Curator Johanne Mullan Introduces Art as Agency, a major new exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) that 'invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings and possibilities of art in shaping our understanding and action in the world'.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is a three-year exhibition celebrating IMMA's Permanent Collection as a source of agency and knowledge.
Featuring over 100 artists, from the 1960s to the present, it highlights key works, including many recent acquisitions. While there will be rotational presentations of ephemeral and performative artworks, many will remain in situ to facilitate a rich durational experience of Ireland’s National Modern and Contemporary Collection by all our audiences.
Through thematic, chronological, geographical, and media-based approaches, the exhibition examines how artworks connect across time and contexts, fostering new interpretations and relevance. In the introductory spaces, works from the 1960s to the 1980s evoke the foundational story of the Irish art world and reference the artists, collectors, donors, critics and curators of the day as well as the dynamic relations between art dispositions, art discourse and the politics of culture. While acknowledging the context of the Modernist, predominantly male dominance of that era, the exhibition also spotlights the material innovation and socially engaged practices of others who persisted despite the relatively conservative status quo.
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Listen: IMMA Head of Collections Christina Kennedy talks Art As Agency
The exhibition also includes a specially created 'white cube’ gallery space inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s renowned series of essays Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), that critiques the hegemonic, market-driven effects of the white cube gallery format. Likewise, the choice of works curated for this space pushes back by highlighting works by Post-War American women, pioneering conceptualist artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Brian O’Doherty himself as well as a contemporary feminist response by Andrea Geyer.
Further displays present more recent practice that explores urgent global themes such as gender, identity, hybridity, de-colonialism, migration, climate, and ecological change.
Artists are storytellers, reflecting societal shifts through works that inspire, challenge, and foster solidarity. Joan Jonas connects feminist archetypes with Irish mythology in a work she developed on a residency at IMMA 30 years ago. Memory and imagination offering generative ways to process fragmentation, dislocation, and survival in unfamiliar spaces. The exhibition invites you to engage with art’s power to reveal, question, and transform.
Yazan Khalili critiques racial stereotypes perpetuated by digital surveillance software. Alice Rekab’s digital drawing negotiates her mixed-race Irish heritage while Philip Taaffe’s large painting fuses ethnographic masks with abstraction. Daphne Wright’s life size sculpture Stallion evokes narratives of battlefields, themes of extinction and human-animal connections. John Kindness critiques the glorification of war and the plight of war veterans whom society has abandoned.
Works by Ellen Gallagher, Howardena Pindell, and Shirazeh Houshiary blend abstraction with activism. Gallagher repurposes racial motifs from 19th-century minstrelsy, Pindell addresses racism and climate issues while Houshiary’s calligraphic drawings blend Sufi meditation with political resistance.
Migration and displacement are explored by Dorothy Cross, Nil Yalter, and Leanne McDonagh. Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job (1983) documents migrant experiences, Cross’s Tread symbolises diaspora through carved marble while McDonagh’ drawings evince the relationship of Irish Travellers with the natural world.
Bodily vulnerability, generational trauma and human-animal relationships are explored by Lucian Freud and Mary Kelly while Siobhan Hapaska’s sculptural materials reference colonialism and rootlessness as well as longing and resilience.
Moving further into the exhibition mystery and memory unfold in works by Giorgio de Chirico, Juan Munoz and Vik Muniz. Cristina Iglesias’s sculptural passageway is an immersive, otherworldly environment while Alice Maher’s Mnemosyne, an ice-covered bed, evokes the memory and shared human experience as well as climate change.
By interweaving historical and contemporary narratives, Art as Agency invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings and possibilities of art in shaping our understanding and action in the world.
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is currently on show at IMMA, Dublin - find out more here
