This screening of Yes, But Do You Care? (2019–2021) for Living Canvas at IMMA is part of the Yes, But..? national tour of a series of audio-visual artworks by artist Marie Brett. The work is held by IMMA Collection and Brett received an Arts Council Touring Award to bring the piece to arts, community and healthcare settings across Ireland, with an accompanying series of conversation events. The national tour began in September 2025 and continues until February 2026. At IMMA, the screening will be followed by a professional practice event in the Matheson Creativity Hub at IMMA on 12 February 2026.

About the film:

Marie Brett
Yes, But Do You Care? (2019–2021)
14 minutes
Yes, But Do You Care? is an audio-visual film combination of dance, sculptural installation and sound. Set in a huge warehouse as a live overnight event, five performers interact with a ton of salt, big bundles of sticks, haptic projections and a soundscape that collages real-life stories with legal statute. This evocative art piece is layered and complex. It explores the politics of autonomy, family caregiving and capacity legislation. It asks difficult ethical questions related to overlooked elements of human-care interrelation.

Aesthetically the piece collages visuals of human body metaphor with sumptuous colour, swirling pace and symbolic use of materials. The collaged soundscape combines lived-life testimony with judicial readings; balancing sounds of hope, cope and survival. Like much of Marie Brett’s work, Yes, But Do You Care? is strikingly poignant, and responds to the essence of life’s fragility in relation to healthcare, trauma and human rights issues.

There are two art pieces in the Yes, But Do You Care? series. The first, set in a huge industrial warehouse, screens for Living Canvas at IMMA 8-21 January. The second, set in a domestic interior and open-fields, is held by IMMA Collection, and screens as part of the professional practice event on 12 February 2026.

The making of Yes, But Do You Care? included collaboration with choreographer/dancer Philip Connaughton, members of the Dementia Carers Campaign Network supported by The Alzheimer Society of Ireland, and individual advisors in law, advocacy and human rights.

The Yes, But..? tour of the artworks is funded by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and supported by a number of arts, community and health-care organisations.

About the artist:

Marie Brett is an Irish audiovisual artist who creates ambitious video art, print, and immersive multimedia installations, often involving live performance, with work presented in in both galleries and unusual sites of flux. At the core of her work are shunned human experiences, and through an extensive socially engaged practice, Brett collaborates with individuals with experience of (ill)health, trauma, loss and social injustice. This sensitive and highly challenging working method is navigated through concepts of hope, cope, care, folk medicine and DIY survival modes.

Recent work includes a nine-country global justice commission; building an immersive installation at Brussel’s European Parliament; touring a national infant mortality art series to healthcare and arts settings; creating a series of live performances at Holy Wells; and a collaboration with trafficked modern-day slaves with Health Service Executive and Drug-Squad and Organised Crime Bureau collaboration.

A graduate of Goldsmiths, London University (BA / MA Arts Degrees), the artist has received commissions and national awards; has critical writing published in Ireland, Britain and Finland; and has artworks in that National Collections of IMMA; Birthrights UK; a number of Local Authorities, and The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Qué es para usted la poesía (What is poetry to you?) (1980) by Cecilia Vicuña is screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA in celebration of the opening of the exhibition Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey by Vicuña at IMMA. This is the first solo exhibition by the renowned artist, poet and activist in Ireland. For this exhibition, Vicuña’s delves into themes of ancestry, ecological urgency, and the interconnectedness of humanity inspired by the discovery of her ancient ties to Ireland. Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey  will run in the galleries until 5 July 2025.

About the film:

Cecilia Vicuña
Qué es para usted la poesía (What is poetry to you?), 1980  
Video, sound; 23:20 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
The artist Cecilia Vicuña asks passersby on the streets of Bogotá – including fellow artists and poets, sex workers, children, a police officer, and a scientist – the question: “What is poetry to you?” The surprising answers she elicits reveal the richness of oral culture in Colombia.

Text courtesy EAI

About the artist:

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974.

She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her poetry and Palabrarmas (word-weapons) stem from a deep enquiry into the roots of language. Her early work as a poet in the 60’s was simultaneously celebrated by avant-garde poetry magazines as El Corno Emplumado, Mexico City (l961–1968), and censored and/or suppressed for many decades in Chile and Latin America.

Solo exhibitions of Vicuña’s work have been organized at a number of major institutions, including, most recently, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá, Colombia (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, Spain (2021); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2020); and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including in documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), and the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and is part of major museum collections around the world.

The author of more than 30 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, her most recent books are: PALABRARmas, USACH, Editorial de la Universidad de Santiago (2023); Word Weapons, Co-published by RITE Editions and Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2023);  Libro Venado, Direcciones, Buenos Aires (2022); Sudor de Futuro, Altazor, Chile (2021); Cruz del Sur, Lumen Chile (2020), Minga del Cielo Oscuro, CCE, Chile (2020), and New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá, Kelsey Street Press (2018), among many others.

Cecilia Vicuña was the winner of the 2023 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2023, one of the most prestigious awards given by her homeland. Preceding this recognition, Vicuña was elected a foreign honorary member of the United States Academy of Arts and Letters and also received the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2022 at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Text accessed 30 September 2025 here.