DUBLIN.- Opening on 1 June 2018, Irish Museum of Modern Art is presenting the first solo exhibition in Ireland by German-American artist Andrea Geyer. When We features several recent works by Geyer as well as the new immersive work Collective Weave (Ireland), 2018, commissioned by IMMA for this exhibition.

Geyer’s work provokes a radical re-thinking of time. She studies our present by charting histories through a de-familiarizing, transgressive, feminist lens. The resulting works invite a viewer to re-think, re-enact and re-imagine their relationship to past time and how it informs the way they experience the present. As the artist recognises, “Art is not dead… [it] is constantly, through our living, in the making” (Insistence, 2013). In this way, Geyer creates a nuanced space of potential, a vital tool for empowerment and action amidst today’s cultural, social and political systems. The title When We suggests this potentiality; that we can do something, that something may have happened, or indeed can still happen. When We is therefore both a suggestion and an affirmation.

The exhibition at IMMA focuses on Andrea Geyer’s current body of work – an ambitious investigation into the formation of modern art, its institutions and their histories. Featuring performance, text, photography, installation, sculpture and video, the exhibition unfolds as a series of salons, each with its own mood, or as the artist describes, each creating its own particular “universe”. These are spaces made for lingering, to give time for collective thought where critical reflection can otherwise be diluted by the drone of contemporary culture. Combining fictional and documentary strategies, the works within these salons, such as Constellations (2018), Manifest (2017), and Revolt, They Said (2012 – ongoing), honour and celebrate ideas that have been and continue to be marginalized or obscured.

The newly commissioned work Collective Weave (Ireland), 2018, is an expansive floor-to-ceiling installation of white linen featuring iridescent silver patterns of drawings. The drawings are derived from Irish queer magazines, posters and flyers dating from 1970 to the early 1990s. Raising questions around identity, community, representation, and visibility within museums, with this body of work Geyer seeks to champion art as a fundamental necessity and propose alternative possibilities within our contemporary lives.

Notably a key influence for Andrea Geyer is the American dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer, Yvonne Rainer, whose seminal early dance works have recently been shown at IMMA in May 2018. Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, Rachael Thomas states, “...IMMA is honoured to be working with the pioneering and influential artist Yvonne Rainer. Rainer continuously explores the body as a metaphor itself, as a site inspiration, courageously challenging political and social structures. Extending this oeuvre, we are also delighted to be exhibiting new work by Andrea Geyer, who focuses on themes of gender and memory; and how they are constantly reinterpreted against a backdrop of history and current culture. These two artists, Rainer and Geyer, reveal new pathways of understanding feminism, and are rewriting the rules of art practice.”

Andrea Geyer, When We continues in the Courtyard Galleries at IMMA until 21 October 2018. Admission is free.