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January 10, 2025 – Review
Hamad Butt’s “Apprehensions”
Tom Denman

Hamad Butt’s long overdue first retrospective opens with what might as well be a statement of unfinished business. A noticeboard headered with the word “TRANSMISSION” houses behind its glass doors a colony of live flies; pinned to the board are three sheets of A4 paper printed with tercets canticulating blindness, fear, contagion, and the obscuration of sex with death. Transmission (1990)—a chilling installation revolving a prayer circle of glass books splayed on the floor on parabolic legs, with the pages resembling wings, and the potentially blinding ultraviolet lights acting as spines, or thoraxes—is Butt’s first concrete response to the AIDS crisis, spurred by his own HIV-positive diagnosis in 1987, the same year he enrolled, aged twenty-five, at Goldsmith’s College in London. It was the focus of his degree show in June 1990, a month before the former Goldsmith’s student Damien Hirst exhibited his raucously acclaimed, also fly-infested A Thousand Years (1990). Presumably interpreting Hirst’s piece as plagiarism, Butt revoked the flies from his own installation and the original noticeboard has long been lost. Although the wall text omits this controversy, the curators have honored the artist’s decision by showing the refabricated component separately, presenting the rest of the installation in …
January 22, 2024 – Review
“Self-Determination: A Global Perspective”
Judith Wilkinson

“Everyone has the right to a nationality,” states article 15 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) and “no one shall be deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” As part of “Self-Determination: A Global Perspective,” Banu Çennetoğlu has filled the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s East Wing Gallery with three gigantic bouquets of gold helium letter balloons. Each bouquet, a mass of oversized jumbled letters, spells out a different article from the declaration. Throughout the course of the exhibition the balloons that make up right? (2022–ongoing) will deflate, lowering to the ground, until nothing remains but their empty carcasses.
An initiative of Annie Fletcher, IMMA’s director since 2019, “Self-Determination” explores the establishment of new post-World War I nation-states—including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and Ireland itself—focusing on the role that art and artists played in statecraft and the formation of the national imagination. The site of the exhibition, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (built in 1684 as a home for retired British soldiers), holds significance in the construction of the Irish nation. It was considered as a potential headquarters for Oíreachtas Shaorstát Éireann, the newly established government of the Irish Free State …