Stan Douglas
5 June–20 September 2015
Etel Adnan
5 June–13 September 2015
Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital
Military Road
Kilmainham
Dublin 8
Ireland
Stan Douglas
IMMA presents the work of Canadian artist Stan Douglas in Ireland for the first time. The exhibition, Mise en Scène includes over 40 works, with a special focus on the photographs Douglas has produced since 2008, providing a rich introduction to the artist’s practice.
Stan Douglas came to international prominence in the 1990s when his film installation Der Sandmann was one of the highlights of Documenta X in 1997. Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Canada, Douglas is known for his films, photographs and installations that use new and outdated technologies, the media of cinema, TV and photography, the conventions of various Hollywood genres (including film noir and the Western) and reference classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka), to examine intersections of history and memory in evocative, mesmerising artworks.
The exhibition presents critically acclaimed photographic works ranging from his Crowds and Riots Series, 2008, to Mid Century Studio, 2010–2011, to some of his latest photographs, such as Hotel Vancouver, 2014. The exhibition also brings together the photograph series Malabar People, 2011, and Disco Angola, 2012, as well as the large-scale series of Interiors, 2009–11. Douglas’s monumental 2013 jazz-jam film Luanda – Kinshasa, 2013 an installation video featuring famed jazz musician Jason Moran in a re-creation of a 1973 Miles Davis recording session in the legendary Columbia 30th Street studio, NYC, is also presented at IMMA.
The exhibition is curated by Seamus Kealy, Director, Salzburger Kunstverein, and is part of an ongoing tour involving Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013–15).
Etel Adnan
IMMA presents the work of Lebanese artist, poet, and writer Etel Adnan in a solo exhibition of 30 works opening at IMMA on 5 June. Now in her 90s, Etel Adnan is an extraordinary creative voice and force of artistic renown. She moves freely between writing and art, poetry and tapestry. Many of these creative strands are denoted in the works on display in this exhibition.
A selection of the artist’s enigmatic and diminutive oil paintings showcase her use of rapid, thick strokes and distinctive shapes, representing the landscapes of California and the Mediterranean Sea. These works appear alongside a series of delicate leporellos where the transcriptions of her poems are recorded on unfolding urban landscapes, fusing Adnan’s parallel practice as artist and writer.
The exhibition also features two film works; Adnan’s Motion, 2012, a 90-minute silent unfurling of cityscapes, skies and sunsets, and The Otolith Group’s I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, 2012, a work shot largely in the artist’s Paris apartment which centres on a reading of her poetry. Both films are meditative explorations of nature and our presence within it.
One of the leading voices in contemporary Arab American literature since the 1960s, the Adnan exhibition includes a selection of her publications, from her iconic novel Sitt Marie-Rose (Éditions des femmes, 1978) to the Etel Adnan reader, To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is (Nightboat Books, 2014).
