Deirdre O’Mahony has an impressive 30-year track record in making work across sculpture, painting, installation and participatory projects. At the centre of this work is her interest in the politics of landscape, rural/urban relationships, rural sustainability and food security. From large-scale paintings produced by tracing the shadows of boulders in the Burren National Park, Erratics (1997) to setting up community spaces in the aftermath of a local conflict, X-PO (2007-) she deftly considers the role of art in bringing together diverse communities, alternate forms of knowledge, embracing art as a critical space to help us see things differently. In 2024 her sound and moving image artwork, The Quickening was presented in a ground-breaking exhibition at The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin and simultaneously screened in rural farms, halls and barns across the South-East of Ireland. O’Mahony has received numerous Arts Council of Ireland awards and residencies and her work is public and private collections including the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. More details here
Sebastian Cichocki is Senior Curator and Head of Research at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN), where he was a member of curatorial teams of Who Will Write the History of Tears: Artists on Women’s Rights (2021), Primary Forms (2021-ongoing), The Penumbral Age: Art in the Times of Planetary Crisis (2020), Never Again: Art against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries (2019), Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times (2016), and other exhibition and research programmes. Sebastian Cichocki was guest Curator of the 40th EVA International – Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2023.
Selected exhibitions also include The Postartistic Congress (Sokołowsko, The Konteksty Festival 2021), the Polish pavilions at the 52nd (Monika Sosnowska 1:1) and 54th Biennale of Art in Venice (Yael Bartana … and Europe will Be Stunned), The Bródno Biennale (2018), Rainbow in the Dark: On the Joy and Torment of Faith, Konstmuseum Malmö (2015). Sebastian Cichocki is a curator at The Forum for Future of Culture at the Powszechny Theatre, Warsaw, a platform for feminist, ecological and antifascist activism and culture, and The Sunflower—Solidarity Community Center in Warsaw, an aid, culture and counter-propaganda initiative for those who suffered from Russia’s invasion on Ukraine. Cichocki has published extensively and lectured at various venues, including Dhaka Art Summit, the Kochi Biennale, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Gwangju Biennale, and The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He is a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, MoMA, New York. More details here
Christina Kennedy is Senior Curator, Head of Collections, at IMMA, since 2008. Prior to that she was Head of Exhibitions at the Hugh Lane Gallery where she assisted in the transfer of Francis Bacon’s Studio from London to the Hugh Lane and co-ordinated the exhibition Francis Bacon in Dublin (2000). Since joining IMMA she has guided many acquisitions to IMMA including the donation of the Novak/O’Doherty Collection of Postwar American Art. She has curated and co-curated many Collection related exhibitions, edited publications and contributed texts to numerous catalogues, including The Burial of Patrick Ireland, IMMA, 2008; The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from 1900s – 1970s, IMMA, 2010-2011, Postwar American Art: the Novak/O’Doherty Collection, IMMA 2010; Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio, Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, co-curator, 2013; Art as Argument: Brian O’Doherty and the Novak O’Doherty Collection, Kunstmuseum Bayreuth, 2013; Patrick Scott: Image, Space, Light, IMMA 2014; Lead curator of IMMA Collection: Lucian Freud Project 2016-2021; Paula Rego Obedience and Defiance, 2021/22; IMMA Collection: The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: IMMA: 30 Years of the Global Contemporary, 2021-2023, publication editor.