Interventions Series
Commissioned by IMMA for Self-Determination: A Global Perspective

Array interventions commissioned by IMMA for the Self-Determination: A Global Perspective exhibitions in the East Wing Galleries. Using ephemera associated with statehood, such as monuments, stamps, crests and blueprints, these have been instigated by and sit in dialogue with artworks on display. 
Regalia: The Slapper is inspired by the rubber gloves of domestic labour, and hidden reproductive work, attested to by the use of children’s toy bricks. It sits at a height ideal for slapping the patriarchy. Worm’s Link/Nasc Peiste is the first in their lenticular stamp collection that layers hostile architecture with invasive creatures from the island’s past and present. Stormont-Na-Gig subverts the symbolic aspirations of Parliament Buildings into an iconography of the protests that take place there. An Immaculate Business Proposal refers to the Church and State collusion to control women. Two blind embossed prints depict templates for manipulating bodies through an architecture of control. In an alcove adjacent to Section 7: Architecture and Gender, Section 9: Erasures and Aleksandr Dozshenko’s film Ivan is a liminal space for reimagined queer narratives. Many Scented Wreaths, a pattern for a worker’s jacket infused with a Sapphist scent, that is refreshed as it dissipates, sits alongside An Evening Botanist a wilting vase of flowers that will be replaced with a commemorative plate depicting the same decayed floral arrangement. The embroidered crest Burn Out reasserts pre-christian associations of fire amidst the ongoing cultural displacement in Belfast resulting from fires that benefit property developers. Their final intervention materialised amongst Section 13: Language Acts during Seachtain na Gaelige in March 2024.

All images by Ros Kavanagh commissioned by IMMA