Focus Ireland Festival of Home at IMMA on Nov 22nd and 23rd

dublin | arts and media | event notice Tuesday November 14, 2006 12:29 by Roughan Mac Namara - Focus Ireland

Focus Ireland is also holding an event in IMMA called the Festival of Home on Nov 22nd and 23rd which will seek to stimulate a debate on the meaning of housing and home in Irish society and the implic

The first day will feature an event called Show Home which will explore our understanding of home through art, drama, film and writing.

This day on Nov 22nd is free to attend. All are welcome and the event will feature a range of work that has been produced by Focus Ireland service users and tenants in workshops held by the Dublin City Arts Squad and Create Arts group, writer Yvonne Cullen and photographer Annika Johansson.

Show Home will also feature people from the arts world exploring the concept of home through their own work including film, drama, readings and discussions. Artists featured include award-winning writer John Healy, Perry Ogden, Director and Co-writer the critically acclaimed film Pavee Lackeen and theatre company Arambe Productions.

The second day will feature the conference “Building Housing or Creating Homes?” and will draw on national and international experience to explore the meaning of home, the relationship between housing and home and the challenge of ensuring that everyone has a place they can call home. Among other things the conference will examine:

The connections between housing and home and the implications for housing policy
Personal control as central to home and how this influences responses to homelessness
Changing demographics, culture and environment and the impact on home

For further information and to book log on to www.focusireland.ie or phone 01 284 26 87.

There is also an exhibition exploring different concepts of home which is the result of a collaborative project between the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the homeless & housing organisation Focus Ireland which opened at IMMA on Thursday November 2nd.

The exhibition is called: “Hearth: Concepts of Home from the IMMA Collection in Collaboration with Focus Ireland,” and admission is free.

In a unique move the works featured in the exhibition were selected from the permanent IMMA collection following a process of consultation between Helen O’Donoghue (Senior Curator: Education and Community Programmes IMMA), Catherine Marshall, (Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA) and people using the services of Focus Ireland.

Commenting on the exhibition Helen O’Donoghue of IMMA said, “The collaborative process between IMMA and Focus Ireland was a positive way of engaging people with contemporary art and artists. I hope through this process we have succeeded to demystify the curatorial process through sharing and exchanging skills and knowledge. Projects such as this really can help towards opening out the meaning of public access into the resources of a museum in general and IMMA in particular.”

The people involved are attending an education progamme called Spokes run by Focus Ireland at John’s Lane West in Dublin City Centre. Dave Gregory who has been attending Spokes for the last year and was one of the group working with IMMA picking the final pieces for the exhibition said: "It was a great experience and I think it's important to look at things like home and homelessness in different ways, such as through art, so people can express how they think and feel about things. It can provide a great outlet and it also shows everyone that people who are homeless have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else but have just gone through a bad time."

Declan Jones, Chief Executive of Focus Ireland said, “Focus Ireland’s vision is that everyone has a right to a place called home. Hearth provides a unique opportunity to explore this vision and to reflect on what home means in contemporary Ireland. We hope that through this exhibition the needs and concept of home are presented to the public in an innovative and unique way that will contribute to the awareness and advocacy objectives of Focus Ireland.”

The Hearth exhibition aims to create an awareness of the meaning of home in contemporary Ireland. It has emerged as a result of an access programme run by IMMA’s Education and Community and Collection Departments. Comprising 16 works, Hearth features a variety of work including “Power Cuts Imminent” by Tim Mara, in which the artist depicts the normal scenario of a family home in the 1980s but disrupts the scene to include an insert of his time at art-college.

The exhibition also features “Hereafter”, a recent work by Paddy Jolley, created in 2002 when he was commissioned to make a film in Ballymun, Dublin, an area targeted for radical social and economic change. As part of this plan, residents were asked to move from flats in tower blocks - which in many cases they had lived in all their lives - to contemporary new houses. Jolley focused on the newly vacated flats - and the physical items left behind.

Other works include “Property” by Beat Klein and Hendrijke Kuhne, a response to the property boom in Ireland in the late 1990s. Cut from estate agents advertisements in The Irish Times over a period of months in 1998, at the height of the property boom in Dublin, these flimsy houses of card illustrate the fragility of those dreams of wealth. While “How to make a refugee” by Phil Collins’ is the story of a family caught up in a very different reality, the dispossessed who are forced to find new homes and a sense of identity as a result of war.

A catalogue, sponsored by Red Dog Design Consultants, accompanies the exhibition. Hearth continues until 1 April 2007 and admission is free.

Opening hours are: Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am - 5.30pm
(except Wednesday 10.30am - 5.30pm)
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12 noon - 5.30pm
Closed Mondays and 24 - 26 December