About Speaker
Lisa Godson is a historian of design and material culture, and also researches and writes about contemporary design. She studied History of Art at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1994) and History of Design at the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, London (MA 1998, PhD 2008). Godson has held tenured lecturing posts in a number of institutions including DIT and the Royal College of Art, where she was lead tutor in critical studies for MA design interaction, product design and industrial design. She was RCA Teaching and Learning Fellow and devised the college Virtual Learning Environment RCAde. She was NCAD Fellow at the inter-institutional Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) 2009-13, where she was part of the team that developed and taught a pioneering structured doctoral research programme and chaired two research seminars, in historiography and theories of contemporary design.

Recent books include Uniform. Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World (Bloomsbury: 2019 co-edited with Jane Tynan) and Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond. Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945 (Bloomsbury: 2019 co-edited with Kathleen James-Chakraborty), Making 1916: Material and Visual culture of the Easter Rising (Liverpool University Press: 2015, co-edited with Joanna Bruck); Design learning in an age of austerity (Cumulus: 2015. Her essays include ‘Thus Crucifixes Became the Norm’: System, Affect and Display
in post-Famine Catholicism’ in Mark Fitzgerald et. al. (eds) The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture (Liverpool University Press 2018), ‘The Speculum and Obstetric Violence’ in Design and Violence (MoMA, 2016) and ‘Design in Twentieth Century Ireland’ in volume 5 of the History of Art and Architecture of Ireland (Yale/RIA: 2014).

She has also published across a range of journals including Architectural Review, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Irish Geography, the Journal of Design History, Design and Culture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Material Religion. The publication of her monograph How the crowd felt: the material culture of public events in the Irish Free State is planned.

An aspect of Godson’s research involves collaborations with creative practitioners – her concept and research on Irish modernist architecture in Africa was the basis of the award-winning feature-length documentary Build Something Modern (Still Films: 2011); she was research collaborator with artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne on their major Artangel/Create/Arts Council 2016 national commission In the Shadow of the State (2016) and was research collaborator with Jesse Jones on the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017).

Godson is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin. She is a Director of the Irish Architecture Foundation and a Trustee of the Design History Society. See more details here

About Artist
Bharti Kher was born in 1969 in London, England and lives in New Delhi, India. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic. In 1992 she travelled to India, deciding to live there in 1993. Kher’s recent solo exhibitions include: ‘A Wonderful Anarchy’ Hauser & Wirth Somerset, ‘Chimeras’, Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel (2018), ‘Djinns, things, places’, Galerie Perrotin, Tokyo (2018), ‘Points de départ, points qui lient’, DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2018), ‘Dark Matter’, Museum Frieder Burda, Berlin, 2017), ‘This Breathing House’, Freud Museum, London (2016), ‘The Laws of Reversed Effort’, Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2016),’Three decimal points. of a minute of a second. of a degree’, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2014) and ‘Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai(2014).

Recent group exhibitions include: ‘In the Company of Artists’ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2019), ‘Desire in Art, from the 20th Century to the Digital Age’, IMMA, Dublin (2019), ‘Les arts du Tout-Monde’, Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2019), ‘Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti’, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2019), ‘Facing India’ Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2018), ‘Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body (1300-Now)’, The Metropolitan Museum, New York (2018), ‘Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada’, Canada tour: Art Gallery of Alberta – Alberta; University of Toronto Art Centre – Toronto; Winnipeg Art Gallery – Winnipeg (2018-2019).

Bharti Kher, A Consummate Joy
13 March –17 May 2020
Main Galleries, West Wing
IMMA is delighted to present, A Consummate Joy, a solo exhibition by acclaimed British-Indian artist Bharti Kher (b1969 London). Kher’s art gives form to daily life and its rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms its meaning to yield an air of magical realism. Now living in New Delhi, India, Kher’s use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social surroundings. Read more details here.