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Engagement & Learning

Engagement & Learning

There were significant innovations in IMMA’s Engagement & Learning programme during 2022.

IMMA had a busy and successful year in 2022. One of the highlights was the museum’s first annual Earth Rising Eco Art Festival in October, which brought together artists and activists for a weekend of ideas and creativity. The Engagement team convened a series of discussions with renowned international speakers, including a keynote talk by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who advocated for the critical role of design in tackling the climate crisis, and Lucy Jones, who presented new scientific research on the importance of forging a bond with nature for our health and wellness. The festival received tremendous feedback from eventgoers and participants, and many ideas will be fed into planning for the 2023 event.

In November, IMMA hosted an international research conference to mark a century since the formation of the Irish Free State, with more than 30 speakers presenting on the role of art and artists in shaping the country in the aftermath of World War 1. The conference also situated this work within a global context of emerging nation states and independence movements in this period. Both in-person attendees at The Lighthouse Cinema and a global audience were able to follow the programme through a high-quality broadcast. This research intervention will be built upon in advance of the 2023 exhibition “Self-Determination: A Global Perspective,” which will take place in the Autumn.

A screenshot from what appears to be a broadcast of a conference. A white woman with brown hair, visible only from the waist up, wearing glasses and dressed in black, is standing at a podium talking into two microphones. She is smiling. Behind her the bottom of a large projector screen is visible. Overlaid in the top left are the words ‘CONFERENCE, 100 YEARS OF SELF-DETERMINATION, 9-12 NOV 2022’, and in the top right it reads ‘IMMA ÁRAS NUA-EALAÍNE NA hÉIREANN; IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’. In a blue box overlying the photograph on the bottom left is written: ‘Jessica Zychowicz, Self-Determination in Ukraine Today’.

International Research Conference 2022: 100 YEARS OF SELF-DETERMINATION

IMMA’s SPICE Project, financed by the EU Horizon 2020 fund, continued to promote citizen curation, and connect with diverse sets of marginal, migrant, and minority groups. The project showcased an exhibition of art from youths in Oberstown detention centre and co-hosted events with Black & Irish, MASI and, ArtMulti. The project brought new important audiences, particularly from minoritized groups to the museum in an organic, community-led way and solidified IMMA’s relationships with community groups including Fatima Groups United.

IMMA’s talks programme had a full year, with highlights including the More-than-human – Hybrid Radio Show co-curated with Dublin Digital Radio, late gallery openings and evening events in the Courtyard, and a talks partnership with the Project Arts Centre to present the all-day international seminar: Tapes Under the Bed in November. All talks and seminars were edited post-broadcast and made available for public listening on IMMA’s Soundcloud.

A photograph of fourteen people standing with their backs to the camera facing a white woman dressed in grey and wearing a long yellow artist’s apron who is addressing them, her hands clasped and her expression focused. She is standing in front of what looks like her studio space, with a table and some books visible inside, and pictures hanging on the back wall. Two large, dark wooden doors are opened wide, and inner glass-paned doors are opened inwardly. On the right-hand door, under a sign reading ‘Clodagh Emoe’ with ‘a visible plot’ written in smaller letters above, four A4 information sheets are displayed in a row, their content indiscernible. The left-hand door also has a row of sheets; only two are visible.

Open Studio with Clodagh Emoe: Clodagh Emoe, IMMA Outdoors, A Radical Plot Open Studios, October 2021.

Photo by Louis Haugh

 

IMMA’s Residency Programme – A Radical Plot, continued to host a variety of artists who feed into the work of the museum. Notable participants during 2022 included ANU’s The Wernicke’s Area, which was featured in The Project Space in October and Clodagh Emoe’s Seed STUDIO, which presented a series of engagements over the course of the Earth Rising weekend.

Art Nomads Collective availed of an IMMA Studio on a regular basis to host nationwide members at IMMA for creative interventions. Navine G Dossos and Aoife Dunne spent time in residence as they made stunning artworks for the IMMA Courtyard. And IMMA was delighted to realise a residency with artist/photographer Suné Woods in partnership with Light Work. This exchange enabled IMMA to double an offering for the International Photography Award by creating an opportunity for Jan McCullough to work with Light Work and Suné Woods to work with IMMA. In September IMMA was delighted to welcome our fourth Fulbright Scholar Jasmine Burns.

A photograph taken perhaps in a workshop or studio. Four large pieces of paper are hanging on a wall in a square formation, three of which are fully visible, with the one bottom right partially obscured by a white woman with long hair, wearing a mauve top, who is fixing the top right picture to the wall. Each page of paper has 16 small boxes on the left, in rows of 4, which seem to be colour or style tests, and an arched window-shape on the right. Each of the small boxes is labelled with a different word, including ‘grief’, ‘beauty’, ‘resilience’, and ‘patience’, and each is illustrated differently, and painted with different colours. Many of the words are the same between the 16 boxes of the 3 visible pictures on the wall, but each is illustrated differently, and each of the window shapes next to them contains a very different drawing made up of colours and patterns that clearly draw on each picture’s 16 boxes.

Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop: Navine G. Dossos, Kind Words Can Never Die Workshop 2022.

Photo by Louis Haugh

During the year, IMMA also partnered with the Dean Art Studio, a new multi-disciplinary hub in the heart of Dublin City Centre, to offer an annual studio to four artistic practices — Thaí Muniz, Brian Teeling, Salvatore Fullam and Elayne Harrington.

The 2022 IMMA Summer School selected participants from 22 countries and featured a range of national and international artists, theorists, and educators. The theme of the year’s summer school was Self-Determination, and it is part of a wider programme of activities related to the museum’s Self Determination research conference which took place in November.

IMMA’s Art & Ageing programme returned to in-person visits with an invited group of members of the Irish Dementia Working Group and Dementia Carers Campaign Network attending the first in-person Azure tour post pandemic. IMMA also continued to build a network of parties interested in art and ageing and hosted the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland’s Health and Well-being Day in May.

Finally, IMMA’s Slow Art program launched a series of nine videos showcasing work from IMMA’s Queer Embodiment exhibition on Slow Art Day in April.