Nowhere without no(w) is the first solo exhibition at IMMA by Irish artists Walker and Walker. The twin brothers have collaborated professionally since 1989 and have become one of Ireland’s most highly regarded artists internationally. The exhibition showcases a number of pre-existing works from the artists’ extensive 30 year career with a series of new works responding to their ongoing research into language, its meaning and its construction.

Walker and Walker work in a wide range of forms and media. Encompassing film, sculpture, drawing and installation, and featuring materials as diverse as steel, neon, a pearl and a flower that blooms once a year, Walker and Walker’s work in primarily grounded in the elusiveness of language.

Walker and Walker also take inspiration from a variety of 19th and 20th Century Surrealist artists, writers and poets, from Marcel Duchamp, Stephane Mallarme and Rene Daumal. By re-evaluating their meaning and lyrical structure the words become independent from their original signifier and enforces new ideas through the variety of mediums and the selected locations of each work in the exhibition.

Walker and Walker co-represented Ireland at the 51st International Venice Biennale, 2015 and have shown widely nationally and internationally. The film Mount Analogue Revisited screened internationally an LA; San Francisco; Berlin; Dublin; and Rio de Janeiro was listed one of the best films of 2010 by notable Australian film journal Senses of Cinema. The artist duo recently published a play Return Inverse as part of an artists’ book with Magazin4 in Bregenz, Austria (2015).

A new publication will accompany the exhibition and will include contributions by Jörg Heiser, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Rebecca O’Dwyer, and Rachel Thomas, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA. The publication is edited by Rachel Thomas and assisted by Victoria Evans, Assistant Curator, IMMA.