I had a day off from college today so I decided to visit the Irish Museum of Modern Art to see the new exhibition, Conversations. After getting lost and wandering around the trendy apartments in south quarter (and daydreaming about how we wanted to live there…), we finally found the IMMA. It was well worth the wandering around though, I was literally in awe at the images. I literally turned into “photography fan-girl”, much to my boyfriend’s dismay. I walked around going: “THEY HAVE A LANGE PHOTO! THEY HAVE A SOTH PHOTO!” and squealing when I saw photographer’s works that I admired. I loved all the photographs, some that I knew, from photographers I know and some that I’ve never seen, from photographers I didn’t know. The arrangement of the images played a big part in their meaning, they were placed in “conversation” with each-other, a photograph from the 1800’s alongside a photograph from 2003. The images complement each-other in a way you wouldn’t expect.
From the IMMA website: “Modern works are juxtaposed with older works, European with American, and staged subjects with documentary images. These conversations create unique visual groupings, including images of visitors responding to art in museums, such as Thomas Struth’s Audience 4 (2004), which shows people gazing upward at Michelangelo’s statue of David at the Academia Gallery in Florence, and Musée du Louvre 4, Paris (1989), where visitors contemplate Théodore Géricault’s famous Raft of the Medusa in a Louvre gallery.”
The stand-out images for me were:
Neeta Madahar’s image “Sustenance 104, 2003”
Toni Schnider’s image “Switched”
David Hillard’s image “Dad”
Vera Lutter’s image “135 LaSalle Street, Chicago, VI”
The exhibition is produced by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and runs til the 22nd of May at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Military Road, Kilmanham Dublin.
Aisling Keavey 
