Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)
17 February – 3 May 2010
An exhibition of selected key works by Irish artist Anne Tallentire, created over the past ten years, is now open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham. “This, and other things, 1999-2010″ amalgamates two of Tallentire’s earlier works as well as four of her most recent pieces, created in response to the environment at IMMA. “Nowhere else”, “The Readers”, “Document” and “Drift: diagram xi”, [working with architect Dominic Stevens] are shown for the first time, alongside previous installations: “Instances”, 1999, and “a staging of Manifesto 3 (… instead of partial object)“, 2004, in collaboration with artist John Seth, a frequent collaborator since 1993, in a practice recognised as ‘work-seth/tallentire’.
While Tallentire’s body of work would generally make use of staging and recording her own actions; in Drift, the artist instead documents others’ actions in 21 short, video clips on a loop, that depict ordinary activities that are related to maintaining a city’s infrastructure. For Drift: diagram xi, 2010, Tallentire has collaborated with Irish architect Dominic Stevens to present an eight-screen video installation encased along a maze of scaffolding . Each individual installation has been designed specifically for the demands of the space available and identified numerically in order to critically consider the context of the gallery space as part of the installation itself. This is a very thought-provoking exhibition, eerily prescient in the context of today’s construction bust. The viewer is encouraged to walk through the scaffolding, moving forwards by the promise of the next video installation… At every turn the viewer faces video screens depicting silent , languidly moving construction workers carrying on their daily routines, all the while as the viewer is themselves enclosed in their metal scaffolding shell.. The exhibition is well worth a look!
