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'Is this a poem?' at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI)

I'm very excited to announce my most ambitious curatorial project to date, which opens to the public today, Saturday 24 February 2024, at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in Dublin, and which will run until 21 July (now extended to 22 September):

Is this a Poem? is a mixed-media exhibition and event programme that collects works of poetry whose common characteristic is having been specifically conceived to operate beyond the page, sometimes in non-verbal modes.


Accompanied by the tagline 'Adventures on the edge of an artform', Is this a poem? is an exhibition about poetry’s furthest frontiers. "Explore the entire museum to discover works of poetry that exist beyond the page: poems that are sound, sculpture, image, film, performances, software, and objects you can touch. The poems collected in this exhibition were mostly made in Ireland over the last decade, but are sometimes seen as a footnote to Irish poetry. Is this a poem? celebrates their playful capacity to surprise, challenge and inform our view of the world."


The Museum of Literature Ireland is located in the heart of Dublin, at the UCD Naughton Joyce Centre, 86 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2. A partnership between University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland, it first opened its doors to the public on 21 September 2019. MoLI hosts immersive exhibitions, treasures from the National Library of Ireland, events, a learning programme, and much else besides such as a dedicated shop, a café, and the audiovisual digital channel RadioMoLI. The Museum recently won a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award - the European Commission’s most important cultural heritage awards - in the Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness Raising category.

The concept for Is this a poem? emerged out of a commission I received to write a chapter on the avant-garde in Ireland for the upcoming publication The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Poetry in Ireland and The UK (a truncated version of this essay recently appeared in an issue of Poetry Wales). The exhibition has been in development for two years. As a conceptually groundbreaking, multifaceted and technically challenging project, it would have been impossible to realise without, firstly, MoLI director Simon O'Connor's openness to my proposal, and subsequently the stellar work by the Head of Exhibitions, Digital and Programming at MoLI, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, in coordinating the multiple and occasionally complex production aspects that go into staging a mixed-media exhibition across the entire museum and grounds.

My thanks, naturally, to Simon and Benedict, and to the entire MoLI team. Many thanks also to Lucy Collins, who conducted a short public interview with me that launched the exhibition at last night's vibrant and wonderfully-attended opening event. Most of all thanks to all the poets, writers and artists whose work is featured in the exhibition, for their permission to display it and/or their agreement to perform or present it in the particular environment and context of Is this a poem?.


The full complement of the work presented in Is this a poem? - including the lineup for the core exhibition event taking place on Friday 1 March 2024, 6-9pm (book here for free admission) - is outlined below. The site, location and physical configuration of these works play a crucial role in the experience of engaging with them individually as well as with the concepts of the overall exhibition. Visiting in person offers many surprises and a range of ways to engage with the poems on display.



Permanent Exhibits:

Graham Allen: Holes
ongoing digital poem composed daily since 23 December 2006 presented as rolling video projection

Bebe Ashley: Confetti
lines of poetry printed in grade one Braille displayed framed + loose across the museum

Sara Baume: Handmade Readymade Souvenirs
display of handmade miniature figurines relating to Marcel Duchamp artworks + hanging accordion-format postcards

Gregory Betts: Kyberdiagnostik
cards produced by administering a Rorschach test on an Artificial Intelligence deep dream generator in grid display + questionnaire on reverse of visitor guide

Kimberly Campanello: MOTHERBABYHOME
display of the object-poetry edition of monumental conceptual/visual poetry 'report', printed in transparent vellum and held in handmade oak box

Hayley Carr: Glossolalia
sound poem using backward phonetics as installation with reversible (forward-backward, but which is which?) playback

Susan Connolly: m / Daytrip on the Enterprise
two typewriter poems using letters & numbers in non-verbal modes, displayed as framed prints

Robert Herbert McClean: Songs for Ireland
video element of interdisciplinary poetry project involving an AI bot and historical Irish poems

Christodoulos Makris: Chances Are
digital projection of mass-collaboration poem as a real-time rolling feed of every post on Twitter / X featuring the word ‘chance’

Julie Morrissy: Positions Gendered Male in Bunreacht na hÉireann / 1937 Constitution of Ireland
two-part wall installation taken from multidisciplinary project responding to inherent gender inequality in Irish law

Suzanne Walsh: BirdBecomeBird
outdoor sound installation of vocal work exploring boundaries between the human and non-human

Emma Bennett: ‘What Matter’ / Ella de Burca: ‘Exposing the Doubt’ / CAH-44 featuring Raven: ‘Dublin Onion’ / James King: ‘Untitled’
audiovisual sequence of recordings of four live works where the poem is the performance itself

'Is this your poem?'
wall installation for visitor contributions as a permanent work in progress


Core Exhibition Event (Friday 1 March 2024):

Performances:
Tobi Balogun: movement art / dance
Emma Bennett: speech as act, matter, medium
Amanda Coogan: Irish Sign Language poetry
Vicky Langan: sound/performance art

Talks & Discussion on Digital Literatures:
Ian Maleney: writer & publisher/producer at Fallow Media
James O'Sullivan: academic & publisher/producer of Graham Allen's Holes
Joanna Walsh: writer & author of AI-incorporating projects Miss-Communication and Autobiology





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