Admission Free, No Booking required, All welcome
Location: Gallery 1

IMMA is delighted to present Symphony of The Nowhere Belly – Prototypes for Cyborgs, an exhibition performance by acclaimed Irish artist Mark Cullen in collaboration with artist composer Tadhg Kinsella. This marks the premiere showcase in Ireland of Cullen’s interactive playable sculpture, The Nowhere Belly, within his broader international project, Prototypes for Cyborgs.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

Cullen’s ongoing body of work exists as inter-related chapters forwards and backwards in time, presenting a posthuman exploration of transhumanism, vertical capital, and neofeudalism. Through this narrative, The Everything Vault and the counterforces of the Chthulucene, embodied by worm-like forms of The Nowhere Belly, engage in a profound struggle.

The Nowhere Belly is cybernetic reworking of the Celtic chthonic deity Crom Cruach after the 2000AD comic  ‘Slaine’ story by Pat Mills. Cullen has translated Crom into a many headed worm deity fashioned from subterranean infrastructure – a prototype cyborg after Rosie Badroitti and Donna Harraway. The key tenet of their work is to challenge the position of humanity in the world as the ground of subjectivity and importance, and to reframe it in the context of interconnection and bleed between species and their artefacts.

About the Artists 

Mark Cullen is a celebrated Irish artist renowned for his international practice across various disciplines and media. His work has received numerous awards and grants, reflecting his exploration of posthuman subjectivity and humanity’s evolving relationship with the world. 

Tadhg Kinsella is a queer classically trained composer, percussionist and live electronics musician. Specialising in Modular Synthesis, hardware and digital technologies. Tadhg is also founder of Dublin Modular, a platform dedicated to contemporary electronic music and arts. 

Admission Free / Booking required – Click here to book
Location: Lecture Room

SPLIT is a new version of a performance by Frank Wasser which has been derived from two bodies of work, his recently released book and his doctorate research.

Wasser’s doctorate research asks pertinent questions about the unstated conventions and regulations of art education, exhibition making and what constitutes artistic research.

SPLIT (Zero Hour Fragments), a short artists book, which was recently published by Ma Bibliothèque, takes the form of a series of distractions collating the sparse written fragments of a zero-hour contractor and associate lecturer seeking agency through the acts of writing and making. Initially it was written on a smart phone between 2013 and 2018, while the writer (the worker) worked zero-hour contract jobs in universities, museums, and art institutions in London. Both bodies weave together a tapestry of observations, fictions, and confabulations from inside the institutions sustaining, controlling, and propagating the flow of capital and culture through living bodies.

This new performance takes the form of a fragmented, interrupted monologue, where the subjects try to grasp a space of mediation between the making of an artwork and the politics produced by that making and distribution.
 
About the artist
Dr. Frank Wasser is an Irish artist from Dublin. He has exhibited and lectured internationally, including Tate Modern, Jerwood Arts, London, and the University of Oxford. Wasser currently teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research follows an investigative preoccupation with class, colonialism and contemporary and historical governing structures in art institutions.

Free, All welcome, Booking essential spaces limited. Book here.

Location: Off-site – Kilmainham Mills
Address: Kilmainham Ln, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, D08 N9X7

Artists
Motunrayo Akinola
Ross Hammond
James Merrigan
Claire Murphy
Aisling O’Beirn
Alice Rekab
Suzanne Walsh 

flr is an evening event where artists, thinkers and workers from a range of backgrounds are each given up to seven minutes to present new work. flr aims to provide a simple, intimate platform for testing what attention is and can be. 

flr is a one-off companion event to hmn, a quarterly project co-organised by Fite-Wassilak and in London, UK, since 2015. For further details click here.  

This is an outdoor event so please wear appropriate clothing or bring an umbrella! 

About the participants:

Motunrayo Akinola is a multimedia artist who uses familiar domestic objects to create spaces which question society’s framing of contemporary issues. After graduating from Royal Academy Schools, Akinola recently completed a residency culminating in his solo show Knees Kiss Ground at South London Gallery (2024).  

Ross Hammond works with performance, installation and moving image to examine spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and ideas of place in connection to our own histories or cultural legacies. These have taken many forms: dressing as a deceased relative, wearing the collective uniforms of thirty-six recently redundant colleagues at once, and remaking and removing the walls from his childhood home. 

James Merrigan emerged as both an artist and art critic during the 2008 financial crash amidst an efflorescent blog culture. He cut his critical teeth as an independent, with a DIY back catalogue including +billion-journal and Fugitive Papers. Small Night Projects is where he now edits, screen-prints and exhibits art and text projects for publication and exhibition in collaboration with other artists and editors. 

Claire Murphy is a visual artist and filmmaker from Ireland based in Cork. Her current practice explores women’s bodily autonomy and the flawed care system and looks at systems of compassion as a catalyst for healing and systemic change. 

Aisling O’Beirn is a Belfast-based artist exploring space as physical structure and a political entity by making and animating forms relating to observed and theoretical structures being studied by contemporary astronomers and physicists. Her interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between art, science and politics through sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects. 

Alice Rekab explores embedded personal and cultural narratives; the stories that we tell and the stories that we are told about ourselves. Working across film, sculpture, performance, print and installation, they deftly consider the making of one’s own belonging through the prisms of the body, the family and the nation state, exploring associated joy and trauma. 

Suzanne Walsh is an artist and writer working with performance, audio, and text. They have an interest in non-human worlds, and in creating rifts through which new meanings and realities can emerge. They also publish essays, art-writing, poetry, and fiction in publications including gorse journal, Fallowmedia, Winter Papers and Paper Visual Art Journal. 

About the organisers:

Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and critic, a regular contributor to art publications and the author of other writings on cheese, dry cleaning, speech bubbles and abandoned sculpture parks. 

Anne Tallentire is an artist who employs concepts such as itinerancy and residue in relation to urban environments. Her work juxtaposes action, objects and image using a range of media such as video, text, sound, performance and photography. 

Admission Free, No booking required, All welcome
Location: Gallery 2

Maria Hassabi will perform on the museum-style bench, already installed in the gallery. She takes a seat and gazes at her audience. The gold mirror surfaces of the bench and the surrounding plinths, reflect her movements and include glimpses of the viewers. Her routine begins with shuffling from one place of pause to the next, materialising uncomfortable and even contorted positions. Twists and turns occur on top, underneath and around the bench, finding an entangled body on a seemingly endless loop.  A quest for rest, for a place to be, to become, to breathe.

About the artist
Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is an artist and choreographer working with live performance, installation, sculpture, photography and video. Since the early 2000s she has developed a unique artistic practice based on the relationship between the live body, the still image, and the sculptural object. Hassabi’s works reflect on concepts of time and the human figure, while employing a variety of media to emphasize the complexity of formal organization. Her photographic and video works use her live performances as a departure point, while the use of technology is employed to override the limitations that occur within the format of liveness and realness.