BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN DISCUSSES A RECENT EVENT BY NA CAILLEACHA IN ROME FOR ST BRIGID’S DAY. 

Two schools, two different times and sensibilities: The School of Athens (1509–11) by Raphael and The School of Hibernia (After Raphael) (2024) by the Irish art collective, Na Cailleacha. Ireland-Italy Projects was founded by Jane Adams and I in 2024 to promote cultural exchange. We saw Na Cailleacha’s project as an exciting, innovative and provocative artwork to bring to Rome, the site of Raphael’s famous fresco in the Vatican.¹ While The School of Hibernia attracted much international and Irish media attention in 2024, there has been little written about its recent iteration in Rome.

The appropriation of well-known art from a different age is a well-established practice in contemporary art since the 1970s. While not as common in Irish art, there are some precedents, such as Robert Ballagh’s The Third of May (After Goya) (1970) and John Byrne’s Last Supper, Dublin (2004). The School of Hibernia follows Ballagh’s lead in using historical artworks to make a political statement – in this case, a feminist challenge to the patriarchy underpinning Western art and its history.

The original tableau vivant was staged in the Museum Building at Trinity College Dublin, with 41 women from all walks of Irish life, including art, music, medicine, art history, poetry, science, theatre, sport, politics, dance, film, and activism. The work exists now as a photographic print, brilliantly captured by Ros Kavanagh, that is simultaneously an image rooted in art history, and a group portrait of contemporary women of significance. They include Mary Robinson, Linda Doyle, and Caroline Campbell, respectively, the first woman President of Ireland, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. The print has since entered the collections of Dublin City Council, the Office of Public Works, the Royal Irish Academy, the Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, University of Limerick, and the Contemporary Irish Arts Society. 

Never intended as an exact replication of The School of Athens, in relation to the number of participants, The School of Hibernia referenced the original fresco in terms of colour palette, architecture, and antique costume, in order to point out an overarching difference – that all of the participants are high-achieving women. Their toga-like outfits were recycled curtains bought in charity shops. Modern references included the substitution of Euclid’s geometrical instruments with a portable computer in the foreground, and trainers worn by the young woman sprawling on the front steps, the place occupied by the barefoot Diogenes in the original fresco.  

In Rome, the work was presented through an eclectic range of events to mark Ireland’s female patron saint, St. Brigid. A symposium was held on 2 February in the beautiful crypt of the Chiesa Santa Brigida, located in the spectacular Piazza Farnese. It was organised by Ireland-Italy Projects and supported by Culture Ireland, the Embassy of Ireland in Rome, and Trinity College Foundation. The event included such distinguished speakers as Professor Arnold Nesselrath, former deputy director of the Vatican Collections; Catherine Marshall, art historian, Na Cailleacha member, and curator of The School of Hibernia; Professor Rachel Moss, Trinity College Department of Art History; Professor Emma Teeling, Zoologist and Director, Centre for Irish Bat Research, University College Dublin; and Caroline Campbell of the National Gallery of Ireland – all participants in The School of Hibernia. 

The talks were delightfully diverse, ranging from a revision of art history education to a comparison between The School of Athens and The School of Hibernia, and the various contexts for the creation of the latter. The symposium finished with a talk on women, science and bats – extraordinary ecological research furthering an understanding of human aging. 

The second part of the event took place a short walk away in the Cinema Farnese Arthouse on Campo de’ Fiori. Here, the Irish-Italian connection was emphasised with a bilingual presentation of extracts from Articoli per Signore /Articles for Women, a one-woman theatrical show written, devised, and performed by actress and feminist Elisa Pistis, which wittily critiqued traditionally discriminatory accounts of women’s achievements by the Italian press. Prior to this, a wine reception, sponsored by Ireland’s Dunne & Crescenzi, was accompanied by background jazz music by Na Cailleacha member, Carole Nelson. An interview with director and Na Cailleacha member, Therry Rudin, by Irish-Italian filmmaker, Vittoria Colonna (a descendant of the eponymous muse of Michelangelo), was followed by the première of Rudin’s charming film, Rootstock (2024), a documentary charting the evolution of the School of Hibernia through participant discussions, interviews, fun and laughter.

Brenda Moore-McCann is a medical doctor, art 

historian and founder, with Jane Adams, of Ireland-Italy Projects.

¹ Ireland-Italy Projects’ first event in 2024 presented research on the work of long-neglected Renaissance painter, Suor Plautilla Nelli, at a symposium in Trinity College Dublin.

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CIAN DUGGAN DISCUSSES THE ART SCENE IN VIETNAM. 

In 2017, I first travelled to Ho Chi Minh City – a place I love that inspires me. It has been home ever since. The city itself is a shapeshifting entity; the skylines morph while buildings appear, disappear, and reappear on a daily basis. Entire streets change. It is a beautiful sprawling city in a state of constant metamorphosis. During my time here, Vietnam has gone through a significant period of rapid economic development and growth.

From 17 January to 28 February, I presented my exhibition ‘THINSPACE’ at Galerie Quynh (galeriequynh.com). Founded by Quynh Pham and Robert Cianchi, Galerie Quynh is the longest running contemporary art gallery in the country, having just recently celebrated its 23rd anniversary. Curated by Anh Dao Ha, ‘THINSPACE’ is the first ever solo exhibition by an Irish artist at the gallery. The exhibition explores ideas central to my practice, including the unsettling of anthropocentric narratives and the blurring of boundaries between the real and fictional, the body, the environment, and the mutability of time. Specifically, this body of work uses the Celtic concept of “thin places” to look at modes of co-existence between the human, non-human, and more-than-human.These themes of thresholds, in-flux states, and non-linear modes of co-existence that I have long explored through my practice can also be found within the independent art scene in Vietnam. While the economy grows and investment in industry and infrastructure surges, the art scene here remains largely supported by private individuals and community-led initiatives.

A big reason for moving here was to better understand the contemporary cultural landscape and the kind of art being made by new generations of artists. I don’t believe you can be passive in this regard; you must go, be there, and be part of it. After a couple of months, I joined A. Farm – an international artist residency based in a repurposed factory in District 12 of Ho Chi Minh City. The residency programme was a collaboration between three organisations: the Nguyen Art Foundation (NAF), one of Vietnam’s largest contemporary collections (nguyenartfoundation.com); Sàn Art, an independent artist-founded space (san-art.co); and MoT+++, an artist-run space centered on sound, video, and performance (motplusplusplus.com). 

I was initially meant to stay in Vietnam for three months, but it turned into six, and I’m still here today. Through my time here, I have connected with an artistic scene that feels particularly immediate, true, and vital to me personally. Integral to the scene is a ‘multiverse’ of interconnected artist-run spaces and initiatives. These aren’t just alternatives to a system; they are the system. Because there is little funding for contemporary art, the infrastructure is largely built on collaboration. It is a DIY scene in which physical spaces are often in flux. You can see this in the work of the Nhà Sàn Collective (NSC), for example, which evolved from the Nhà Sàn Studio – an artist-run space founded in 1998 in Hanoi. NSC supports artist members to push experimental boundaries with or without physical space (nhasan.org). 

In central Vietnam, A Sông in Quảng Nam-Đà Nẵng focuses on grassroot art and community-building, while in the central highlands of Đà Lạt, the Sao La collective runs Cù Rú – a hybrid art-bar, library, and garden that brings artists together with botanists and farmers (saolacollective.weebly.com). Other projects embrace impermanence by design, such as 3năm studio in Ho Chi Minh City, founded with a three-year lifespan to experiment with co-living and art-labouring (3namstudio).

You find this collaborative spirit everywhere, from the interdisciplinary poetry and sound happenings of Tắm Đêm (tamdem_nightswim), to queer club collectives like Vấp Cục Đá (@vapcucda.sg), Gái Nhảy (@gai_nhay.vn), and Bung Lon (@bung_l0n). Also in Ném is a studio run by artist Dương Gia Hiếu. Using upcycled objects, Ném focuses on rethinking the relationships between people, objects and space through design. Ném has a physical space, but one that is conceptually malleable. It is simultaneously Hiếu’s studio, a cafe, a cocktail bar, and a furniture store. It hosts workshops, screenings, talks, exhibitions, and even karaoke (nemspace.info). 

While the independent scene is artist-driven, institutional and diplomatic support remains a key bridge for external funding. My exhibition at Galerie Quynh was supported by the Irish Embassy in Vietnam. It is a significant moment, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Vietnam, and serving as an example of how cross-cultural collaboration can create whole new meaningful connections.

In Vietnam, collaboration is a way of being and a deeply ingrained attitude: if it doesn’t exist, you make it; if it’s broken, you fix it. Waiting for someone else to do it is not an option. When the New York-based Montez Press Radio visited last year, they were struck by how collectives seem to be more prevalent across contemporary culture here, than in the west. As the global art world seeks new models of sustainability, the same questions of adaptability and togetherness are being asked here in Vietnam.

Cian Duggan is an Irish artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. ‘THINSPACE’ was supported by the Embassy of Ireland, Vietnam.

cian-duggan.com

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PÁDRAIC E. MOORE CONSIDERS THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE COLLEGE OF PSYCHIC STUDIES IN LONDON.

Recent years have seen a profusion of institutional exhibitions foregrounding occultism as a vital catalyst for cultural progress. A noteworthy example is the major show, ‘The Medium is the Message’, featuring over 40 artists, which continues at London’s College of Psychic Studies until 31 January. As the McLuhanesque title suggests, the emphasis here is not on any theme or subject but rather upon the methods of producing art via psychic means. 

Artists featured can be divided into two groups. Deceased historical figures from the mid-twentieth century onwards, who actually engaged in forms of artmaking via channelling. Then there is the smaller group of living artists, whose work demonstrates the contemporary renaissance of interest in the esoteric. Of the contemporary artists, the work of  Ireland-based artists, Samir Mahmood and Susan MacWilliam, is worthy of mention. MacWilliam’s work focus upon female luminaries from the history of mediumship, while Mahmood’s delicate, juicy watercolours resemble thought forms or tulpas – a term originating from Tibetan Buddhism relating to the visualisation of sentient beings through spiritual practice. 

A notable aspect distinguishing this exhibition is the synergy between the venue and the material on display. Since 1925, this ostentatious, six-storey Kensington townhouse has been a locus for research into spiritualism and has amassed an impressive archive. Some of these holdings are on permanent display and are literally part of the furniture, such as the portraits of luminaries associated with the history of psychical research adorning the stairwells. Two years before her death, the clairvoyant painter, Ethel Le Rossignol (1873–1970) donated her visionary artworks to this organisation, and they constitute a vital foundational element of the show. Like many, Le Rossignol sought solace in spiritualism during the unprecedented trauma of World War I. In collaboration with her spirit guide (who was named J.P.F.), she cultivated a distinctive visual language that merges prismatic mandalas with whirling art nouveau motifs. 

The clustering of artists into thematic categories (such as Between Worlds, The Mediums, Messages from The Unseen, and so on) lends cohesion to what would otherwise be an unwieldy multitude. Affinities and causal connections are emphasised, and art historical lineages are drawn between individuals that were previously positioned as solitary outliers. This is demonstrated by the protean Ann Churchill, whose visionary and intuitive work has recently been the focus of greatly-deserved attention. Represented here via drawings that possess a filigree quality, such as the jewel-like Iamblicus from 1975, Churchill’s works resonate with that of Le Rossignol. One of several enlightening wall texts punctuating this exhibition reveals that Churchill encountered Le Rossignol’s paintings during a visit to this organisation in the 1960s and clearly found the work of the older artist instructive.

In the 1980s, Churchill was an active participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) at the Women’s Peace Camp in Greenham Common, where she created textile artworks that embellished fences of the military base. This instance exemplifies how artists, invested in exploring unseen worlds and spirit realms, are frequently also committed to social and humanitarian issues. Indeed, the history of modern esotericism is replete with individuals who were active within causes such as women’s suffrage, anti-vivisection, and pacifism. This is attested to in the permanent display in the President’s Room, where, amongst the many photographs of past luminaries, is Charlotte Despard (1844–1939), the Anglo-Irish Sinn Féin activist and founding member of the Women’s Freedom League.

Utopian tendencies are also certainly present in the work of polymath Paulina Peavy (1901–1999), one of several artists in this show with a room devoted to their work. This is the first time Peavy’s work has been presented in the UK, and she is represented here via several works on paper and two videos, all of which were created under the direction of a nonhuman entity known as Lacamo. Peavy’s work draws heavily from New Age philosophies and is infused by the conviction that humankind was on the brink of an epoch in which feminine intelligence and ‘ovarian wisdom’ would flourish. The presented videos are visually scintillating, merging images of ancient Egyptian edifices with geometric graphics. Through these works, Peavy promulgates her conviction that we are all moving towards – and must aspire to – the state of androgyny as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment. 

Aside from the contributions of contemporary artists, most of the work in this show would once have been designated by that problematic but nevertheless useful term, ‘outsider art’, coined by Roger Cardinal in the early 1970s. Only recently has art historical scholarship become equipped to interpret such art, the makers of which were invested in practices beyond the purview of academia. This points to the importance of shows such as this one, which emphasise the seriousness of the devotional, didactic, and in some instances, even scientific intentions of these artists. And so, the most exhilarating aspect of this exhibition is the unselfconscious and assured nature of the presented work. It is gratifying to encounter artworks that have been created according to criteria that transcends any trends or art market forces and are instead the outcome of a creative union between an artist and their kindred spirit.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, art historian, curator, and Director of Ormston House. 

padraicmoore.com

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MIGUEL AMADO REVIEWS THE LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2025. 

The spectre of empire haunts Liverpool. Everywhere across the city, British colonialism’s exploitation of people and lands near and far, and the corresponding wealth extraction for the benefit of the British aristocracy, is summoned. The theme of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, BEDROCK, draws directly from the city’s geology, but a complementary understanding of the concept, anchored in a social perspective, makes the articulation between the city and its history more thoughtful, and helps explicate the intellectual edifice formulated by curator Marie-Anne McQuay. In BEDROCK, the sandstone that spans Liverpool is more than a geological quotation; it is a metaphorical lens by which a wound in today’s society might be reclaimed, even if the fractured relationship between Liverpool and its past is too profound to ever be entirely repaired.

Alice Rekab is one of the 30 artists featured in BEDROCK, and their contribution encapsulates the curatorial premise. Like Rekab, around half of them operate from European cities – from Amsterdam to Vienna, Oslo, and Dublin – yet have roots in diaspora, with the majority exploring topics of identity and representation informed by their lived experience. In advancing a selection that pays particular attention to demographics and politically driven content, McQuay points to cultural hybridity as the quintessential characteristic of the twenty-first century, suggesting that contemporary Liverpool, independently of its complex foundational principle, synthetises such attribute. In this regard, BEDROCK aligns with a myriad of recent European biennials, placing a globalist interpretation of art at the core of their reason for existence. Similarly to those other biennials, BEDROCK struggles with Liverpool’s ambiguous historical condition as a centre of power, as well as the mere fact that its curatorial vision necessarily departs from a position of privilege – whether financial, ethnic or other – granted by its European institutional and ideological apparatus.

At The Bluecoat, Rekab presents an expansive, refined mix of works, both new and from recent years, that epitomise the questions posed in BEDROCK. The display consists of fragmented clay pieces that resemble body parts, African statuettes, miniature replicas of animals associated with wildness laying on found mirrors, and a salvaged cabinet holding archival items, from heirlooms to books. Furthermore, a wallpaper digitally blends old portraits of Rekab’s paternal grandmother and father, architectural details of The Bluecoat and other buildings where Rekab exhibited before, impressions of Rekab’s sculptures shown elsewhere, and fluid lines depicting transatlantic ship routes linking Liverpool, West Africa and the Caribbean, known as the ‘Blundell family’s slaving voyages’. Appropriately, the display is titled Bunchlann/Buncharraig (2019-25), linguistically relating ‘bedrock’ to notions of origin and family. 

Rekab’s display speaks to their Irish and Sierra Leonean heritage. It combines the Irish language and elements of the white monoculture in which they grew up, with aspects of a multifaceted Black culture acquired via interactions with their Sierra Leonean progenitors. At stake here are issues of racial memory, generational trauma in marginalised communities, and senses of displacement and belonging, all entangled with inherited and chosen lineage. The same theoretical framework guides another artist showcased at The Bluecoat, Amber Akaunu, whose film, Dear Othermother (2025), takes Black Liverpudlians as a subject in a fitting crossover of fact and self-reflection, typical of the regional stories the artist documents. The work is an emotional chronicle of kinship, pride, and resilience among single mothers from Toxteth, illuminating a matriarchal care network derived from need and solidarity.

Another interesting pairing of artists is that of DARCH (composed of Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) and Linda Lamignan at FACT. Lamignan’s three-channel video, We Are Touched by the Trees in a Forest of Eyes (2025), is a grandiose description of Liverpool’s commercial ties with the Nigerian state of Delta, predicated on palm oil and petroleum. In a captivating sequence of scenes, it demonstrates the antagonistic interests of Western corporations and the earth-oriented belief system of the region’s inhabitants. To create their installation, Heaven in the Ground (2025), DARCH collaborated with residents of Sefton, a village in Merseyside, to compile accounts of their worldview – which integrates humanity, nature, and spirituality in equal terms – focusing on death and grief. DARCH render them in audio, accompanied by four interconnected soil mounds, above and within which are animals, fabricated in ceramic.

A rich layering of narratives with the exhibition’s theme appears outdoors and in unconventional locations. Along Barry Street is Kara Chin’s installation Mapping the Wasteland (2025), a group of tiles inserted into the concrete paving stone that poignantly address the impact of overconsumption. At a warehouse in Jordan Street, Imayna Caceres’s installation, Underground Flourishings (2025), comprises countless intricate clay pieces uniting the artist’s Peruvian ancestry with matter and water sourced from the Mersey and Danube Rivers to elegantly consider primeval ways of life. 

Also of note is Isabel Nolan’s sculpture Where You Are, What We Are, with Others (2025), set against the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. The work is inspired by interior design plans for the Lutyens Crypt, part of this site, and the demolished St Nicholas Pro-Cathedral. The forms are infused with ecclesiastical sensibility, smartly resonating with the construction: Arched window frames unfold in a concertina motif, whether in colourful and delicate or austere and brutalist lines. They are barely held together, conveying a state of imminent collapse. The work examines the role of religion – including sectarianism and inter-faith encounter – in defining Liverpool’s civic mindset, and expands Nolan’s enduring interest in the intersections of architecture, myth, iconography, and abstraction.

Arguably, BEDROCK’s highlight is at Walker Art Gallery. In dialogue with a collection developed during Liverpool’s economic heyday – and still a symbol of the city’s engagement with art – Antonio José Guzmán and Iva Janković present Concrete Roots/Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic (2025), a potent iteration in their series of large-scale modular structures that serve as backdrops for textile banners and soundscapes, as well as scenarios for performances. In all works by the duo, the textile banners are dyed in the unique indigo of a workshop in India that employs artisanal methods. This substance, once known as ‘blue gold’, was a highly prized commodity in Europe, and rapidly acquired the status of cash crop across the colonised world, from India to South Carolina, mostly relying on slave labour. 

The textile banners bear abstract patterns influenced by DNA sequences that evoke the forced resettlement of enslaved West Africans in the Americas. The music is affiliated with dub, a style that emerged in Jamaica. In conjunction, they express a wider, distinctive Black culture formed through the exchange, and later fusion, of artefacts and knowledge from West Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and England – what has been designated the Black Atlantic. Here, a more contextual output is illustrated by allusions to urban unrest using printed textual graphics – a nod to Liverpool’s so-called race riot in Toxteth in 1981 (which actually involved members of the working class from diverse backgrounds), which is explicitly referenced in the soundtrack.

It is precisely this commitment to the locale that upholds the ideas and materials amalgamated in BEDROCK, so eloquently elucidated in Guzmán and Janković’s work by addressing legacies of dissidence in Liverpool. In addition, because Guzmán and Janković are surrounded by the paintings and sculptures of the Walker Art Gallery – assembled in the context of the institution’s embedment with Liverpool’s mercantile elite of British colonialism – they are able to establish a parallel between the titular Black Atlantic and processes of capital accumulation that provoked, and continue to shape, inequality and segregation, whether dividing the West from the rest of the world or, within the West, the working versus the ruling classes.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and Director of Sirius Arts Centre.

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MAEVE MULRENNAN REVIEWS THE HELSINKI BIENNIAL.

The third edition of the Helsinki Biennial (8 June – 21 September), entitled ‘SHELTER: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging’, vibrantly continues the ecological discourse of the previous two editions. Founded in 2021, this focused biennial has so far been largely concerned with the climate crisis and the place of art in conversations on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. An enduring enquiry into the relationships between the maritime city, nature, and art is the conceptual foundation of the biennial. In its third iteration, this relevant and pressing thematic is still fresh and far from exhausted. 

Curated by Blanca de la Torre, Director of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), and Kati Kivinen, Director of the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), this iteration offers somewhat hopeful perspectives on the climate crisis. None of the 57 artworks feature humans as the main subject, although the environmental destruction caused by humans is all too present. De la Torre and Kivinen’s curation harnesses innovative approaches, genuinely rooted in an ecological ethos, with ‘SHELTER’ seeking to address the imbalances between humankind and nature, offering a multi-species and holistic alternative future. 

The work of 37 artists and collectives is presented across three venues: HAM and Esplanade Park – a long, narrow greenway – are in the city centre, while Vallisaari Island, a now-uninhabited nature reserve, is a short ferry ride from Helsinki. A military site until the 1990s, many of the empty military buildings on Vallisaari Island make perfect, if somewhat dystopian, settings in which to encounter artworks. Disembarking visitors are greeted with the visual spectacle of Pia Sirén’s Under Cover (2025) – a gateway installation of a mountainous landscape, made from tarpaulins and plastics, which camouflages a large, derelict building. Under Cover creates space for viewers to contemplate this artwork and prepare for the others they will encounter on the island. 

Located on the trek around the island perimeter is Hans Rosenström’s Tidal Tears (2025). The work comprises a circle of petrified wooden columns, a pool of water, and an ethereal audio piece that sounds like a primordial opera, borne from the earth. As with many of the works presented on Vallisaari, the audience is cast into the role of witness. Islands lend themselves to interstices, and this setting is the perfect curatorial device for works exploring alternate realities and non-anthropocentric models.  

The Helsinki Biennial has a practice of commissioning permanent artworks, which includes a number of new commissions this year for ‘SHELTER’. Sara Bjarland’s sculptures, entitled Stranding (2025), are bronze casts of semi-deflated, dolphin-shaped, plastic swimming floats, beached on the rocky shore. These emotive works are forever trapped in the liminality of half-inflation, underlining the permanence of plastic waste and the fragility of marine ecosystems. 

Irish artist Katie Holten’s work, Learning To Be Better Lovers (Forest School) (2025), straddles two separate sites: an indoor ‘classroom’ set-up on Vallisaari, and an installation of flags along the Esplanade. The classroom offers a communal, participatory experience, which gently asks viewers for their time and contemplation. Holten presents a reimagined alphabet, which includes letters from the Finnish alphabet as well as drawings of trees, plants, fungi, and birds from the island. An accompanying guide includes walks, instructions, conversations, breathing exercises, and a considered text, written by the artist. The alphabet and guide are available to download from the biennial website (helsinkibiennaali.fi). 

As with many of the other works, Learning To Be Better Lovers is concerned with the climate crisis without inciting feelings of helplessness or hopelessness. There is a direct dialogue between art and landscape, with plenty of space to meaningfully connect with this proposition. However, the busy Esplanade promenade in Helsinki city centre is a tough site to present work. Holten’s work is exhibited as a set of flags, which manage to both stand apart from the busy site while appearing to integrate into the fabric of the city. The flags contain ‘letters’ of the Forest Alphabet. Even if a viewer does not read the accompanying explanatory text, there is still the feeling that the flags are communicating something. Esplanade Park has a colonial appearance, with manicured lawns and trees planted in rows, casting dappled shadows on bronze monuments. Holten’s work reminds us that there are alternatives to prevailing systems, with re-foresting and re-wilding conceptualised as acts of love. 

HAM contains works that benefit from a gallery space rather than an outdoor environment. Ofrenda (Offering) (2024), an installation by Regina de Miguel, comprises paintings, engravings, and a mural, which read as a visual encyclopaedia of a multi-species, harmonious universe. Engravings on metal plates are reminiscent of the Voyager Golden Records –  phonograph records, launched aboard the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, containing sounds and images, selected to portray the diversity and beauty of life on Earth to extraterrestrials.

Artist/activist Jenni Laiti and photographer/reindeer herder Carl-Johan Utsi, both Sámi, present the beautiful video work, Teardrops of Our Grandmother (2023). It is a poetic meditation on the precarity of Sámi life and culture, due to shifting arctic weather conditions and other persistent threats to Indigenous communities. The piece explores the relationship between intergenerational trauma, the land, and the animals bonded to it. Like Holten’s work, the piece invites the viewer to slow down, nurture their relationship with the natural world, and participate in nature’s healing.

The curators describe ‘SHELTER’ as a “caring space where all lifeforms can thrive” (sttinfo.fi). The focus on non-human nature and indigenous narratives creates perspectives not traditionally prioritised within the Western art canon. However, across a former military site, manicured park, and white cube museum space, we are reminded of the negative impacts of colonialism and capitalism on our world, which cannot be disregarded.

Maeve Mulrennan is Assistant Arts Officer in Cork County Council.

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JOANNE LAWS REPORTS ON A PILOT INITIATIVE TO ENHANCE THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSURE OF IRELAND-BASED ARTISTS.  

When attending the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial in June 2023, I was perplexed to find that no Ireland-based artists had been selected to participate in the programme. Notwithstanding the creative synergy that had been cultivated with the Irish visual arts community in recent years, Liverpool has always held robust historical connections to the Irish diaspora. An accessible port of entry during the Great Famine and beyond, the city’s demographics and cultural landscape have been significantly shaped by Irish immigrants. 

Curated by Cape Town-based independent curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and titled ‘uMoya: The sacred Return of Lost Things’, the 12th edition aimed to “address the history and temperament of Liverpool” – a city deeply intertwined with the colonial era, when it served as a major port for the exchange of goods and enslaved people between the West Indies, Africa, and the Americas. Indeed, the city even has an International Slavery Museum to mediate this dark history, and several key exhibitions were staged for the biennial in a former tobacco warehouse in Stanley Dock.

If ‘uMoya’ was a “call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing” I could think of more than a dozen Ireland-based artists who would have been ideally positioned to contribute to this critical conversation, not least Alice Rekab, whose work emerges from their mixed-race Irish Sierra Leonean identity, and whose astonishing exhibition, ‘Family Lines’, had been presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery the previous summer. 

What were the possible explanations for such an omission? I briefly considered whether this could be partly due to the increasingly complex customs and shipping bureaucracy caused by Brexit. Perhaps deficits within Irish infrastructure or policy-making were somehow failing to equip artists with the funding or commercial leverage to prominently showcase their work abroad? Gradually, it seemed most likely that there were simply tangible gaps in the knowledge of international curators about the vibrancy and tenacity of the Irish visual arts. 

Around the same time, Culture Ireland launched Ireland Invites, a new initiative in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the Hugh Lane Gallery, aimed at enhancing the international exposure of Irish-based visual artists by hosting biennial curators. As the three-year pilot project reaches is conclusion, an impact report has recently been compiled to relay the findings, including some optimistic participation statistics.

According to the report, 52 Ireland-based artists hosted studio visits with invited curators, which resulted in 14 artists being chosen to participate across seven different international biennials. 

The first curator to participate in the initiative was Inti Guerrero, Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney, who visited in May 2023. Having curated the 38th edition of EVA International in Limerick in 2018, Inti was well-placed as the first invitee. During his visit, Inti gave a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery, and subsequently selected Breda Lynch to present her Cyanotype print, Cake Bomb (2016) – part of a long-running series focusing on identity, hidden histories, and queer culture – at the 24th Biennale of Sydney.

Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López, co-curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024, visited Ireland in August 2023 whereupon a public conversation was held with Annie Fletcher at IMMA. Artist Léann Herlihy was subsequently invited to install their photographic work, to be nowhere (2022–ongoing), in downtown Toronto as an enormous, iconic billboard. Speaking of their participation in Ireland Invites, artist Léann Herlihy said: “Meeting the curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024 […] was a pivotal point in my practice, opening up space for a plethora of disparate narratives to crossover. Subsequently participating in the Toronto Biennial, I witnessed the transformative potential of reciprocated care within curatorial practices and how this care and attention drew out the joyous rage within artists’ practices. One of the highlights of this opportunity was meeting the other participating artists and learning about their work and life worlds – an accumulation of knowledge I hold dear to me.”

Binna Choi, one of three curators of the Hawai’i Triennial 2025, visited Ireland in February 2024, undertaking several studio visits and delivering a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery. Binna’s visit resulted in four artists (Vivienne Dick, Kian Benson Bailes, Isabel Nolan and Belinda Quirke) being invited to contribute to a bespoke triennial programme, called Kīpuka Ireland, in April 2025, comprising sonic performance, film screenings, and workshops. Speaking of her experience, Bina said: “Ireland Invites opened up new, unexpected lines of resonance, connection and friendship between Ireland and Hawaii. My visit to Ireland allowed me to meet a number of artists in Dublin as well as other areas whose practice and concerns resonate with artists of Hawaii so much in terms of its geographic positionality, colonial experience and the politics of decolonization, value of culture, land, tradition, and critical practice of indigenization. This led me into conceiving the visiting program Kīpuka Ireland within the context of Hawai‘i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NÕ. This could not be realized without inspiring encounters in Ireland as well as the relationship forged with new colleagues and institutions in Ireland.” 

Blanca de la Torre, Head Curator of the Helsinki Biennial, visited Ireland in July 2024 and subsequently selected Katie Holten to participate in the third edition of the biennial, which launched in June of this year (see pp. 38–39). Speaking of her visit to Ireland, Blanca said: “I had the privilege of engaging with a remarkable community of Irish artists whose practices closely align with my curatorial research interests. The programme offered the opportunity to deliver a lecture at IMMA and collaborate with its exceptional team of women professionals. This experience provided valuable insights into the contemporary art landscape in Ireland and facilitated meaningful dialogues that will continue to inform my curatorial practice.”

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and Basil Al-Rawi were selected by John Tain for the Lahore Biennale 2024 through his participation in Ireland Invites, while Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan, George Bolster, and Kira O’Reilly were selected by Apinan Poshyananda for the Bangkok Biennale 2024.

Returning to my opening lines about the Liverpool Biennial, I was thrilled to see the inclusion of Alice Rekab this summer in the 13th edition, as a direct result of Ireland Invites. Isabel Nolan was also invited to participate, and both artists created ambitious, site-responsive works for gallery settings and the public realm. ‘BEDROCK’ continues across Liverpool until 14 September (see pp. 34–35).

Commenting on her visit to Ireland, Liverpool Biennial Director, Dr Samantha Lackey stated: “In 2024 Ireland Invites extended the opportunity to join a group of international curators and directors, visiting the brilliant EVA International. My time in Limerick and subsequently Dublin enabled me to further explore the deep connections between Liverpool and Ireland and convinced me of the importance of bringing in a curator who had existing connections with Irish artists to curate our 2025 festival.” Curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2025, Marie-Anne McQuay, added that: “Working with Isabel Nolan and Alice Rekab has been a joy and a privilege. The work exhibited by both artists has a special resonance with the city – Isabel responding to the city’s historic art collections and lost architecture, while Alice engages with stories of migration and belonging, narratives shared between Dublin and Liverpool. I can’t thank them enough for their outstanding contributions.” 

Overall, the documented successes of Ireland Invites attest not only to the effectiveness of the initiative in the short-term – insofar as the collegiate gestures of invitation and hosting clearly result in the more prominent showcasing of Ireland-based artists on the international biennial circuit – but to its less tangible and longer-term influence on international curatorial knowledge. One hopes that this can be consolidated and progressively expanded upon in the future, with each new round of curatorial invitation. 

Joanne Laws is Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

visualartists.ie

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Irish Arts Center, New York

6 September 2024 – 15 January 2025 

Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher’s magisterial textile work The Map (2021) was installed at the Irish Art Center in New York during a febrile period ahead of the US election. Part of an occasional visual arts programme at IAC, it was suspended in the black box studio, approached verso so that the territories stitched and painted on its front were visible as floating shadows denuded of detail as you entered the theatre – ghosts of a terra incognita. 

On its worked side, The Map offers a fantastical cartography of Mary Magdalene, her iconography, associations, and the ‘muddle of Marys’ and unnamed women in the Bible whose stories became bundled in with hers. Symbols associated with the Magdalene become sites. Spikenard Lighthouse beams across Ointment Bay. The seven devils driven out of her appear as a range of active volcanoes. Other geographical features pay tribute to her penitence, her lamentation at the base of the cross, her presence at the resurrection, and her 30 years of hermitage in the south of France.

The greatest territory of the map charts the world of female transgression that has become associated with the Magdalene, whose name (in Ireland) is synonymous with sin. The hot tubs of the City of Lovers sit on the Swamp of Transgressions, close to Country Girl Cove. Lest we forget what is being defended in the moral policing of women, the isle of Heterotopia is flanked by Utopia and Myopia. Above them float Hysteria and the Isle of Shits. 

An island named The System carries the floorplans of laundries at High Park, Donnybrook, and Séan McDermott Street in Dublin and Sunday’s Well in Cork. Here, unwed mothers and other wayward and unruly women were incarcerated and forced into labour, their babies taken for adoption. At the bottom of The Map, The Nappery is stitched from scraps of old stained tablecloths above which drying racks whirl, named for the Ryan and McAleese Reports.

Three years in the making, The Map was first shown at Rua Red Gallery. The work takes on fresh associations in New York. Following the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, women’s reproductive rights have become a key electoral issue. As Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) reminds us, the control structure of the laundries was exported. In Hartman’s stories of young black women born after emancipation, the threat of the Magdalene House haunts those who dare pursue sexual relations outside of wedlock or across colour lines, to those who stay out too late, or draw attention to themselves. 

The Map’s exhibition period was brief – a little under a month. It is outlasted by ‘Untying the Knots’, a small exhibition in the building’s public spaces that elaborates and extends the world of The Map. Suspended within the atrium, and visible from multiple levels, The Mantle is a new collaborative work, rich with roots and veins and a vocabulary of symbols rendered in embroidery, lace, and knotwork. In title, it refers to the Irish mantle, a loose woollen garment subject to prohibition under various sumptuary laws from the 15th century on. Across its surface in Gaelic script is a repeating call – Scaoilimis Gach Snaidhm – ‘Let us untie all the knots’. Fallon and Maher’s collaboration began on the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment (2015-18), and like the protest banners they designed, The Mantle is rendered in lush silks in shades of pink and yellow – an object of beauty as well as a testament to centuries of cultural suppression. 

Each artist has taken a wall on the ground floor for an individual work. Drawn onto a white wall in charcoal, Maher’s Untying is a long braid, licking across the surface like a whip – women’s hair, so often subject to regulation, here becomes an emblem of freedom and power. Opposite, the fine white crochet of Fallon’s Measure by Knots stretches across a dark metallic surface like a network of nerves. It’s a medium Fallon deploys for its socio-historic associations, thinking of the women who made lace to support families during Ireland’s famine years, and the vast migration through New York that coincided with it.  

Against the backdrop of a fractious and divided city, The Map and ‘Untying the Knots’ evoke women’s resistance across time and geographies. Acknowledging repression – historically, as well as in our own time – in these works, humour and beauty become an invitation to rally, to share stories, skills and knowledge. 

Hettie Judah is a writer and curator based in London. Her latest book, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, was recently published by Thames & Hudson, while a touring exhibition of the same name, commissioned by Hayward Gallery and curated by Judah, is currently showing at Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. Both Maher and Fallon feature in the book, while Fallon’s Aprons of Power (2018) are presented in the exhibition. 

hettiejudah.co.uk

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AOIFE DONNELLAN INTERVIEWS CURATOR NÓRA Ó MURCHÚ.

Based between Berlin and Ireland for the last four years, curator and researcher Nóra Ó Murchú’s practice examines digital culture as well as the effects of technological developments on social systems. During her time as artistic director of transmediale festival in Berlin, Ó Murchú commissioned work from a number of international as well as Irish artists, including Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan, Jennifer Walshe, and Alan Butler, among many others. As the first female director in the festival’s 37-year history, Ó Murchú’s programming aimed to centre previously absent voices, specifically in relation to decoloniality. We spoke about building a career abroad, her curatorial practice, and her experience of engaging with the Irish art scene from Berlin. 

Aoife Donnellan: Having worked extensively internationally, both as a curator and a researcher, what has your experience been in building your career abroad?

Nóra Ó Murchú: With the topics that I work on in my own research, it’s been primarily bigger countries that had a larger portion of people interested in tech, but I do think that’s really changed. I was based in Ireland until 2020, so had a few different things that I was doing. For example, when I was working on my PhD, I started a digital art festival in Ireland and was building up my network through inviting people and attending events. Then, as I began to have a larger network and meet different people, I started getting invited to curate different things. Simultaneously, I was also working as an academic at the University of Limerick. I was writing about digital art and technology, and I was publishing at the same time as attending conferences and art events. I have tried to grow my practice through those approaches. 

AD: Your work examines how people engage with and build socio-technical systems. Does it benefit particularly from international collaboration? 

NoM: Yes, of course, but that wasn’t the main priority. When I first started out, technology wasn’t something that a lot of artists in Ireland, or artists generally, were exploring. Over time, what we have seen is that more and more artists have started to occupy and work with the medium and format. I never studied art – I come from a technical engineering background. However, when I was in University of Limerick doing my Masters, I got very into research on digital art, and then realised it was something I wanted to investigate. I was always interested in curation, and my PhD looked at curatorial methods in the context of digital art. 

AD: While you were artistic director at transmediale, you commissioned a number of Irish artists. How did you find the process of collaborating with Irish artists from abroad?

NoM: One of the main things I wanted to do, while I was there, was to highlight Irish artists who are working in this space. The previous directors were all male, and they were all either German or Swedish. The last director, for example, presented a lot of American and British artists and researchers at the festival. Going into transmediale, I knew I was really interested in decolonial practices; that was one of the things I was determined to show and exhibit, by inviting people from those contexts and with those types of practices into the festival. 

I also wanted to push away from the very screen-heavy, tech-heavy emphasis on what technical practices or digital art can and should be. I was very interested in the poetics of software, sculpture and materiality. It was really important that the artists I selected were also thinking through some of these lenses as well. Coming from an Irish context, I wanted to highlight that – it’s the place where a lot of my thinking originates, about what decolonial technology is and how it has been formulated. I’m a by-product of a geographical space, of history, of memory and of lived experiences, and so I wanted to ensure that Irish artists were part of that discourse. 

AD: What was your curatorial approach to these collaborations?

NoM: I had this unspoken agenda to include Irish artists while I was there, and then I also shared my research with them as I was progressing. For example, the work I was developing that resulted in a commission with Alan Butler in 2023 – I would share that research with him, and we would have many conversations back and forth about the same themes, ideas and topics. This dialogue would inform my writing or thinking and likewise his. I generally try to develop very reciprocal relationships with artists. When it comes to commissioning work, I have different relationships with different artists. My objective is to support artists in what they’re making, and then I would have as many conversations as they would like, in order to talk about the commission or the work. 

AD: Finally, what are you working on at the minute?

NoM: Right now, I’m focused on a few different projects. I’m working with Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art (aksioma.org) which is a project space in Lithuania, to look at my concept of unusable politics. I will be doing a piece of writing, defining what this is, and we’re going to build a small discursive and exhibition programme that will stem from this research. A lot of it is raising questions about what software is, how it has evolved, and the impedances to new collective forms of action at various levels in society. How do you reorganise or rethink what collective action is online, as increasingly, technology encroaches on your day-to-day? It’s thinking about those things. 

Aoife Donnellan is a researcher, art writer, and curator from Limerick, based between London and Berlin. 

@aoife_donnellan_

Nóra Ó Murchú is a curator and researcher who examines the intersections between fields of art, design, software studies, and politics. 

noraomurchu.com

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VARVARA KEIDAN SHAVROVA REVIEWS THE CURRENT SCULPTURE EXHIBITION AT HAYWARD GALLERY LONDON. 

Currently showing at the Hayward Gallery in London until 6 May, ‘When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture’, presents a substantial survey exhibition, under the curatorial direction of Ralph Rugoff, and assistant Katie Guggenheim. 

Presenting over 50 artworks by 21 international artists across three floors of the gallery’s brutalist interior, the exhibition features expanded sculptural works that originate in the natural world and interrogate sculpture as a methodology of transformation and change. ‘When Forms Come Alive’ addresses the instability of the modern world, in which everything changes all the time, and where nothing is safe, predictable, or static. 

If you study the principle of nature, the answers are all there 

– Ruth Asawa¹

At first glance, this seems to be an impossible task, to represent constant flux through sculptural forms that are typically made from stable materials and that may otherwise traditionally assume the authoritative stature of ‘monuments’. Yet permanence and monumentality could not be further from the preoccupations of the artists and curators of this exhibition. Rather, their interests seem to lie in exploring sculptures that respond to abstracted ideas about nature, the Anthropocene, the post-human, and existentialist uncertainties prompted by the climate emergency and escalating militarism. Through the rigours of abstraction, various sculptural identities present themselves, letting us appreciate their materiality and purposeful human creation on the one hand, whilst simultaneously exploring the whimsical, almost accidental qualities of form and juxtaposition on the other. 

I don’t make sculptures; I make beings that are alive 

– Marguerite Humeau² 

The curatorial approach in ‘When Forms Come Alive’ sets up a series of conversations whereby sculptures and installations with shared questions and approaches are grouped together. As a result, the exhibition flows organically, thus reinforcing the curatorial proposition that the selected sculptures draw inspiration from and reflect our relationship to the natural world. 

For example, at the entrance, the viewer is confronted by two highly ambitious, yet fragile and time-based sculptural installations: Shylight (2006-14) by DRIFT and Bouquet Final (2012) by Michel Blazy. The first consists of petticoat-like forms which lower and raise, open and close like blossoming flowers in a choreographed kinetic light installation. Blazy’s artwork emanates a similar sense of ceaseless change and fragility through the constant accumulation of foam bubbles to form cloud-like waves of shivering matter that creep, glacially, from a scaffold structure, as if part of an endless production line. 

Several artworks actively respond to the architectural fabric of the building itself, including its riverside location. Holly Hendry’s Slackwater (2023) is perched on a second-floor windowsill against the backdrop of the only exterior view seen from the gallery. Inspired by the abstract rhythms of the River Thames and liquid movements within the human body, the immense sculptural entanglement spreads from inside out onto the roof space, using steel ducting, foam, and marble. 

Ernesto Neto’s fibre installation, Iaia Kui Dau Arã Naia (2021) is brilliantly placed above the cast concrete spiral staircase, that by contrast, accentuates its transparency, fragility, and gravitational force. Pinned to the gallery wall and spilling onto the floor, Senga Nengudi’s wonderfully whimsical compositions – R.S.V.P. Reverie (Scribe) (1977), R.S.V.P. Reverie ‘D (2014), and Water Composition I (1969-70/2019) – feature sand-filled, tension-stretched nylon tights, and vinyl structures filled with coloured water, that are both touching and humorous in their vulnerability. Reminiscent of popular culture images of nuclear disaster, Dream – Spontaneous Combustion (2008) by Olaf Brzeski is a cloud-like form in black soot, ash, and polyurethane resin that is petrified and unnerving.

It is plainly observable how matter imposes its own form upon form 

– Henri Focillon³

Phyllida Barlow’s untitled: girl ii (2019) presents the viewer with an arrangement of stone-like forms, reminiscent of a dolmen, a megalithic monument, or another prehistoric manmade structure. Through this powerful evocation of abstracted corporeal presence, Barlow’s sculpture thus achieves a primaeval effect; an ancient presence with tactile surfaces and curvaceous forms, seemingly imbued with timeless feminine power. One wonders whether this sculpture may always have existed since time immemorial.

Until once, in a standing circle of stones,

I felt their shadows pass

Into that dark permanence of ancient forms.  

– John Montague⁴

By avoiding representational sculpture and its idioms of frozen life, this exhibition allows the viewer to engage with the wider and deeper concepts of decay and renewal; of change and its inevitability, indeed, its necessity. The excellent curation of the show raises a host of questions and invites visitors to reflect on possible answers.  

Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist, curator, writer, and PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. She is currently conducting her 12-month AHRC-funded research placement at the Science Museum in London. As part of her research, she is also collaborating with Rolls-Royce Aviation. 

varvarashavrova.com

¹ Extract from the opening speech by Ralph Rugoff, Director of Hayward Gallery and Curator of ‘When Forms Come Alive’, 6 February 2024.

² Ralph Rugoff, When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture, exhibition catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2024) p 9.

³ Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992) p 19.

⁴ Extract from John Montague, Like Dolmens Round my Childhood, first published in Poisoned Lands and Other Poems (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961).

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Presented at the Hayward Gallery between February and May, ‘Extinction Beckons’, was a partial, albeit intentionally distorted, survey of Mike Nelson’s practice from the mid-1990s to the present day. With its ominous title, the exhibition reconfigured and reimagined 15 of the artist’s major works and incorporated materials from various other sources. 

Twice nominated for the Turner prize, Nelson was born in 1967, the year before the Hayward Gallery opened in 1968. Designed by Higgs and Hill, the emblematic piece of brutalist architecture, with its exposed grey concrete, at one point in time represented the same collapsed post-war ideals that Nelson often excavates and complicates through his sculptural practice.  

Nelson conjures reclaimed materials that have long since passed their initial function in the realms of industry and architecture to construct large-scale immersive and labyrinthine installations which subvert and occasionally obliterate the viewer’s expectations of a space. Early in his career, he developed hybrid scripts, blending obscure political and counterculture subjects into Borges-esque fictions, inferred through installations that suggest the viewer is occupying a strange space of something that has long since happened or has only just occurred. Broken old doors, straight and bent rebar, cast concrete remnants, waiting rooms, busted tyres, empty barrels, creaky corridors, worn-down floorboards, bits of plastic, sun tarnished images, sand-covered buildings, stopped clocks, a tipped-over chair beside a roulette table, an empty bar, and rusty cogs from retired machines, are but some of the reoccurring combinations and materials appearing throughout Nelson’s practice. 

Solstice – from the series ‘The Asset Stripers’, shown in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2019 – is made of hay rakes, steel trestles and girders, concrete slabs, and other materials which were conflated and flattened to the extent that their original function is incomprehensible. Untitled (public sculpture for a redundant space) (2016), which was situated under one of the Hayward Gallery’s iconic brutalist staircases, comprises an algae-covered sleeping bag, filled with bricks and concrete. The imprints of bodies are everywhere in Nelson’s work, but actual human forms are nowhere to be seen.

From the very start of the exhibition, the viewer’s familiarity with the gallery is intentionally skewed. An invigilator is waiting at a door; not the usual entrance into the space, rather the narrow entrance of the gallery’s old book shop. After a set of instructions and warnings are issued by, in my case, an extremely tired invigilator (who had perhaps unconvincingly said the same line, “Welcome to the Hayward Gallery”, a couple of thousand times already that day), I enter a corridor, where the gallery’s mediation explains that the first work in the exhibition is I, imposter (2011) – a work first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2011. A storage room is lit by red light entering through an artificial window; it contains work piled on deconstructed factory shelves, and the work is not installed in the original form. It feels as though I am walking around an abandoned warehouse while an apocalyptic scenario unfolds outside. 

Storage, something waiting, a moment in time passed; such themes are conceptually foregrounded at the very start of this exhibition and this register permeates throughout. Elements of I, imposter were also reused in other parts of the exhibition. The red-lit darkroom of the original installation is partially connected to the spectacular bunker-like structure of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), which in turn is surrounded by empty barrels of oil – a reimagined reconstruction of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) – and covered in forty tonnes of sand, as if a sandstorm has just occurred. 

The second room contains The Deliverance and The Patience (2001), a maze-like structure comprised of many corridors and rooms. The piece was first installed in an old brewery at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. The work itself is highly reminiscent of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album) (1990) and Nelson’s widely acclaimed installation, Coral Reef, which was installed in Matt’s Gallery in early 2000. The distinctive spaces of the installation seem to allude to fictions that are somehow just beyond comprehension. An empty bar, an airport waiting room, an altar for some occult ritual – each room is connected by a parataxis of squeaking old doors. However, despite the scope and spectacular calibre of these immersive installations, the work sits uncomfortably within the institution of the Hayward Gallery itself. 

Each piece was accompanied by an invigilator and often the popularity of the exhibition (I visited several times with my students) meant that viewing each piece came with a long queue and detailed waiting instructions. The problem was not the queuing but what was encountered between the works. The exhibition differed from previous iterations of Nelson’s work in that the institutional mediation felt at times unchecked. It is impossible not to think of the museum workers one encounters, who are perpetually reeling off scripts or clicking tally counters. The Hayward Gallery, as part of the wider Southbank Centre, initiated mass redundancies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Precarious labour, declining living conditions, and the erosion of workers’ rights are further implications of the failed utopian promise muted by post-war modernism that Nelson’s work so heavily hinges upon. Inadvertently and explicitly, the blockbuster exhibition serves to highlight some of the complex inequalities operating within large art institutions today. 

Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer who lives and works in London.

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