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Inflammatory Speech: an Irish Museum of Modern Art commission

In July, Nathan O'Donnell, Suzanne Walsh and I operating as a collaborative unit received one of three project commissions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to create new work in response to the ROSC 50 exhibition.

After a four-month research and composition period, our resulting collaborative text and performance 'Inflammatory Speech' will be presented on Saturday 11 November at 2pm in The Johnston Suite at IMMA as part of an event showcasing the ROSC 50 artist research commissions.

Admission is free, but booking is required as places are limited:

"Audiences are invited to attend a seminar comprising of artists’ performance, lecture presentations, screening and a panel discussion. This includes research projects in response to the Rosc exhibitions: 'Prologue' by artist Amanda Coogan, 'Poverty of Vision' by Emma Haugh and a collaborative project titled ‘Inflammatory Speech’ by Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and Suzanne Walsh. Each artist has taken as their starting point the material relating to the Rosc exhibitions in the NIVAL archive, and are responding to themes relating to the ambition, memory and legacy of Rosc and also the critical and public engagement with the exhibitions. Other contributions will be presented by Brenda Moore-McCann, art historian, writer and appointed researcher of the IMMA/NIVAL: ROSC 50 - 1967 / 2017 project, and Valerie Connor, curator and educator, D.I.T."

About ROSC 50 and the Rosc exhibitions:

ROSC 50 is a collaborative research project between IMMA and NIVAL (The National Irish Visual Arts Library) to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Rosc exhibition in 1967. The Rosc exhibitions took place between 1967 and 1988 and had a significant impact on the development of contemporary art in Ireland. These pivotal, and often controversial, exhibitions were the first major series of large scale international art exhibitions in Ireland, at a time when Ireland did not have a National Museum of Contemporary Art. Rosc took place approximately every four years between 1967 and 1988, with IMMA being founded in 1991. From the Press Release:

"An important part of ROSC 50 is to uncover new research and new perspectives from both artists and audiences today, and to record these for future generations.  Audiences are being invited to submit their testimonials of their experiences of Rosc, which will in turn be folded back into the NIVAL archive, while artists Amanda Coogan, Emma Haugh and a collaborative project comprising Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and Suzanne Walsh have been selected from an invited call to undertake research projects in response to Rosc. Each will take as a starting point the material relating to Rosc in the NIVAL archive, and take into account of themes relating to the ambition, memory and legacy of Rosc and also the critical and public engagement with the exhibitions."

About 'Inflammatory Speech':

"Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and Suzanne Walsh are proposing, Inflammatory Speech: a research programme and subsequent performative event in response to Rosc. It is devised as a collaboration between three practitioners working at the intersections of contemporary art, poetry, and writing. Inverting Rosc’s subtitle – ‘the poetry of vision’ – they propose an alternative ‘vision of poetry.’ They will create a repository of material from the Rosc archive from which they will shape several original poetic texts for performance. This may take the form of a multivocal or polyphonic performance; a sort of choral call-and-response with poetic texts and music overlaid to create a meshwork of sound. In their submission the collaborators stated: “Responses to Rosc were (and are) marked by hostility, bafflement, defensiveness; languages of resistance but also of territorialism and the fear of the unknown, the troubling, the provocative … It is to this context, rather than the content, of Rosc that we wish to respond, creating work that explores and amplifies the exhibitions’ reception, rather than the exhibitions themselves per se."

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