On Wed 16 October IMMA Members are invited to join Irish artist Elaine Hoey and Assistant Curator Rachel Gilbourne, Exhibitions, IMMA, for a gallery based discussion on Hoey’s recent commissioned work Imaginary State(s), her practice and the wider themes of the newly opened exhibition ‘Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age’ where Hoey’s work is featured.

Imaginary State(s) fuses paradigms from theatre and online computer worlds to create a real-time, live virtual-reality performance. This work poses difficult questions about how anxiety and fear can manifest within a society when the desire for individuality/difference is repressed through predetermined national identity politics. It explores the concept of the ‘other’ by examining the nature of physical and non-physical borders and boundaries. When states of existence go beyond the physical, ideas of bodies, borders, and nation-states break down, become abstract, non-binary and open to reinterpretation. The performance confronts constructs of personal and national identity to reveal the process of othering inherent in such constructions.