Andrea Geyer, When We

Andrea Geyer, When We
01.06.2018 - 21.10.2018

Opening on 1 June 2018, IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is delighted to present 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.

About the Artist
Andrea Geyer (b. Freiburg, Germany, 1971) is an artist living and working in NYC. Her work has been exhibited widely at institutions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California; The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space and White Columns, in New York City; Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, Texas; A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Red Cat and LACE, in Los Angeles; Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland; Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden; Generali Foundation and Secession, Vienna; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; the Turin Biennale; the São Paulo Biennial; and dOCUMENTA (12), Kassel, Germany. International public collections with Geyer’s work include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, Neue Galerie, MHK, Kassel, the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg and the Federal Collection of Germany.

Andrea Geyer worked with the Irish Queer Archive at The National Library of Ireland and the Cork LGBT Digital Archive and was supported by Orla Egan, Dr. Katherine O’Donnell, Tonie Walsh, Jennie Taylor and Emma Haugh for her research towards the new commission Collective Weave (Ireland), 2018.