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Exploring Creative Practice at Sensitive Sites Seminar

Memory is not an instrument: a seminar on creative practice at sensitive sites

IMMA, Sat 12 April 2025, 2pm - 5pm

Booking and further details: https://imma.ie/whats-on/seminar-exploring-creative-practice-at-sensitive-sites/

This seminar brings together researchers and practitioners working across a range of art forms including sculpture, architecture and theatre making to present and discuss work created at sensitive sites, that is places and buildings associated with conflict, oppression, confinement and other harms. A strong focus of the seminar will be strategies for the research, realisation and production of artistic projects as well as ethical considerations when planning and creating work that not only addresses ‘difficult’ histories but that are embedded at both officially designated sites of conscience and places where sensitive histories may have been physically erased but still have material force.

Convened and moderated by Lisa Godson, a cultural historian whose work focusses on material culture, architecture, and artists’ use of the past (Programme leader, MA Design History and Material Culture at NCAD). Contributors include:

ANU Productions (Louise Lowe and Owen Boss), the multidisciplinary Irish production company that presents award winning theatre, visual art and socially engaged artworks

plattenbaustudio (Irish architects Jonathan Janssens and Jennifer O’Donnell), an architectural practice whose work includes extensive educational, mapping and exhibition work focussed on Ireland’s institutional history

Brian Hand, artist and Head of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD, whose site-specific work includes projects at the former workhouse in Kilkenny, the roof of the GPO and Kilmainham Gaol

Culturstruction (Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy), a multi-disciplinary practice whose work has included an exploration and celebration of rights of way at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham/IMMA focussed on the repressed celebrations for St John’s Eve and the common burial ground of Bully’s Acre

This seminar is supported by Research Ireland – Taighde Éireann, presented in partnership with IMMA. It is one outcome of the funded New Foundations project led by Lisa Godson ‘An oral history of the Irish Museum of Modern Art at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin’ as part of her broader publication project focussed on a critical material history of the site of IMMA/RHK.