Convenor & Moderator
Lisa Godson is a cultural historian whose work focusses on material culture, architecture and artists’ use of the past. She is Programme leader of the MA Design History and Material Culture at NCAD. This is a unique postgraduate course on the island of Ireland dedicated to exploring and generating new research into objects, buildings, systems and spaces and includes a deep material investigation of different areas of Dublin every year; this has included a focus on the site of IMMA/RHK in collaboration with UCD postgraduate architecture students and IMMA. Godson’s edited books include Making 1916: Visual and Material Culture of the Easter Rising; Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond; Uniform: Body and Discipline in the Modern World. Her work with artists and institutions includes as research collaborator with IMMA on Self-Determination: a Global History; Eimear Walsh on Romantic Ireland (Venice Biennale 2024); Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne on In the Shadow of the State and with Still Films on Build Something Modern, a feature documentary based on her research into Irish ‘tropical modern’ architects’ work in Nigeria, Uganda and Sierra Leone. She is currently writing a critical material history of the site of IMMA/RHK. More details here
Participants
ANU Productions (Louise Lowe and Owen Boss)
ANU are a multidisciplinary Irish production company that presents award winning theatre, visual art and socially engaged artworks. We place the audience at the very centre of each production, creating an immersive live experience where audiences have agency and proximity to the fierce and mesmeric worlds we create. Our work ignites the imagination, piques curiosity and elicits cogent and emotionally charged responses. With each production we challenge the very boundaries of what is possible in the art of theatre unmatched by any other theatre company in the world.
Established in April 2009, ANU is led by Theatre-maker Louise Lowe, Visual Artist Owen Boss and Creative Producers Lynnette Moran and Matthew Smyth. Together we’ve created 50 seminal works, public art commissions, gallery installations and museum interpretations, growing a national and global reputation for excellence.
Recent work includes The Dead adapted and directed by Louise Lowe at the Museum of Literature Ireland co-produced with Landmark Productions, Dec 2024 – Jan 2025, Starjazzzer at the Royal Society of Antiquaries Ireland, Dublin Theatre Festival, 2024, Hammam at the Abbey Theatre, 2023, The Secret Space: Palimpsest at the National Archive, 2023, Ulysses 2.2, Arts Council Making Great Art Award, co-produced with Landmark Productions, various locations, 2022 and 2023, The Wernicke’s Area at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Project Space, 2022, Staging the Treaty at the Kevin Barry Room, National Concert Hall, Dublin, 2022, The Book of Names, Dublin Port, Dublin Theatre Festival, co-produced with Landmark Productions, 2021, The Secret Space at Project Arts Centre, 2021, Intersection, The Lab Gallery, 2019, Beyond These Rooms, Tate Exchange at Tate Liverpool and National Museum Ireland, 2019, Faultline, Dublin Theatre festival, Co-produced with the Gate 2019, The Anvil, Manchester International Festival, 2019.
ANU have undertaken a number of works at sites with sensitive or ‘difficult’ histories, including Laundry at the former Gloucester Street Magdalene Laundry; Pals at Collins’ Barracks and Sunder at 10 Moore street and the surrounding area. More details here
Brian Hand
Brian Hand is an artist based in the Blackstairs Mountains in Co. Carlow. He studied Sculpture at NCAD and Media at the Slade School of Art, London. He was artist-in residence at Kilmainham Gaol Museum (1990) and part of the original project team for the Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon. (1990-94). In 1995, he was awarded a PS1 International Studio bursary and in 1999 a critical writing bursary from the Arts Council. In 2003, Hand was selected as curator of the Arts Council’s Critical Voices programme. Hand has exhibited widely and made many temporary public works and time-based installations often in site-responsive ways. He has, over the years, also worked on several collaborative projects; most recently with Orla Ryan and Alanna O’Kelly as Stormy Petrel /Guairdeall and Orla Ryan in Entre Chien et Loup. He has published essays for individual artists and produced writing more broadly addressing art and politics. Hand is currently a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD Dublin. His site-specific projects include work at the place of the former workhouse in Kilkenny, the roof of the GPO and La Puissance, an installation, single channel video, text and pyrotechnic work that was installed in the Invincible’s yard and in one of the corridors of Kilmainham Gaol. More details http://brianhand.ie/
plattenbaustudio (Jonathan Janssens and Jennifer O’Donnell)
plattenbaustudio is an architecture studio founded by Irish architects Jonathan Janssens and Jennifer O’Donnell in Berlin in 2018. Alongside built projects the studio is active in the fields of architectural communication, exhibition, and research, focusing on the realities of architecture in use and on the far-reaching consequences that our built environment brings to bear on the lives of humans. The studio’s approach to architecture is guided by critical observation. Part of the studio is dedicated to the development of contemporary architectural drawing, and the studio uses its drawings as tools with which to study, communicate and design for the complexities of the built environment. Plattenbaustudio’s work has been exhibited at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Irish Architecture Foundation, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Irish Embassy Berlin, among others. The studio was awarded a Fellowship at the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2020, Irish Arts Council Architecture Bursaries in both 2019 and 2022 and the Visual Arts Award by the Irish Embassy Berlin in 2018. The studio are partners in CoLab 81-7 with Denise Murray and Dún-na-dTuar, undertaking a series of consultation, educational, research, exhibition and creative work in relation to the former Magdalene Laundry at Seán McDermott street as part of Open Heart City and an ongoing project Rún: Ireland’s (In)visible Buildings Project, the first-ever survey to chart the scale and condition of potential “sites of social conscience” across the island of Ireland. More details here
Culturstruction (Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy)
Culturstruction is a collaborative architecture and design practice working in the overlaps of design, architecture, art and spatial practices. Culturstruction is led by Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy. They believe that design is a powerful social tool that can be used not simply to create equality of access to places, but also to democratise the power to produce those places.
In 2011 Culturstruction were commissioned to undertake a research residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art to investigate public engagement with the place of IMMA and its site at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Their research into ideas of ‘access’ and ‘mediation’ was based on a period of three months of direct observation and field work, looking at the usage patterns of the museum complex and its grounds. They looked at the high boundary wall, the lapsed historic rights of way through the Royal Hospital’s grounds and the evolution of an exclusion wall around the sites graveyard (Bully’s Acre) in the time of a cholera epidemic. From this, they initiated a reccurring event through which a right of way and tradition of public midsummer bonfire was temporarily uncovered on the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham / Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). This project was developed with the Education and Community Department at IMMA. Culturstruction’s projects have been produced with The Irish Architecture Foundation, Dublin City Council, The Education and Community Department at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, the Abhainn Ri Festival of Participation and Inclusion in Callan, and PLACE, Belfast. See more details here
