Ghosts from the Recent Past at IMMA, Dublin

Image: Untitled, Phil Collins, 2000, courtesy to IMMA

To ensure the health and safety of the public, in line with current government restrictions, IMMA’s galleries will close from 24 December until further notice. 

Ghosts from the Recent Past explores how urgencies of the recent past continue to inhabit the present. Framed by key political events of the past 40 years, both in Ireland and further afield, the exhibition presents artworks from the IMMA Collection from the 1980s onwards. These works tell stories of colonisation and contested borders, of human relationships to the environment, of radical self-representation in the face of oppression and of love.

Isaac Julien, still from Paradise Omeros, 2002, 16 mm film transferred to three-channel video, 20 min 29 sec, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2006

The exhibition looks at how artworks carry the language of resistances, waywardness, joys and subversions, which continue to resonate and agitate. Given the Irish context and this moment of global reckoning, the impact of contradiction, duality and paradox abounds.

Untitled, Phil Collins, 2000, courtesy to IMMA

The placement of artworks in the galleries plays with these tensions, highlighting that opposing forces are not always easily disentangled: love from hate, fear from hope, protection from invasion. These forces are akin to lingering atmospheres or “ghosts” from the past which play an active role in structuring the conditions of the present.

Out of this complex inquiry, a simple but burning question arises – how can we care for a shared world? *