Artist and current ARC researcher Susan Gogan,  will participate in an upcoming event as part of the IMMA Art | Memory | Place programme. The event also features a presentation by artist and MAVIS alumna Beth O’Halloran.

Places at the event can be booked via the IMMA website here.

Art | Memory | Place: Karen E. Till — Wounded Cites

Friday 11 November 2016, 1.00 – 2.30pm,  Lecture Room, IMMA

Dr Karen Till, Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography, Maynooth University, discusses memory, national identity, systemic violence and the possibilities of spatial justice in the cites of Berlin, Cape Town, Bogotá and Minneapolis. Drawing upon the work of activists and artists,such as Joseph Beuys, Till argues that to acknowledge the historic ‘wounds’ of the city enables the process of memory-work that is needed to create healthy places, citizens and states.

Critical of current-day narratives of resilience, Till’s ethnographic research of field notes, interviews, archival texts, public art and maps advances a ‘place-based ethics of care’ that negotiate the contradictions and tensions of social trauma, memory-work and national identity existing in today’s modern cities.

This lecture is followed by short presentations that address ‘Artists and Place’ by Susan Gogan and Beth O’Halloran who will both discuss their work in response to the city of Berlin.

Further Information

Dr. Karen E. Till is Director of the Space & Place research collaborative and author and co-author of numerous scholarly books and articles, including The New Berlin; Mapping Spectral Traces; Walls, Borders and Boundaries; and Textures of Place. As an ethnographer, curator, and creative writer, Karen often collaborates with civil society actors and artists on projects that seek to advance the work of caring for places as a means of working through difficult pasts and imagining more just futures. She is currently working on a book-length international comparative project, Wounded Cities, that examines how groups that have inherited the legacies of state-perpetrated violence offer alternative spatial imaginaries of the city through their place-based memory-work.

Beth O’Halloran is a visual artist, her work is concerned with ephemeral, in-between states and places. Lately, she has incorporated representational images of creatures which inhabit these ‘grey areas.’Her practice spans painting, photography and installation. She has exhibited widely in Ireland, the UK, USA and Japan. Highlights include Preponderance of the Small, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Green Horizons, Olin Museum of Art, Maine, USA.

Susan Gogan is a visual artist whose practice is primarily through the medium of photography and more recently through moving image work.  At the core of her practice is the examination of social space and our relationship to it, with specific reference to the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, and the concept of Thirdspace, involving the expansion of the spatial imagination to create new possibilities for transformative thinking and the symbolic use of space in the everyday as a means of carving out new, alternative identities within our urban and suburban spatial structures.  Susan has exhibited widely around Ireland and in Australia and the USA.  She is currently undertaking the Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) Masters programme at IADT, Dun Laoghaire. Website: