Location: Johnston Suite
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MOMENT OF SURRENDER (2014–2025) by John Lalor, comprising paintings, film and a novel, is currently on display as part of the IMMA Collection: Art as Agency exhibition. As part of Culture Night, there will be a launch of Lalor’s newly published novel, accompanied by a discussion between John Lalor and Dr Jenny Haughton
Since his early exhibition in Temple Bar Galleries before moving to Paris in 1988, John Lalor’s work has continued to be marked by a radical social conscience combined with an arresting visual intelligence and intellectual refinement. MOMENT OF SURRENDER was conceived during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash in Dublin, it began as a screenplay about a young father struggling to make ends meet as austerity deepens around him—a man brought to the edge of surrender.
MOMENT OF SURRENDER evolved as a novel told across three mediums, painting, film and text. Instead of treating his painted images, filmic shots and literary paragraphs as separate crafts, Lalor composes them as interdependent sequences. Resulting with a narrative that does not proceed by plot points but by rhythms: repetition, ellipsis, and return. Lalor’s novel is an architecture of attention. Chapters become rooms, paragraphs become canvases, scenes become shots. Characters appear obliquely often as traces rather than portraits because the real subject is the condition that surrounds them: the repetition of façades, the scale of civic space, the struggle with institutions.
About the speakers
John Lalor has lived in Paris for over 35 years. His multidisciplinary practice spans painting, scaled models, text, performance and film. Cinema is central to his work. In 2013, he wrote, directed and produced INCIDENT URBAN (35mm, 27 mins), his first fiction film with actors, funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. It was selected for major international festivals and contemporary art screenings, culminating at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014. Entering the collection of the Cinémathèque Française in 2018, it was also acquired by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021.
He has written a feature film, DOG-BONE, evoking Paris and its suburbs, and is currently developing a screenplay, COASTAL VIEWS, based on a 1970s Irish film. In 2017, in Leros, Greece, he filmed displaced Syrian families, resulting in LEGENDARY PASSENGER, currently in post-production. That same year, his poem on Lucian Freud, BIGGER THE BUSH, featured in the documentary The Gamble on BBC Radio 4.
He is showing at CCI Paris in September 2026 in Everyone Should Have a Home, curated by Nora Hickey M’Schilli. He will show at the Lagos Biennale, Akete Collection, curated by Folakunle Oshun, in November 2026. He was a member/director of the artist-run space Glassbox Paris, 2005–07. He was a jury member of the Women’s International Film Festival Créteil in 2022.
In 2010, with Christina Kennedy as independent producer, he published STEREO JLG, a 3,000-word text printed weekly over seven weeks in The Irish Times on Jean-Luc Godard.
Dr. Jenny Haughton is an independent art professional and educator. She is the founder/art director of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios (1983), and the Artworking agency (1991). She was National Coordinator of Ireland’s representation at the Sao Paulo and Venice Art and Architectural Biennales on seven occasions and has coordinated public art commissions with a diversity of Irish and international artists and art practices throughout Ireland and abroad. With an Arts Degree from IADT and a Masters in Human Rights from DCU, she has recently completed a PhD with TUD, constituting an inquiry into Ireland’s Per Cent for Art Scheme and the nature of coordination.
