Featured Modern Artists; Alvar and Eino Aalto, Ilmari Aalto, Arnold Akberg, Seref Akdik, James Archer, Ljubo Babić, Vladimir Becić, Aleksandra Beļcova, Berezil Group, Nurullah Berk, Zoia Bielkina, Jovan Bijelić, Onufriy Biziukov, Blok Group, İbrahim Çallı, Vasyl Chalienko, Abram Cherkasky, Margaret Clarke, Marcus Collin, William Conor, Lozje Dolinar, Ģederts Eliass, Refik Epikman, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Annti Favén, Eileen Gray, Kyrylo Gvozdyk, Pekka Halonen, Henri Hayden, Grace Henry, Paul Henry, Evie Hone, Jerzy Hulewicz, Antonina Ivanova, Božidar Jakac, Władysław Jarocki, Mainie Jellett, Oskar Kallis, Eino Kauria, Jēkabs Kazaks, Sean Keating, Harry Kernoff, France Kralj, Tone Kralj, Olena Kryvynska, Charles Lamb, Ludolf Liberts, Herberts Līkums, Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, Karin Luts, Jūlijs Madernieks, Konrad Mägi, Rafał Malczewski, Louis Marcoussis, Đoko Mazalić, Lydia Mei, Vadym Meller, Kosta Miličević, Jănis Muncis, Eemu Myntti, Tymon Niesiołowski, Henrik Olvi, William Orpen, Johannes Pääsuke, Oksana Pavlenko, Veno Pilon, Felix Randel, Kristjan Raud, Tyko Sallinen, Helene Schjerfbeck, Emanuil Shechtman, Maya Simashkevich, Władysław Skoczylas, Melek Celal Sofu, Edith Somerville, Vojko Stanojević, Franjo Stiplovšek, Strādnieku Teātri Workers Theater, Niklāvs Strunke, Sava Šumanović, Romans Suta, Leo Svemps, Mary Swanzy, Milivoj Uzelac, Kuno Veeber, Nande Vidmar, Dmytro Vlasiuk and Jack B. Yeats.

Featured Contemporary Artists; Ursula Burke, Banu Çennetoğlu, Jasmina Cibic, Declan Clarke, Array Collective, Dorothy Cross, Ieva Epnere, Minna Henriksson, John Hinde, Dragana Jurišić, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Gülsün Karamustafa, Istvan Laszlo, Niamh McCann, Brian O’Doherty, İz Öztat and Zişan, Alan Phelan, Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Sasha Sykes, Dilek Winchester.

Opening on 15 February two new works commissioned by IMMA are presented as part of the exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective– Turkish artist İz Öztat site-specific installation, Rest, and a new multi-narrative environment, An Dún, by Belfast based Array Collective. 

İz Öztat, Rest, 2024. Commissioned by IMMA, Supported by SAHA. 

The installation sets the stage for working through the top-down implementation of founding ideologies constructed by nation states, as well as the struggles to resist them. In the video, a group of fellow artists activate the installation, drawing from embodied collective memories that relate to multiple connotations of the word “rest”: The rest here refers to those whose existence and equal rights are denied by those in power. The word evokes the burden resting on one’s shoulder, the burden of violence motivated by the state’s fantasy of exerting total control over its others, as well as the act of putting the dead to rest by collectivising mourning as a demand for justice. And perhaps finally, the work proposes rest as a form of recovery that comes with the struggle for freedom and peace. Rest grapples with these multiple meanings through forms and gestures that evoke subjugation, resilience, mourning, confrontation and negotiation.  

Array Collective, An Dún, 2024. Commissioned by IMMA.

An Dún is a new multi-narrative environment by Array Collective. Across immersive spaces a complicated and messy understanding of statehood and citizenship is unearthed. Ideological, topographical and political plans are fashioned and accumulated inside a site of destruction and construction. Resting outside of time, we hear echoes of our past, present and future in ever-changing failed experiments of hope. The ‘good room’ deep within a cave, stages rituals of citizenship. Behind the scenes, plans are cooked up and mistakes are made, amidst the labour of daily life. As An Dún shifts and repositions, occupying unsteady space between reality and fiction, care and compromise endeavour to make a shared existence liveable.

Presented as part of the exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, Poetry Jukebox is a sound installation that animates public spaces through the medium of poetry.

Conceived and developed by Prague based cultural activists, Ondřej Kobza and Michaela Hečková, there are now poetry jukeboxes in nearly 20 cities around the world, including Berlin, Brussels, Belfast, Dublin, Paris, New York and Prague. This installation is part of a collaboration with the Poetry as Commemoration project which encourages creative engagement with the material history of the revolutionary period through poetry commissions, creative writing workshops and public art installations. Poetry as Commemoration is an initiative of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at UCD Library and is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme.

The Poetry Jukebox at IMMA, located just outside the main recpetion, features ten new poetry commissions by established and emerging poets from Ireland, north and south including; Seán Hewitt, Paul Muldoon, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Padraig Regan, Stephen Sexton, Victoria Kennefick, Nithy Kasa, Aifric Mac Aodha, Bebe Ashley, and Martina Evans. These poems are accompanied by ten other poems selected during a recent Open Call.

Project partners; Poetry Ireland, Arts Council Northern Ireland, and Quotidian – Word on the Street. For more information visit: www.poetryascommemoration.ie

This IMMA TALKS playlist features the voices of several artists, curators and scholars who critically reflect on the outcomes of the self-determination movements.