Sarah Browne, The Invisible Limb (2014), Linda Brownlee, The Way We Dress: Hong Kong Dress (2015), and Ahree Lee, Bojagi (Memories to Light) (2015) – are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, to coincide with the exhibition Kith & Kin, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, which runs in Gallery 3 until 27 October 2025. Kith & Kin features the work of African American women from a small Alabama community whose textile works have become symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride, celebrating African American culture and heritage.

Films in order of appearance:
Ahree Lee, Bojagi (Memories to Light) (2015), 15 minutes
Sarah Browne, The Invisible Limb (2014), 19:30 minutes
Linda Brownlee, The Way We Dress: Hong Kong Dress (2015), 2:38 minutes

Ahree Lee
Bojagi (Memories to Light), 2015
Digital video and sound, 15 minutes
Music by Nathan Melsted

Ahree Lee’s Bojagi (Memories to Light) is inspired by Korean wrapping cloths, or “bojagi”, which women traditionally pieced together out of scraps of spare material, creating an heirloom full of beauty and utility from what would otherwise be waste. Often made by mothers for their daughters before getting married, bojagis served as a memento from the past that bridged the transition from childhood home to future home. The artist Ahree Lee reimagined the bojagi as a video that uses home movies from Asian American families to create a collective wrapping cloth of memories.

Thanks to Center for Asian American Media and the families who donated their home movies to the Memories to Light archive (caamedia.org/memoriestolight/).
Music by Nathan Melsted.

About the artist
Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her BA from Yale University in English literature and MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art, where she studied under Sheila de Bretteville.

Her many commissions include the Craft Contemporary Museum, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; the 01SJ Biennial; the International Short Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium; the International Festival of Video Art of Casablanca; and the Sundance Channel. Lee’s Webby-nominated video Me was shown by Steve Jobs at the D5 tech conference, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. Me currently has over 9 million views.Lee’s awards include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute; a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination; an Artist Fellowship Grant in film and video from the state of Connecticut; and an artistic career development grant from Asian American Renaissance. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.

Lee lives and works in Los Angeles with her daughter and husband, Nathan Melsted, an electronic musician, who composes musical scores for much of Lee’s work.

Sarah Browne
The Invisible Limb (2014)
Single-channel HD; 19:30 minutes
German language, English subtitles, sound

The Invisible Limb is one of a number of works by Sarah Browne addressing issues of gendered labour and representation connected to textile processes. The film is partly addressed to deceased German artist Charlotte Posenenske, known both for her rigorous sculptural work and later, her withdrawal from artmaking in favour of retraining as a sociologist focused on wage labour conditions. Browne invites another sculptor of Posenenske’s generation into dialogue with this practice; Irish stonecarver Cynthia Moran. Shot partly in Moran’s studio and at the Giant’s Causeway, Co. Antrim, the film stages a series of unlikely correspondences between the women’s practices, through sculptural objects, archival research and physical gestures, exploring the magic of apparently costless production.

Directed, written and edited by Sarah Browne. Featuring: Cynthia Moran. Cinematography: Kate McCullough. Additional camera: Sarah Browne. Voiceover: Amanda Elena Conrad. Composition: Alma Kelliher. Choreography: Fearghus Ó Conchúir. Research assistants: Christin Müller, Laura Wünsche. Archives: Hessischer Rundfunk, WDR mediagroup. Translation: Petra Gaines. Colourist: John Beattie. Special thanks to Burkhard Brunn, Felix Ruhöfer, Jessica Foley, Natascha Reigger, Fire Station Artist Studios, Dublin, and Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt. Commissioned by basis, Frankfurt.

About the artist:
Sarah Browne is an artist concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Primarily working through film, sculpture and performance, she often collaborates with people of formal and informal expertise (children, lawyers, poets) to establish new communities of knowledge or experience.

Significant projects in this vein include Echo’s Bones (2021-3, a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett, commissioned by Fingal County Council); The Law is a White Dog (2020, curation of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway); and In the Shadow of the State (2016, with Jesse Jones, commissioned by CREATE and Artangel). Her solo exhibitions include Tógaimid ár dteanga le carraigeacha, Kunstverein Aughrim and Buttercup, SIRIUS, Cobh, (both 2024); Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017); Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (all 2014). Browne has participated in include Bergen Assembly (2019) and the Liverpool Biennial (2016). In 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and their collaborative practice, Kennedy Browne. She is the winner of the Golden Fleece Award in 2025.

Linda Brownlee
The Way We Dress: Hong Kong Dress (2015)
Colour and sound; 2:38 minutes
A film by Linda Brownlee with Simone Rocha
Originally presented by NOWNESS

The Way We Dress, Hong Kong Dress, a NOWNESS film by Linda Brownlee with Simone Rocha, offers a thoughtful look at cultural heritage and the inherent poetry of daily life. Inspired by Rocha’s personal connection to her father’s birthplace, the film subtly explores the interplay between identity, place, and modes of dress.

Narrated by Rocha, this work, part of the NOWNESS series ‘The Way We Dress’, moves beyond surface aesthetics to excavate the hidden narratives embedded within the act of dressing. Brownlee’s direction frames Hong Kong through Rocha’s uniquely discerning gaze, as the film journeys through the streets, focusing on the city’s women, particularly the older generation. Inspired by her grandmother and aunts, whose meticulous presentation embodied a sense of pride and self-respect, Rocha observes the women of Hong Kong’s poise and taste and the city’s unique energy. Washed-out pastels, textured twinsets, and the neatness of a hairstyle are captured across intimate macro shots, elevating the quotidian.

Brownlee’s lens equally attends to the urban landscape, noting the interplay between the architectural vernacular of high-rise apartments and the distinctive colour palettes that permeate the city. The dynamism of Hong Kong’s inhabitants, their practical movements and understated elegance, are observed with a painterly eye, suggesting a profound connection between individual expression and the collective rhythm of urban existence. Through rich imagery and astute observations, the film offers a poetic glimpse into Hong Kong’s unique culture of dress and identity, positioning clothing not merely as adornment but as a profound articulation of self within a specific cultural context.

About the artist:
Linda Brownlee is an Irish photographer and director whose practice moves across the realms of portraiture, fashion, and documentary. Her lens intimately explores the subtle dynamics of human behaviour and the profound connections between subjects and their environments. Driven by intuition, Brownlee’s collaborative process centres on capturing atmosphere and energy, meticulously capturing eloquent details in gesture and expression.

Brownlee’s work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘Sixteen’ at Tate Liverpool, the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Photo Museum Ireland, and The Library Project. Her solo exhibition, ‘Idle Topography,’ was held at Hangtough Gallery in 2019, and her recent collaboration with photographer Aisling McCoy, ‘Light Aggregates,’ shown at the Dunlavin Arts Festival in 2024.

Brownlee’s published monographs include the evocative ‘Achill’ (Eighty One Books, 2010), ‘Hydrangea Etc’ (AAD, 2014), and the collaborative ‘I Zii’ (with Aisling Farinella and Workgroup, 2016). The artist’s distinctive photographic aesthetic has been featured in prominent publications such as British Vogue, The New York Times, Dazed & Confused, and The Guardian magazines. Commercial collaborations include work with brands such as Bally, Miu Miu, Cos, Simone Rocha, and Roksanda. Extending her enquiry into moving image, Brownlee’s short film series ‘Limber Notes’ was featured on NOWNESS. Collaborative film projects with figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Edie Campbell, Vanessa Redgrave, and Simone Rocha have been screened at international festivals, including the Aesthetica Film Festival and the Milan Fashion Film Festival.

These two films by Sweat Variant – swallow the moon and looking – are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, to link with the artists’ live performances on 14 and 15 June in IMMA’s Baroque Chapel. The screening also connects with Sewing Fields, an exhibition of the work of Sam Gilliam (1933-2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting. Emerging in the mid-1960s, Gilliam’s canonical ‘Drape’ paintings merged painting, sculpture, and performance in conversation with architecture in entirely new ways. Sewing Fields runs in the House Galleries at IMMA until 25 January 2026.

Sweat Variant
swallow the moon

swallow the moon is the second in a series of lamentations that mark the rupture between a precolonial West African body and the charged space of identity within a contemporary Black body. At the heart of this epic song is a mother’s wail with the gravitational force of generations. It signals a mother’s grief for a lost daughter. Her cries are doubled in embodied shadows that gather around her–cries so loud, with a mouth going so wide, she would swallow the world.

Conceived, composed and performed by Okwui Okpokwasili with additional collaboration by Lucia Betelou, Willow Green, Julianna Massa, Adriana Ogle
Headpieces designed by Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili
Scenic elements and audio design by Peter Born

Sweat Variant
looking
looking is part of the installation for a larger work, called poor people’s tv room (solo)

In his novel “Foreign Gods Inc.” by Okey Ndibe, the main character visits a friend of his in his hometown in Nigeria. His friend has become rich, and his way of sharing that wealth with the community was to build an extra living room to his house, where people could come and sit in the air conditioning and watch old Michael Jordan videos. He called it a “poor people’s tv room” and that inspired the title of this work—this idea of providing a room where someone else’s aspirations were always on a loop, a space set “alongside time,” rather than in it.

Inspired by the events of the Woman’s War of 1929 in southeastern Nigeria, the “Bring Back Our Girls Movement” in 2014 and the movement for Black Lives (BLM) in the US in 2014, this work considers how protest movements are durational acts. These acts transmit embodied knowledge through generations and across continents, even when cultural histories have been suppressed. This work explores the relationship between these durational acts and performance practice.

This installation is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Created by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Cinematography by Iki Nakagawa

About Sweat Variant
Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. They are partners in their work and their lives. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority.

Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking. They hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty, and of mystery. It is in this space that they believe we can see each other anew.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include the Bessie Award-winning Pent-up: A Revenge Dance, the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as Poor People’s TV Room, when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s Revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head, and adaku, part 1: the road opens. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum (NYC), Witchhunt at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Commissions include the performance on the way, undone at the High Line in NYC and at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, the film Returning for Danspace Project, the site-specific performance swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow, and a new 2024 commission from Little Island as part of its commitment to supporting original work.

Her work has been presented at such venues as the Walker Art Center, Performance Space New York, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, BAM, and New York Live Arts. She has worked with film and theater directors Carrie Mae Weems, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Mika Rottenberg, Mahyad Tousi, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, Annie Dorsen, and Peter Born. Okpokwasili is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA.) She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023.

Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, with whom he has created the installation turn, return at the Doris Duke Foundation (2024), repose without rest without end in Trondheim (2021), swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), on the way, undone at the High Line (2021), Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO) installation at the New Museum and the Hammer Museum (2021), Sitting on a Man’s Head (2019) at Danspace Project, Adaku’s Revolt (2019) at Abrons Arts Center, Poor People’s TV Room (2017), when I return, who will receive me (2016), Bronx Gothic (The Oval) (2014), Bronx Gothic (2013), and pent-up: a revenge dance (2009). Born and Okpokwasili also produced an album, day pulls down the sky, in 2019. Their work has also appeared in the Berlin Biennale and at the Tate Modern, London. Born has collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer, and writer on The Venus Knot (2017) and he his own mythical beast (2018), and as a set designer for Nora Chipaumire’s rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). His work Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO), created in collaboration with Okpokwasili, is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. Four of his collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance (Bessie) Awards.

His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. Born is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker, and furniture designer.

For more information about Sweat Variant / Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, visit www.sweatvariant.com

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor 
laying fire (2023)
HD video, colour, sound; 16:23 minutes

Please note, the film contains language that some viewers may feel is unsuitable for young children.

laying fire by Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor is an experimental memory work on intimacy. Using real life portraits of queer Black Norwegian femmes, the film explores revolutionary ways of being in partnership with our beloveds and ourselves. The film questions societal expectations of gender and sexuality and how to interrogate these expectations through a queer Black lens. laying fire uses Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” as a guiding beacon. As Lorde writes, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos and power of our deepest feelings.” The erotic is most often defined as arousing sexual desire. If we queer this definition of the erotic, we can redefine the term to include new ways of relating to one another. Instead of the erotic being used as a pornographic tool, we can modify it to build partnerships and make relationships more inclusive.

One queer use for the erotic could be imbuing all of our exchanges with a heightened charge of energy that comes from a place of pleasure. The initiative to archive narratives about queer Afro-Norwegian in the Nordics arose from questions about the politics of intimacy. Queer intimacy in all its forms is politicised in many societies around the world, from over 200 anti-LGBT bills filed in the United States in 2022 to more than 60 countries across the globe with national laws criminalising same sex relations. Images of queer Black intimacy are rarely shown in a positive, stable and affirming light, where stories from these intersecting communities are rarely amplified in mainstream media. laying fire proposes a rebuke to the policing and erasure of queer Black intimacy.

As part of the Living Canvas at IMMA programme, this screening of laying fire coincides with and celebrates Dublin PRIDE 2025 on the grounds of IMMA.

About the artist:

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor is an artist researcher working with text, dialogue, archives and moving images. Her roots are in the Southern United States, born in Mississippi and bred in Florida on former Timucan land. Her work centers on themes of ritual, social politics and identity mythology of Black and Indigenous folks. Taylor is currently researching death and mourning practices across the African diaspora as part of her PhD fellowship at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Taylor curated and hosted the almost monthly discursive salon on race politics and race relations ‘Black in Berlin’ which was presented at Savvy Contemporary (Berlin) and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art. She has performed and presented work at the Barbican Centre of Art (London, UK) Chisenhale Gallery (London, UK), Hebbel Am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, Germany), Sophiensaele Theater (Berlin, Germany), The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo, Norway) and National Museum of Norway (Stavanger, Norway). Taylor has been a resident at Tate Museum of Modern Art and the Irish Museum for Modern Art.

Fritz Lang
Metropolis, 1927
Germany, reconstructed and restored 2010
145 minutes
Courtesy of the FWMS and Eureka Entertainment

About the film:
With its dizzying depiction of a futuristic cityscape and alluring female robot, Metropolis is among the most famous of all German films and the mother of sci-fi cinema (an influence on Blade Runner and Star Wars, among countless other films). Directed by the legendary Fritz Lang (M, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, The Big Heat, etc.), its jaw-dropping production values, iconic imagery, and modernist grandeur – it was described by Luis Buñuel as “a captivating symphony of movement” – remain as powerful as ever.

Drawing on – and defining – classic sci-fi themes, Metropolis depicts a dystopian future in which society is thoroughly divided in two: while anonymous workers conduct their endless drudgery below ground their rulers enjoy a decadent life of leisure and luxury. When Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) ventures into the depths in search of the beautiful Maria (Brigitte Helm in her debut role), plans of rebellion are revealed and a Maria-replica robot is programmed by mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) and master of Metropolis Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) to incite the workers into a self-destructive riot.

A “Holy Grail” among film finds, Metropolis is presented here at IMMA in its reconstructed and restored version, as lavish and spectacular as ever thanks to the painstaking archival work of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and the discovery of 25 minutes of footage until recently thought lost to the world. Lang’s enduring epic can be seen as the director originally intended, and as seen by German cinemagoers in 1927.

About the Director:
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria in 1890 and died in Los Angeles, USA in 1976. His life spanned service in World War I, spectacular fame in Germany in the 1920s, escape from the Nazis, and a period of emigre reinvention in Hollywood. He produced a series of classic films (from Metropolis, M, and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse] to Fury, The Big Heat, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). Lang is widely recognised as one of the most important of all cinema directors.

Texts courtesy of the FWMS and Eureka Entertainment.

Image credits:
Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927. Courtesy of the FWMS and Eureka Entertainment.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Solaris, 1972
166 minutes
Courtesy Curzon Film

About the film:

Solaris is often cited as one of the greatest science fiction films in the history of cinema. A 1972 Soviet film, it is based on Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same title. The film was co-written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, and stars Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. The electronic music score was performed by Eduard Artemyev and the film also features a composition by J.S. Bach as its main theme.

The film’s plot revolves around the Solaris mission, which has established a base on a planet that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret. After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base, the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also encounters his wife who has been dead for ten years, he begins to appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.

Solaris won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. The film was Tarkovsky’s attempt to bring greater emotional depth to science fiction films; he viewed most Western works in the genre, including the recently released 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as shallow due to their focus on technological invention. Some of the ideas Tarkovsky expresses in this film are further developed in his later film Stalker (1979).

About the Director:

The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He garnered international attention with his first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublev (1966), which was banned by the Soviet authorities for two years. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at four o’clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it from winning a prize – but it won one nonetheless and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face.

Solaris (1972), on the other hand, was acclaimed by many in Europe and North America as the Soviet answer to Kubrick’s ‘2001’ but Tarkovsky ran into official issues again with Mirror (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to Europe. His last film, The Sacrifice (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman’s regular collaborators, and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of lung cancer at the end of the year. Two years later Sergei Parajanov dedicated his film Ashik Kerib to Tarkovsky.

Edited from texts sourced from Dan Ellis/IMDb, Michael Brooke/IMDb and Wikipedia.

Image credits:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972; 166 minutes. Courtesy Curzon Film.

Links to:

Staying with the Trouble

Summer at IMMA

Living Canvas at IMMA