 3D glasses at the IMMA Shop!


About the Artist

About the Artist

Niall Sweeney (Pony Ltd.) b.1967, Dublin, lives in London. Pony Ltd. is an award-winning, internationally-acclaimed creative studio based in London and is the collaboration of Niall Sweeney and Nigel Truswell (Sheffield). Output at the studio ranges from popular culture to the avant- garde, from high-brow to low-brow — in art, design, print, theatre, film, performance, installation, music, publishing and writing. Pony’s work has been published, exhibited, performed, collected and screened around the world.

Niall has worked for over thirty years with radical spaces and their graphic ephemera. From the early days of SIDES dance club in 1985, Flikkers at The Hirschfeld Centre, GAG, POWDERBUBBLE, H.A.M. and Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI, 1987–2012), through to the new technologies of ELEVATOR, DEAF and D1 Recordings.

Working with this growing family of collaborators, AMI and Panti emerged as a national queer force, becoming active participants on the road to Marriage Equality in Ireland. Radical theatrics continue with ThisIsPopBaby’s productions, Where We Live, Queer Notions, WERK, RIOT, and so much more.

All of Niall’s output is touched, in one way or another, by the revolutionary dancefloor this alternative family built for themselves, moving forward to their own disco beat, and by the ecstasy of tomorrow.


About CHROMA Project

The primary catalyst for the themes discussed in CHROMA, was the book ‘Chroma – A book of Colour’ (June 1993) by British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.  Written during the final year of the Jarman’s life as his eyesight fails him, the book is an intensely personal exploration of colour. 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 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.

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.

The project also features 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.


Watch Chorus of Chlorologia highlights

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