In advance of an exhibition of work by artist Sarah Pierce, IMMA is issuing two ‘calls for participants’
1. General call out for participants to take part in an initiative between March and September 2023.
2. Call out for Transition Year Students to take part in a one-day event in April/May 2023.
Details of how to apply can be found below.
In 2023, IMMA will present an expansive exhibition spanning twenty years of Sarah Pierce’s practice, from the early 2000s to the present. The solo exhibition consists of performances, videos, large-scale installations, and archives. Sarah Pierce, who lives and works in Dublin, relocated to Ireland from the US in 2000. Curator Rike Frank has brought together twelve major works, spanning twenty years, to highlight patterns of making and thinking that define Pierce’s influential practice. Borne out of sticky relationships between the narratives we reproduce and those we wish to leave behind, the exhibition asks what it means to protest, reflect and act in community. This will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date.
A large body of recent works relates to Pierce’s interest in the figure of the student, in particular the art student, and the tenuous relationship between teaching and learning, politics and art-making. Pierce’s upcoming exhibition will feature a significant selection of projects with students, who are regular collaborators in her work, including An Artwork in the Third Person (2009), made with the Dutch Art Institute, Campus (2011), a repeated performance by art students that mirrors repetitious acts in how art is understood, made, and installed, and The Square (2017), an experimental “play without a script” that uses Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstück – or learning play – as a starting point. Pierce will involve student groups in the re-learning and re-staging of certain performances.
This upcoming exhibition will be guest curated by Rike Frank, who is co-director of the European Kunsthalle, an institution without a physical space.