Home is where the art is

A collaborative project between IMMA's department of education and community and Focus Ireland, a charity fighting homelessness. Together, they have selected 16 works from the museum's collection to mark the 21st anniversary of Focus Ireland. With the historical experience of Ireland as a place of mass emigration and, more recently, its experience as a country of migration, the exhibition examines our shifting concept of the ‘home' as not only a place of shelter, but as a sense of belonging to a community and a culture.

A   collaborative project between IMMA's department of education and community and Focus Ireland, a charity fighting homelessness. Together, they have selected 16 works from the museum's collection to mark the 21st anniversary of Focus Ireland. With the historical experience of Ireland as a place of mass emigration and, more recently, its experience as a country of migration, the exhibition examines our shifting concept of the ‘home' as not only a place of shelter, but as a sense of belonging to a community and a culture.

The show opens with Vik Muniz's monumental ‘Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll' (2004), an impressive iconic replication of the Victorian child who inspired the book Alice in Wonderland. Originally constructed out of polychrome plastic toys and other paraphernalia from a post-industrial childhood, it refers to poverty, vulnerability and, perhaps, the so-called ‘Carroll Myth'.

Directly adjacent is Paddy Jolley's ‘Hereafter' (2002), one of the most haunting and multi-dimensional pieces in the exhibition. Part animation, part real-time, the black and white video features an abandoned domestic interior rapidly disintegrating as water cascades down its walls, dislodging wallpaper and objects with it. There is a sense of a deep, affecting presence in these deserted rooms, brought about by the personal items left behind by their previous inhabitants, reminiscent of footage broadcast in the aftermath of bombings in Iraq, of Hurricane Katrina and the Southeast Asia tsunami.

Although it speaks of collective displacement in the face of disaster, the work has a particular and local resonance. It was filmed in Ballymun's tower blocks; an area targeted for radical social and economic change and famous for its notoriously unsuccessful public-housing scheme, through which residents were asked to move from their flats in the tower blocks, destroying an already fragile community.

Dimitri Tsykalor's ‘Chalet/Shed' (2003) is a life-size sports car fashioned exclusively out of wood and furnished with a bed, clock-radio, houseplant, key rack and postcard of the Eiffel Tower taped to its dashboard. Its comical appearance is quickly diminished by its reference to the ‘debt culture' of Ireland and, more obviously, the less amusing aspects of those forced to sleep in cars.
Occupying much of the floor in the first gallery is ‘Property' (1998), a sprawling miniature city by Beate Klein and Hendrijke Kuhn made out of newspaper cuttings of properties advertised in the Irish Times during a period of unprecedented inflation in Dublin's housing in the late-1990s which saw many first-time buyers priced out of the market.

On the walls, there is an interesting juxtaposition of predictable paradigms of traditional life, such as Paul Henry's ‘Lake and Blue Mountains of Connemara' and Grace Henry's ‘Les Maison des Humbles', alongside more contemporary works such as Colin Middleton's ‘Strange Opening' and Tim Mara's ‘Power Cuts Imminent' (1975), a screen-print featuring the artist's wife and friends surrounded by electrical appliances.

Antoinette Sinclair

Curator, Oisín Gallery, 44 Westland Row, Dublin 2. www.oisingallery.com