The three films – Duncan Campbell, The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2016), Ghosts from the Recent Past: Sarah Clancy, Cherishing for Beginners (2021) and Marion Bergin, SAOIRSE (2020) – are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, to link with the group exhibition Staying with the Trouble, which runs in the Main Galleries at IMMA until 21 September 2025. The exhibition Staying with the Trouble is inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, and features over forty contemporary artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time.

Duncan Campbell
The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy, 2016
Video, 31:37 minutes
Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art. Commissioned by IMMA with co-commissioners Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Western Front, Vancouver, 2016.

About the film:
The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2016) was Irish-born artist Duncan Campbell’s first new work since winning the Turner Prize in 2014, and his first film based in the Republic of Ireland. Originating from research undertaken in the IFI Irish Film Archive, Campbell’s film commission takes as a starting point a 1960’s UCLA anthropological film study of rural Kerry to investigate and reframe contemporary Ireland.

The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy is underpinned by extensive research, in this instance Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty’s 1968 documentary film The Village, and three influential anthropological studies: Inis Beag by John C. Messenger; Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland by Hugh Brody; and in particular Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

The film uses a combination of archive material and self-shot footage and is set against a visit by two American anthropologists to the village of Dun Chaoin thus mirroring The Village. Campbell directly integrates footage from Hockings and McCarty’s film with newly scripted material also filmed in and around Dún Chaoin, which echoes key scenes from the documentary that captured the day-to-day routine of the village. In revisiting these scenes Campbell looks at some of the assumptions, ethics and misconceptions that frame the relationship between the filmmakers and the villagers.

As with many of Campbell’s works the film questions the validity of documentary form as historical representation, blurring fact, and fiction, recording and interpretation. His extensive research into a specific time and context uncovers the unknown and unexpected in a representation of Ireland that at first seems familiar. On one level The Welfare of Tomás ó Hallissy represents the uses and misuses of the past as the implications of the societal shifts and misrepresentations it explores still resonate and inform contemporary Ireland today.

The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy was commissioned by IMMA with co-commissioners Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Western Front, Vancouver. This commission was one of three major new works commissioned by IMMA to reflect on the legacy of the commemoration of the Irish State and was part of the official Ireland 2016 programme. Funded in part by the Irish Film Board, the work marked the first time that IMMA and Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board have collaborated on a film work.

This commission was also presented as part of an exciting on-going initiative, New Art at IMMA, proudly supported by Matheson, which allowed IMMA to continue to support artists’ vital work in a strand of programming that recognised and nurtured new and emerging talents, new thinking and new forms of exhibition-making.

About the artist:
Duncan Campbell (b.1972 in Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Glasgow. He is best known for his films which focus on particular moments in history, and the people and objects at the centre of those histories. He uses archive material as a route to research subjects and histories that he feels are important. The process of making the films becomes a means to further understand his subjects and reveal the complexity of how they have been previously represented. Although these histories are located in specific times and geographies they resonate with and inform our present. Extensive research into the subjects through archival material underpins all of the films and the histories Campbell chooses to focus on reflect his interest. Using both archival and filmed material, his films question our reading of the documentary form as a fixed representation of reality, opening up boundaries between the actual and the imagined, record and interpretation.

He completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in 1996. Campbell was the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize (Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell) and was one of three artists representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale as part of Scotland + Venice 2013 (Corin Sworn, Campbell, Hayley Tompkins). In 2012 Campbell took part in Manifesta 9 curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, Belgium and in 2010 he took part in Tracing the Invisible, Gwangju Biennale. In 2017, Wiels, Brussels will host a solo exhibition on Duncan Campbell.

Ghosts from the Recent Past: Sarah Clancy, Cherishing for Beginners, 2021 | Video, 3:23 minutes

Commissioned by IMMA, created by filmmaker Matthew Thompson, and co-produced by IMMA and Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, in collaboration with Poetry Ireland, 2021.

About the film
This short film featuring poet Sarah Clancy reading her poem Cherishing for Beginners and created by filmmaker Matthew Thompson is one of a series commissioned by IMMA in partnership with Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation and Poetry Ireland. Set within the IMMA Collection exhibition Ghosts from the Recent Past (2021–2022), each film acted as a call-and-response between artwork and poet. Clancy performed work that presented a layering of socio-political, cultural and economic interpretations, tensions and translations connecting to the exhibition. In this way, through the lens of the filmmaker, the film offers tangential replies and rebuffs to the vital question that was embedded within the exhibition – How can we care for a shared world?*

*Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019)

About the contributors:
Sarah Clancy is a poet and community worker from Galway city, living and working in County Clare. She has published three collections of poetry— Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Belfast), Thanks for Nothing Hippies (Salmon Poetry), and The Truth and Other Stories (Salmon Poetry). Clancy has been involved in many campaigns in Ireland over the years, for environmental justice, bodily autonomy, marriage equality, and most recently, the ongoing campaign to end Direct Provision. Her poems have been published in Ireland, UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Slovenia, Poland, Italy, and Nicaragua and broadcast on RTÉ and BBC Radio. She has poetry forthcoming in an anthology of queer poetry, Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, Belfast), and a new collection from Salmon Poetry which is years overdue but still in the works.

Over the past number of years, Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson has created a series of films with the Brinkerhoff Foundation, in partnership with Poetry Ireland (Dublin), RADA (London), Druid (Galway), the 92nd Street Y (New York), and Poet in the City (London). The films represent a new approach to poetry that combines language, performance, music, and moving image. The result is an immersive experience that invites viewers to reconnect with a communal art form that is vitally alive.

The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation is a literary organisation based in New York, bringing great poetry from across places, eras, and traditions together. The Foundation’s aim is to expand access to poetry for audiences worldwide to enjoy. By exploring universal themes through poetry from the past and present, the Foundation connects some of the greatest writers of the 20th century with new and diverse voices today.

Poetry Ireland connects poetry and people, and is committed to achieving excellence in the reading, writing and performance of poetry throughout the island of Ireland. The non-profit organisation, established in 1978, combines its role as a promoter and supporter of poetry with advocacy for poets, advancing the art form through solid development goals.

Marion Bergin
SAOIRSE, 2020
Colour with sound; 8:39 minutes

About the film:
In SAOIRSE, Marion Bergin captures the fading world of Dublin’s working-class horse owners, a way of life at odds with the city’s relentless gentrification and development boom. As the urban landscape undergoes a transformation, the spaces once occupied by horses are mostly gone. The city, now dominated by fast-moving traffic and modern infrastructure is no longer suitable to accommodate the rhythms of horses and carts. This film records the last of a culture synonymous with the city that’s all but disappeared.

Filmed in the horse yards of Dublin 1 and Dublin 7, this short film is both a time capsule and a reflection on resilience, loss, and change. Horses hold a nostalgic place in the collective memory of Dubliners, yet their presence is diminishing in the face of development and continuing welfare issues. The presence of horses in Dublin’s inner city has long been a subject of controversy, with significant welfare concerns dominating public discourse. These issues are real and demand attention. Also of importance is acknowledging the sense of purpose that the scene has created for men in marginalised communities, and to explore opportunities to support this through access to education and training. SAOIRSE invites audiences to see beyond stereotypes. In it, we encounter four men of different generations who genuinely care for their horses as they try to keep their hobby alive in a town turning into a homogenised European city.

More than just a document of a disappearing culture, SAOIRSE explores the delicate balance between tradition and progress, inviting audiences to reflect on what disappears when a city outgrows its past.

SAOIRSE originally premiered on the LVMH film platform Nowness. This screening on Living Canvas at IMMA represents the film’s public debut, and is programmed with the major group exhibition Staying with the Trouble, running in the Main Galleries of the museum until 21 September 2025.

About the artist
Marion Bergin is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans filmmaking, photography, movement, and creative direction. Bergin’s work is deeply rooted in the conviction that beauty, wonder, and awe are essential to the human experience. She explores the transformative power of art as a means of healing and elevation, creating works that invite audiences to connect with a sense of reverence and the profound potential for beauty to inspire and renew.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a BA Hons in History of Art and Italian, she spent the formative years of her career running her own fashion label in London before transitioning into photography and film, bringing with her an ability to weave visual stories as she had previously done collections.

Bergin’s most recent project, SWIMirl, is an immersive film that explores Dublin’s sea swimming community. Created in collaboration with Robert Bourke Architects, it was presented as an immersive spatial installation at Hong Kong’s Pier Seven for the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, further pushing the boundaries of how beauty and meaning can be experienced in different environments.

Marion Bergin’s work has been the recipient of a number of awards including a Gold Shark for SAOIRSE for Best Documentary Short and three YDA Cannes shortlists. SAOIRSE has also been a finalist in Oslo Film Festival, Edinburgh Doc Festival, Rome Independent Film Festival and Asolo Art Film Festival.

This once-off evening screening of Peter Lennon’s iconic film Rocky Road to Dublin (1968) is programmed as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, to link with the group exhibition Staying with the Trouble, which runs in the museum’s galleries until 21 September 2025. The exhibition Staying with the Trouble is inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, and features over forty contemporary artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time. Rocky Road to Dublin is cited in particular as a source of inspiration for artworks that feature within the exhibition. Filmmaker Paul Duane’s documentary The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin (2004) was made as a companion piece for Rocky Road to Dublin and is screened following the main feature.

About the films:

Peter Lennon
Rocky Road to Dublin, 1968
English language; Ireland; 70 minutes
Courtesy Irish Film Institute

In 1967, Paris-based journalist Peter Lennon returned home to find a country that was stagnating under the weight of its own history. His response was this film, his only one, a brash, polemical essay which contrasts the aspirations of the founders of the state with the ideological malaise afflicting the Ireland that had emerged. As Lennon comments “this film is an attempt to reconstruct, in images, the plight of a community which survived nearly 700 years of English occupation and then nearly sank under the weight of its own heroes and clergy”.

Inspired by the French New Wave, the film critiques Irish society through interviews with public and private figures and through the cinematography of New Wave’s Raoul Coutard who captures the action in pubs and on pitches, in schoolyards and graveyards, hospital wards and tennis club hops on his discreet 16mm camera.

Paul Duane
The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin, 2004
English language; Ireland; 30 minutes
Courtesy Irish Film Institute

Made as companion piece for Rocky Road to Dublin, The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin describes the journey of Peter Lennon’s iconoclastic documentary from its creation and initial life on the screen to its resurgence in popularity more than thirty years later. Present-day interviews with Lennon and Raoul Coutard trace how the film grew from an idea into a fully-fledged feature. Directed by Paul Duane and produced by Sé Merry Doyle (Loopline Films) the film unearths some remarkable, previously unseen footage of Lennon confronting Godard and Truffaut at Cannes in 1968 while workers and students demonstrate around the Sorbonne at the peak of their revolutionary fervour.

About the directors:
Peter Lennon (1930 – 2011) was an Irish-born journalist who wrote in Dublin for the Irish Press, for the Sunday Times and as Paris Correspondent and later London-based features writer for The Guardian. In Ireland today, Lennon is probably best known as director of the social history documentary film Rocky Road to Dublin.

Paul Duane is an Irish-born writer and director of television and film. His documentary feature credits include Barbaric Genius, Very Extremely Dangerous, Natan, Welcome to the Dark Ages. His debut feature drama is All You Need Is Death (2023).

Text courtesy Irish Film Institute.

This once-off evening screening of Shane Hogan and Tom Burke’s The Liberties (2008) is programmed as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, as a partnership with The Liberties Festival, which runs from 21 to 27 July 2025 across multiple venues. The Liberties Festival is one of Ireland’s oldest festivals. From modest beginnings in 1970, it has grown to become a highlight of the summer in Dublin with a series of family-friendly, sporting and community events, and an exciting multi-cultural and arts programme.

This evening screening is part of the Summer at IMMA programme at the museum.

About the film:

Shane Hogan & Tom Burke
The Liberties (2008)
50 minutes
Presented by Liberties Festival in association with Living Canvas at IMMA

First screened in 2009, The Liberties is a series of 12 crafted short films, each focusing on a different character within Dublin’s Liberties community. Directed and produced by Tom Burke and Shane Hogan (Areaman), The Liberties celebrates ordinary people living in The Liberties – such as tailor, Eugene Fagan, Meath Street butcher Declan Larkin, flower ladies, Phyllis Kavanagh and Mary Hand, as well as better known residents such as Brenda Fricker seen polishing her Oscar at home.

About the directors:
Shane Hogan has produced and directed single documentaries and a number of documentary series funded by The Irish Film Board, Arts Council, RTÉ Television and RTÉ Player including; The Fisherman, There’s No Charge for The Hat, The Liberties, Too Old for the Road? and Changing Ireland: My Big Idea.

Tom Burke has been making film and video projects of varying scales and styles for over a decade. Working primarily in the documentary form, he often assumes a shooting director role, and more often than not will be the editor of his own films. Features include Losing Alaska (2018), Shooting the Darkness (2019) and The Gap in Consent (2024) which encompassed a PhD in which he looked at Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking.

These films by artists Avril Corroon, Anita Delaney, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, and Tamsin Snow, are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, to link with the group exhibition Staying with the Trouble, which runs in the Main Galleries at IMMA until 21 September 2025. The exhibition Staying with the Trouble is inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, and features over forty contemporary artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time.

Joseph Noonan-Ganley
Our Bed, 2023
21:12 minutes

About the film:
Our Bed begins with the reconstructed voice of a Uruguayan rugby player who crashed in the Andes in 1972. He describes the design, construction and use of the team’s emergency beds inside the fuselage of the wreckage. Images, sound and text from archives, mass media and personal notebooks make space for viewers to cohabit these beds, to partake in the imaginative composition that they produce. The protagonist elaborates upon the methods that the boys improvised, drawing on an example: a contemporary alphabet fashioned out of jockstraps. This cliché of homosexual identification helps express the different contexts that the boys find themselves in (bed, plane, book).

In interjecting footage of a live televised rugby match, rain and mud disturb the clean capture and transmission of the event. Streaks from the player’s bodies are animated into smears on the video screen, activating their gestures and blurring the subsequent content for the viewers of this video.

CGI, AI and technical consultancy: Harry Sanderson. Translation: Maria Jose Legelen and Núria Querol. Supported by The Elephant Trust and The Art Department, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Our Bed is discussed in Megan Nolan’s text Cannibalism and Other Forms of Intimacy, ArtReview, 2024. An extract of the work is installed in the website of The National Sculpture Factory, Cork.

Related texts feature in Noonan-Ganley’s recent anthology of writing The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist’s texts, 2012-2024, published by Ma Bibliothèque. As part of Summer at IMMA, an evening of readings and performance from this book is presented on 31 July at 6-7pm in Studio 5, IMMA. All welcome. See more here. 

About the artist
Joseph Noonan-Ganley (b.1987) is an Irish artist working across video, sculpture, photography, textiles and writing. In 2000, he attended St. Joseph’s Secondary School in Tulla, Co. Clare, then at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, he undertook a BFA in Painting. Following this Noonan-Ganley completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Over the past decade he has designed and lectured on art BA, MFA and PhD courses internationally including at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Newcastle University, and Goldsmiths.

Noonan-Ganley’s art explores how identities are collaboratively made in the process of interpreting others, being interpreted by others and the integration of these relationships. He often takes as artistic material the lives and works of bisexual and homosexual men (Joseph Cornell, Charles James, Gareth Thomas). His exhibitions, performances and publications openly manipulate the remnants of these artists, designers, sports people, dressmakers and writers. Materials unearthed from the person’s life and work are remade through filming, sculptural construction and textual experimentation in explicit detail. Themes cluster around embodied labour, biographic authorship and illicit sexuality. The works draw from the literary genre of bio-fiction, feminist bodily experience, theories of sexual dissidence, Materialist and Cinéma Vérité filmmaking.

Exhibitions include Big Screen, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, 2024; Our Bed, Steam Works gallery, London, 2023-24; Reflex Blue, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2023; Loading Bay, National Sculpture Factory, Cork, 2023; Our Bed, 6 Seville Place, Dublin, 2022. Artist publications include Aqueous Humours, Fluid Ground, Poorhouse Reading Rooms and Matt’s Gallery, 2025; The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist’s Texts 2012-2024: Ma Bibliothèque, 2024; Without Reduction: The Happy Hypocrite, Book Works, 2021; Fetish, Mirror Lamp Press, 2021.

Anita Delaney
Well, 2020
HD video and stereo audio; 01:28 minutes

Creme, 2021
HD video and stereo audio; 00:51 minutes

Cartoon, 2021
HD video and stereo audio; 00:32 minutes

About the films:
These three works by Anita Delaney can be considered part of a series of video ‘tone poems’. Well is a plea for domestic connection. Lonely and intimate, it is comprised of short shots that capture the tender frisson of home. Creme (Shh. A busy beige day). Cartoon is best considered as a list of verbs in the vein of to wait, to gulp, to slip, to hesitate, to stumble.

About the artist:
Irish artist Anita Delaney lives and works in London. Her video and sculptural work explores frissons and gasps. She has shown her work extensively nationally and internationally. Exhibitions and screenings of note include Recontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin, The Louvre, Paris (2021), TBC TV, Somerset House, London (2018), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam (2016) and Winter Series, Void, Derry (2018).

Tamsin Snow
Roses &c. (A Modernist Melodrama), 2025
Computer-generated video animation, 10:06 minute

About the film:
Roses &c. (A Modernist Melodrama) is a computer-generated video animation set in the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois — a modernist structure designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe between 1945 and 1951 built for Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Once a private retreat, the house is now a historic landmark and, in this work, serves as the backdrop for a meditation on architecture, memory, and the digital age.

The video is accompanied by Arne Gieshoff’s sound piece zum raum wird hier die zeit, 2021, inspired by Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. Sound and image together explore the emotional, political, and psychological layers embedded in the house, questioning how space holds meaning and how that meaning shifts over time.

Through digital animation, Roses &c. examines the increasingly blurred boundaries between real and virtual environments. It reflects on how technology shapes our sense of self, privacy, and presence — and how these shifts affect our perception of space and identity.

Subtitled text appears throughout the video — a collage of short phrases and quotations from figures such as Goethe, Shelley, and Mies van der Rohe himself. These fragments form a poetic, open-ended narrative that encourages viewers to draw their own connections between language, image, and sound.

Film credits:
Artist: Tamsin Snow, 2025
Animation: Adam James Sinclair – Sinclair Psionics, 2025
Music: Arne Gieshoff – zum raum wird hier die zeit, 2021
Translator: Hans-Christian Oeser

Funding / commissioner credit: Supported by Internationales Künstlerhaus
Villa Concordia, Bamberg, Germany

About the artist:
Tamsin Snow lives and works in Dublin. She works across sculpture and digital media, using computer-generated video animation alongside physical materials to explore the intersections of architecture, technology, and the body. She constructs immersive environments that reframe the familiar as strange or uncanny, prompting reflection on how perception is shaped by spatial, cultural, and digital frameworks.

Her recent work considers the shifting relationship between physical and virtual space, exploring themes such as mortality, simulation, and the evolving status of the human subject. Snow is particularly interested in how architecture reflects ideological systems, and how its forms and materials carry psychological and political charge.

Snow holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, and a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been presented in both solo and group exhibitions across Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland and the United States, in a range of institutional and independent contexts.

Snow has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia Fellowship in Bamberg, Germany; a Three-Year Studio Membership at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin; the KulturKontakt Residency in Vienna; and the TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange with Helsinki International Artist Programme.

Avril Corroon
Fresh Paint on the Walls, 2016 
HD video, 9 minutes

About the film:
Fresh Paint on the Walls is a satirical take on the private rental market and the difficulties of living in a neoliberal city. A voice-over narration theorises on the motives behind a landlord’s widespread use of magnolia paint in rental properties. The private housing market is reframed through the landlord’s absurd behaviours, offering a surreal justification for why housing is treated not as a basic social need, but as a commodified asset.

Made with: Jeremy Earls acting as The Landlord, SFX make-up by Cayce Helm McManus, camera assistance from Tara McKeon and the support of Temple Bar Gallery. Special thanks to Ann Maria Healy and Daniel Power.

About the artist:
Avril Corroon is a visual artist from County Westmeath working with sculpture, video, performance and social practice. Her work examines inequity and how architecture manifests governance. She collects and juxtaposes material and image to create associative and fictional space. She has made cheese from toxic mould, collected 1800L of dehumidifier water and performed on a city rooftop as the Airbnb logo.

Corroon is a current resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. She received a BA from the National College of Art and Design in Fine Art Media in 2014 and a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include GOT DAMP at TACO! London and Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2023, Cow&Gateat Sismógrafo, Porto, Spoiled Spores curated by Sheena Barrett at The LAB, Dublin 2020. Group exhibitions, screenings and performances at Dreamtime Ireland and Artworks at VISUAL Carlow, Eye Cinema, Amsterdam, Rijksakademie Open Studios, PuntWG, 2025 (NL), Living Space at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, (IRE) No Smoke Without ___ , Mayfair, London, 2022,  PEER, London, 2021, Feminist Supermarket at Ormston House curated by Mary Conlon, Limerick, 2021, Work in Progress at South London Gallery, 2020, Forming a Residency Association at LUX, London, 2020, HMK (NL), My Brilliant Friend at Temple Bar Gallery curated by Rayne Booth in Dublin, 2016. She is collected by the Irish Arts Council Collection.