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25/7/2011

Two exhibitions

Irish Museum of Modern Art - IMMA, Dublin

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
For Tomorrow For Tonight

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, from Thailand, is a renowned independent film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His feature films include Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the prestigious 2010 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or prize; Tropical Malady, winner of a jury prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; Blissfully Yours, winner of the top prize in the Un Certain Regard program at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival; and Syndromes and a Century, which premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival and is the first Thai film to be entered in competition there.

Working outside the strict confines of the Thai film studio system, Weerasethakul has directed several features and dozens of short films. Themes reflected in his films frequently discussed in interviews include dreams, nature, sexuality and Western perceptions of Thailand and Asia. His films display a preference for unconventional narrative structures, like placing titles/credits at the middle of a film, and for working with those who have no previous experience of acting. The exhibition at IMMA, entitled For Tomorrow For Tonight, features new work that explores the theme of night through video, photographs and installation. Night and darkness are recurring motifs in Weerasethakul’s films (such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tropical Malady and The Primitive Project) and the themes are examined even further here. This new multimedia installation was made following The Primitive Project, which was shown to critical acclaim around the world, and his feature film Uncle Boonmee.

Weerasethakul was born in 1970 in Bangkok and grew up in Khon Kaen, a city in the north east of Thailand. He received a degree in Architecture from Khon Kaen University and a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been making films and videos since the early 1990s.

The exhibition, curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director of IMMA, is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue designed by Pony, London and featuring texts by Chris Dercon, Director of Tate Modern and Eungie Joo, curator at New Museum, New York among others. During July and August, the IFI is running a season of his films to coincide with the exhibition at the Museum.

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Gerard Byrne

A major exhibition of the work of the celebrated Irish artist Gerard Byrne opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 27 July 2011. THROUGH THE EYES comprises of a series of five projects dating from 2003 to 2010, surveying almost a decade in which his work has become widely recognised internationally. Byrne’s multi-layered approach to his work creates an exhibition that is both complex in its subject matter and recognisable in its imaginary reconstructions of the ongoing debates between the present, soon to be past, and the projected future. Influenced by literature and theatre, Byrne's work consistently references a range of sources, from popular magazines of the recent past to iconic Modernist playwrights such as Brecht, Beckett, and Sartre.

Byrne’s work encompasses film, video, photography and installation. Often taking texts as his starting point, it often takes the form of reconstructions, where actors use texts as formal scripts. The works are culturally coded and can be viewed as a critique of bourgeois culture from the period since the 1960s. Byrne places the works within contemporary settings, allowing for a distance between both recent historical moments and the present.

The works included in the exhibition are New Sexual Lifestyles, 2003, part of the IMMA Collection, and based on a conversation published in the September 1973 issue of Playboy magazine; Subject, 2009, commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds as part of the exhibition The New Monumentality, and shot on the campus of Leeds University; A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, 2010, a direct response to art critic Michael Fried’s seminal text Art and Objecthood, 1967; 1984 and beyond, 2007 and his ongoing project since 2001 Case Study: Loch Ness.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Byrne graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and the Lyon Biennale, in 2007 and at the Sydney Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale and the Turin Triennial, in 2008 and his work is currently on show in the Venice Biennale, 2011. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Lismore Castle, Co Waterford, Glasgow International Festival of Art, Lisson Gallery, London and Green On Red Gallery, Dublin. Group exhibitions include Little Theatre of Gestures, Malmo Konsthall, Sweden, Slow Movement at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and Sense and Sentiment at the Augarten Contemporary, Vienna, Austria.

Talk: On Tuesday 26 July at 5.00pm, in The Chapel at IMMA, Dr Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, critic, curator and lecturer at University College Dublin steers a conversation with the artist on selected works in the exhibition. Admission is free but booking is essential on www.imma.ie/talksandlectures

A publication, edited by curator and writer Pablo Lafuente, with contributions by critics Maeve Connolly, Bettina Funcke, Sven Lütticken, Tom McDonough, Jeremy Millar, Maria Muhle, Volker Pantenburg and Ian White, accompanies the exhibition.

A limited edition by Gerard Byrne is available to purchase.

For further information and images please contact Vanessa Cowley or Patrice Molloy at tel: + 353 1 612 9900; email: press@imma.ie

Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Kilmainham - Dublin
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday: 10.00am - 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am - 5.30pm
Free admission

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