Opening Reception Friday 7 November, 6 – 8:30pm

The opening of Primal Architecture includes live performances:

Kevin Atherton, Timepiece (1974 – 2014)

6 – 7pm, IMMA Courtyard

Bedwyr Williams, 20º (2014)

7:15pm, IMMA, First Floor, Landing

The opening reception is followed by Primal Rising, a live music and DJ night which marks the start of IMMA’s winter opening weekend.

This exhibition borrows its title from an iconic work by the influential American artist Mike Kelley Primal Architecture (1995) in which the artist uses sculptural forms to map a history of his personal genealogy.

Exploring ideas inherent in Kelley’s piece this exhibition brings together works by Irish and international artists that elaborate on notions of pseudo-autobiography, consciousness, identity, architecture, power and nostalgia. Since the sixties, contemporary art has been associated with moments or acts of crises and political change. Often these acts have not only affected art, but also mirrored what was happening within the world. This exhibition, Primal Architecture, unfurls in the form of a sequence of episodes or chapters that can be read with relative autonomy, each offering exhilarating interpretations of the human condition and the complex ways we interact and narrate the world around us.

Primal Architecture will feature artworks spanning across varied media and decades, including installation, video, sculpture, drawing, performance and photography. It includes artists – Mike Kelley, Jeremy Deller, Conrad Shawcross, Kevin Atherton, Linder, Jesse Jones and Bedwyr Williams. For many of these artists this exhibition at IMMA will be their first presentation in Ireland.

To accompany the exhibition there will also be a series of programmed happenings, performances, screening and events by both international and Irish emerging artists.

Primal Architecture will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication that ranges across multiple disciplines to include contributions from leaders in the diverse fields of New Media, Performance Art and Genetics. The publication will include texts by international writers including Dan Fox (Co-Editor frieze); Doug Harvey (Los Angeles based writer, curator, artist, and editor of pata-critical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3); Maeve Connolly (Writer, researcher and lecturer at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dublin); Rachael Thomas (Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions, IMMA); and David McConnell (Professor of Genetics, Trinity College, Dublin). In a further exploration of the diverse themes in the exhibition, the publ