Presented as part of the exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA has commissioned two new works including a site-specific installation titled, Rest by Turkish artist İz Öztat and a new multi-narrative environment, An Dún, by Belfast based Array Collective.

Rest, 2024 by İz Öztat is an installation that sets the stage for working through the top-down implementation of founding ideologies constructed by nation states, as well as the struggles to resist them. In the video, a group of fellow artists activate the installation, drawing from embodied collective memories that relate to multiple connotations of the word “rest”: The rest here refers to those whose existence and equal rights are denied by those in power. The word evokes the burden resting on one’s shoulder, the burden of violence motivated by the state’s fantasy of exerting total control over its others, as well as the act of putting the dead to rest by collectivising mourning as a demand for justice. And perhaps finally, the work proposes rest as a form of recovery that comes with the struggle for freedom and peace. Rest grapples with these multiple meanings through forms and gestures that evoke subjugation, resilience, mourning, confrontation and negotiation. 

An Dún, 2024 by Array Collective, is a new multi-narrative environment by Array Collective. Across immersive spaces a complicated and messy understanding of statehood and citizenship is unearthed. Ideological, topographical and political plans are fashioned and accumulated inside a site of destruction and construction. Resting outside of time, we hear echoes of our past, present and future in ever-changing failed experiments of hope. The ‘good room’ deep within a cave, stages rituals of citizenship. Behind the scenes, plans are cooked up and mistakes are made, amidst the labour of daily life. As An Dún shifts and repositions, occupying unsteady space between reality and fiction, care and compromise endeavour to make a shared existence liveable.