We are delighted to present Vivienne Dick’s Visibility: Moderate (1981) as the second work from the IMMA Collection to be showcased as part of IMMA Screen. The work was recently acquired for the IMMA Collection and will be presented as part of the upcoming exhibition Ghosts From the Recent Past.

In addition to the work itself, a new video interview between Vivienne Dick and Claire Walsh, Assistant Curator: Collections, IMMA, is also available further down this page. Alongside this, the artist has shared an audio recording featuring the voice of John Keeney, who appears in the film. These three short clips were recorded by Dick around 10 years after Visibility: Moderate was made. In the first part Keeney names the rocks along the peninsula at Drimanoo near Killybegs, this is followed by his memory of encountering a whale when out fishing in his small rowing boat and in the third part he tells about the time his brother set off for Scotland without telling anyone. Although not part of the film itself, this fascinating recording, carrys insight into the world and people captured by Visibility: Moderate. It is available to listen within the ‘Additional Resources’ section below. Further links there and in the ‘Explore More’ sections connect to talks, interviews and other content relating to 93% STARDUST, a survey exhibition of Dick’s work held at IMMA in 2017.

About the film:

Shot on a handheld Super 8 camera, Visibility: Moderate follows American tourist Margaret Ann Irinsky as she travels around Ireland taking in the sites, from the Puck Fair in Kerry to H-Block protests on the streets of Dublin, planting a kiss on the Blarney Stone and running barefoot through the fields. In parts, deliberately recreating scenes from popular John Hinde postcards of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s. Scenes of windy landscapes, neolithic portal dolmens and busy shopping centres are interspersed with tv adverts and snippets from the radio, creating a sense of realities in flux. Part fiction, part documentary, Visibility: Moderate captures the many complexities and contradictions of an Ireland on the cusp of great change.

The tourist encounters a number of recognisable figures within Irish society at the time, including Mary Dunne or ‘Dancing Mary’, a regular performer on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, political prisoner Maureen Gibson, who was involved in the dirty protests in Armagh, and the voices of Nuala O’Faolain, Nell McCafferty and Frank Kelly captured on the airwaves. Other key subjects of the film are members of the Irish Anarchist movement, who the tourist spends time with on arriving in Dublin.

Visibility: Moderate offers a radical counterpoint to nostalgic representations of Ireland driven by the tourist industry. It brings together the familiar and the strange, documenting the artist’s own reckoning with the politics of her homeland, which, having spent the previous decade living in London and New York, she was encountering as both insider and outsider.

Screenings of the film include, the O-P Screening Room, New York, the 1983 Whitney Biennial followed by a US tour with the American Federation of the Arts, LUX cinema, Hoxton, London, Darklight Festival, Dublin (2007), Crawford Art Gallery (2009), Tate Modern (2010) and Seville European Film Festival (2016).