TR I was struck by the fact that IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was only founded in 1991. Thirty or so years old quite a short period for a contemporary art institution to have existed in a city like Dublin, but they have been interesting years. Does that relatively short time span allow you to think self-reflectively and historicise yourself as an institution? 

AF That’s exactly what we think – we’re out of our adolescent period. We’ve arrived at the 30th anniversary, so I was thinking about how we could celebrate that interesting moment. I see IMMA as part of that mad global expansion of the art world in the 1990s. In one sense, if you think about, for example, MACBA [Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona], the brand of contemporary art was super successful and important in lots of different cities around the early/mid- 1990s. I have a list of museums that were all established around that time. It’s quite interesting how they broke that old, classic New York, Paris, Cologne, Vienna timeline, alongside the explosion of biennials. To my mind, it was something to do with the intense globalisation of the art world that led to cities and politics buying what contemporary art was selling at that moment to establish a lot of these museums. It was a fascinating moment and I really try to think of us as a mid-scale European museum born of that energy. In terms of why and how IMMA was established, Charlie Haughey was our controversial Taoiseach at the time, and he was a real Europhile and sophisticate. There are many tales about him, but at the time it was his dynamic vision that led to the reopening of the previously derelict Royal Hospital as IMMA. In the 1960s and 1970s they were tearing down Georgian buildings, bastions of the British Empire and signs of the conflicted post-colonial history of Ireland, that has been shut or forgotten for a long time. There was a movement to reoccupy or re-engage with them, and you couldn’t get more of a bastion than the place of retirement for the soldiers of the Empire since 1684. It’s funny because it has got this really old history and a very dynamic young history. I quite like that those two pull at each other all the time. We’ve commissioned a book on the site because it has at least 1,000 years of history that we know of. It has one of the earliest Celtic high crosses in Ireland, and was a pilgrimage site and home of the Knights Templar. In the 11th century, it was a Norman stronghold, and then the Royal Hospital itself was established in the 17th century. It’s wild material that artists love as well. The infusion of youth and dynamism to its vibrant history is very exciting. 

TR Before becoming director you worked at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, but you also maintained a long-standing relationship with IMMA. I’m interested in how you see contemporary art against the Irish backdrop. I spoke to [Irish writer and critic] Eva Kenny, who said that often in Ireland there’s a sense of being pulled between looking towards America or looking towards the UK. You have brought a much more exciting and unique global lens. 

AF I hope so. I’ve done that in a very determined way and I’m fairly explicit about it, partly because I spent 25 years enthralled and engaged with the contemporary art world, first in Amsterdam and then at Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. I studied things through a global lens and often didn’t see Irish practice anywhere in it. I realised this terrible absence, not out of any nationalist essentialism, but in terms of the excitement of biennials and the way people were talking about different locations, whether it was Gwangju in Korea or Manifesta in Ljubljana. It was very exciting that there was a grounded nature, from the mid- to late-1990s onwards, in which contemporary art was exploring the world. So, coming back here, I had two questions. One is why did I not ever think to include Irish narratives in localised narratives? There’s something to do with the post-colonial moment of shame that stops you. I’m also interested in thinking about what that feels like. Why this parochialism? Why this being a little bit afraid? That bracketing between Britain and America, from the English language to our history of immigration and cultural traffic, is easy. Despite this, structurally, in relation to population and all kinds of other things, specifically post-Brexit, it’s a more useful dialogue to start imagining ourselves as a small nation with a population of 5 million. I guess that drove me. The other interesting thing about locatedness, or understanding what that might mean, is that we have some really interesting global bodies who have been massively influential. One big discussion we’re having right now is about working with Brain O’Doherty’s archive. He famously wrote Inside the White Cube, changed his name to Patrick Ireland during the Troubles, and had a performative burial within the grounds of the IMMA. O’Doherty was hugely important from the 1970s onwards in the critical culture of contemporary art and trying to understand its ideologies. [Curator and artist] Paul O’Neill has published intensively since the 1990s on that notion of conceptualising what contemporary curating is. I suppose, given that I have to run a national museum, I’m trying to articulate located culture within an international dialogue.

Christabel Stewart Have you experienced a sort of sea change? I recently came back from visiting the Venice Biennale and there was a lot of noise around the Irish pavilion. It was beautifully done, and the publications were interesting. Have you witnessed a change in the Irish art world?

AF Yeah, definitely. I think Eimear Walshe’s project is really exciting. We worked with them about four or five years ago. Part of my job is to try to propel people into the global artistic sphere because the quality of the practice is as good as anywhere else. I’m interested in why, institutionally, we haven’t manifested in that confident manner and that’s what I’m trying to change. We’ve just initiated a structurally simple project called Ireland Invites through which we’re targeting biennial curators. We’ve just had Hoor Al-Qasimi from the Sharjah Art Foundation; we’ve had Miguel López, who did Toronto; we’ve had Inti Guerrero, who did Sydney. And finally, as a result of those targeted visits, Irish artists are actually getting into those biennials. There are simple infrastructural changes you can make because the quality is absolutely there. 

TR A few questions spiral out from that, mainly about history. I was interested in the show, Take a Breath. That had a big, really amazing timeline that was so well chosen with its interplay of the ecological, political and social.

AF [Curator] Mary Cremin worked with a geographer from Trinity on it. I think it’s fabulous. We did an internal seminar a few weeks ago for a new project called Technologies of Peace. The first day we were talking about timelines because I think they’re fascinating. I learned that very much in the Van Abbe. They examine the themes of whatever we’re doing in relation to art, but always by thinking about social and political events, as well as art history and the contrasts between these things. Museums are history-making machines, that’s their job. It’s fascinating to try and interrupt and engage with that. For me, that’s very much what I learned in the Van Abbe under [museum director] Charles Esche. What are the tools in your hands as a museum? You know, we’re not a Kunsthalle; we’re not the Whitechapel Gallery. We have a different kind of possibility, which is to generate and think about history and cultural repositories. IMMA did act like a Kunsthalle for a long time – focussing on temporary exhibitions – and we still do, for example with Hamad Butt. But I think there’s something really politically important about interrogating history. 

TR To touch on your point of the museum as a history-making machine, presenting the formation of Ireland depends on whether it’s shown as something completely local and specific, or as part of a wider moment.

AF Exactly. That’s what the [2023] show Self-Determination was trying to do. The context in which that happened was extraordinary. Ireland set up the Decade of Centenaries, which refers to the beginning of 1913 when the labour insurrection led to the 1916 rebellion, which led to the War of Independence and then the Civil War. It was 10 years of complicated history in Ireland as it established itself as the Free State. The government, partly because they’re nervous of Republican rhetoric, put a huge amount of money into commissioning the Decade of Centenaries exhibition. They gave artists, institutions and universities the resources and complete trust to think through this history. It was extraordinary, from local events to our show, which was granted a significant sum. We borrowed major works, mainly from Europe, but also Turkey and Egypt. To pour in that amount of resources may speak to the government’s level of anxiety about this complex history, but on the other hand, it was wonderful. That was the context for Self-Determination. I also worked on a project with IMMA in 2015 when I was still at the Van Abbe called El Lissitsky: The Artist and the State. We brought over a lot of Lissitzky’s work because I was interested in using the Soviet moment in relation to the 1916 uprising in Ireland. That was all generously funded over a 12- or 13-year period, so there was a real renaissance in a collaborative curatorial speculation happening all over Ireland. The genesis of the show was me again trying to locate Ireland within a broader global context, getting out of this bracketing between the States and Britain – especially in relation to something as contentious and difficult as the years of the War of Independence and the Civil War. I was interested in thinking about the incredible noisiness of the world at the end of the First World War and the redrawing of the British and French Empires’ colonial borders, as well as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was an amazing moment of reconsideration of what republics and democracies could be. Lots of people were saying that because of the essentialist nationalist elements of early-20th-century Irish politics, we shouldn’t really be using terms like “self-determination”, but that’s not the point. The point is to try and imagine that amazing moment, what artists were thinking and what the official culture was thinking. I found out that in Turkey and Finland, they commissioned lots of landscape painters and filmmakers because the mythos of the landscape suddenly becomes really important when you’re newly independent. It was fascinating to think about how artists were instrumentalised and how they were countercultural as well. There were so many themes that came out of that dialogue. 

TR  I know [our mutual friend] Hussein [Omar, writer and historian of Egypt] was always very interested in connecting up historical narratives within Ireland, from tying a post-colonial narrative into Irish politics to the Third World perspective or thinking beyond those binaries. 

AF I remember Terry Eagleton did a lot of work around the late 1990s. Ireland is very complicated. It’s a white supremacist nation on some levels, too. I always joke we’re Joe Biden, but we’re also Steve Bannon. There’s a whole point about seeing the subaltern and the settler, and that’s complicated – not to mention becoming modern through Catholic theocracy! There’s an awful lot of work to be done that is precisely located here, and it’s not easily mappable onto other situations. Therefore, I agree with Hussein, it’s an incredibly important dialogue, and to understand it you need a precise timeline. For example, the interwar period was really important because it defined us from other later established and way bigger, emerging republics like India. 

TR How has Self-Determination specifically and your work more generally been received? 

AF It unleashed something huge energy-wise that I didn’t quite expect. In a way, our history was so overdetermined, and that’s part of the weight of everything right up until the Troubles. The new project I’m trying to do now examines this notion of 25 years of peace. What does that unleash when you’re free from the weight of a violent political collapse? People were amazed because they hadn’t read about Ireland in relation to Finland, whose timeline is very similar to ours, quite literally, with Big Brother over your shoulder. They also achieved independence in 1917, followed by a brutal civil war. Civil war is so intense because it’s so proximate, family against family. Irish politics, until recently, was still determined by the notion of the Civil War. The two main centre-right parties didn’t get into government together until then so it generated a kind of stasis. The spectre of things like this is monumental on many levels. They’re not just in the past; they hang over how we condition and understand culture and life. We were trying to break open that heaviness and the overdetermined nature of history and to start to understand that Empire was a bigger global project, and other people might have been going through similar things. 

CS What’s the interplay between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland?

AF How long have you got? The first director of IMMA was Declan McGonagle, who was from Derry in the North. He was the only curator ever to have been nominated for the Turner Prize. He did such extraordinarily significant work. He was bringing people like Jimmy Durham and Nancy Spero to Derry, and I take a lot of inspiration from that. He was buying for the collection and thinking about the North and South when he established IMMA. There is a generation of Irish people from the south who wanted nothing to do with the North even after the peace process – I can imagine it has to do with the shame of violence. Now, some Irish nationalists in the North feel utterly abandoned by the South. Aside from the motivation of unionists, there’s a lot of disaffection and complexity to that relationship. The North is always on my mind. In my next project, The Technologies of Peace, I want to delve into conversations with, amongst others, our Yugoslav colleagues because the timeline of the Balkan War and the peace process is very similar to ours. We just did a big workshop about the Derry Film and Video Collective, and a related exhibition – We Realised the Power of It – curated by Sara Greavu and Ciara Phillips. The Derry collective was commissioned by Channel Four around the same time as the Black Audio Film Collective. The Derry work is unknown in Britain because it was censored. Their offices in Derry were constantly raided by the British Army.

TR That sense of abandonment is felt on both sides. There are a lot of people in England who want nothing to do with Northern Ireland. Now you have a generation of people who’ve grown up during the peace. 

AF I think there’s a huge energy in a post-peace moment when the stakes aren’t so high. It’s possible to talk and to remember and to think. 

TR I saw a trend on social media showing the ways in which war trauma becomes normalised. For example, I watched a Northern Irish boy describe how his mother tells him about a time when a bomb went off down the street and five people died, as if she was asking him if he wanted a cup of tea. It’s like the tendrils of plants are growing through the concrete of silence. 

AF I think the genie is out of the bottle. That noisiness is there. There’s something really important for Ireland in relation to this in that we have come through a very complex history, much like our former-Yugoslavian friends and many others. You understand how representation is so deeply ideological. There’s a deep intelligence born out of that and I’m fascinated with questions like, “Why Ireland? Why now? Why could this be a good place to speak from in a moment of increasing polarisation?” Because knowing and surviving all that gives you generosity and empathy. In Technologies of Peace, I’m going to try to think about questions like, “What is this noisiness? What is this energy?” 

CS I noticed everything you do is bilingual, is that an important aspect of your work? 

AF I thought it was fun to put Irish first. There is a thrust from the government around the Irish language and that kind of thinking. Ireland could be facing a massive infrastructural change in the next 20 years; reunification is not impossible to imagine. So, what does that mean? Certainly, there’s quite a lot of resources in discussing what they’re calling “east-west relations” between Britain and Ireland and forced by Brexit – a border that puts peace in real danger. It has mobilised a certain idea that political stability and peace, above all, is so important and cannot be cavalierly thrown away. The last time we saw something like this was German reunification. I can feel the thrust of that energy coming from both from government and economically. 

TR I suppose there’s a question of how Britain fares outside of the EU, which is going to create an inexorable process, depending on what happens.

AF It’s a really exciting moment for Britain to conceptualise itself, and cultural institutions could do that work.

TR They could. There’s an exciting energy feels lacking in London. I think maybe it’s a nimbleness, an ability to grasp or a willingness to grapple with these questions.

AF It’s not easy stuff. You can imagine how completely unpopular I was when I arrived back in Ireland talking about the subaltern and the settler, or modernisation in relation to Irish theocracy. I think certain history-making institutions could tackle a lot of this. It could be quite interesting. I also completely understand that the politics of austerity in Britain have been so intense in terms of universities, art spaces and the like. 

CS That’s the thing. It’s more a sort of tiredness or exhaustion. 

AF Completely. 

TR I’d be interested to ask you about how you approach the institution itself. When I met a couple of your board members I was struck by how excited, interesting and engaged they were. 

AF Ireland doesn’t have a developed philanthropic model yet. That’s why I like to think of us as a European museum. I’m happy with grant writing and other very transparent ways of raising money, so our board is not comparable to fundraising boards in Britain or the States. They tend to be very civic-minded people, and there’s no obligation on them to raise money, they’re just very passionate. 

TR There’s a real sense of energy to it and an engagement in the project rather than just the institution. 

AF I’m infected and inflected with that thinking, too. I feel very lucky that I came from the Van Abbe. I spent 10 years there thinking deeply about the role of a civic public museum of the 21st century. We’re part of a group of museums across Europe called the Internationale who talk openly about ourselves as a confederation that thinks about sharing skills, intelligence and knowledge in a way that is not about the gigantism of the Guggenheim or the Tate, or the Louvre, which reproduces itself in many ways. Ours is a deeply felt intellectual network sponsored by four-year EU grants. It has allowed us to think not only about the appropriate response as a civic museum, but also to focus on located dialogue. We did a big post-war project that looked at 1950 to 1985 and which was instrumental in bringing out conceptual histories from Eastern Europe in comparison to what was always understood to be a British and American movement. There’s a lot of intelligence there that I took to heart and think about when I’m thinking of an appropriate response for IMMA. It’s not curating shows but curating the institution. I think that’s what the job is. 

TR I lived in Istanbul for quite some time and there’s a comparison between [Turkish arts platform] Salt, particularly the Ottoman Bank Museum, which is part of it, because it inhabits a building that was built for a different function. 

AF What I love is how Salt has embraced these strains of history, having all the economic archives digitised, as much as they have the artwork. The lens is critical, contemporary art, but the vehicle is also infused with all the building’s histories. 

TR Research is a big part of your strategy and a key element. Can you talk about that?

AF We are building our global research and learning centre, which is not about architecture but a massive digitisation project. I’m really excited because I feel like we’ve got the programme going with all its strands, the interest in history and the collection. The next big piece is how we locate this notion of research. Why Ireland? All of those questions we were talking about and also looking at the incredible history of the museum from Declan’s time through all the different directors and the history of the exhibitions. It’s also about bringing in these big archives like Brian O’Doherty and Paul O’Neill’s that locate this story that’s inflected through Ireland in a dynamic global moment. I’ll probably use the timeline of IMMA from 1991 to now as the core of that thinking. We’ve just made our final selections for the first year of our residence programme. We’ve always had residencies, which was called the “artist work programme” when it started, so it means you have a community. Originally, it used to be just individual artists who would come into the residency, but I’ve been taking inspiration from our Internationale partners. None of these ideas are new, but I’m interested in what MACBA has done with its Independent Studies Programme. What’s really important for us is to create a community of global thinkers who are on site every year and hopefully then build up an alumni who have spent time here. I’ll have to see what our team has selected, but I think it’s part of that global connection piece again. I’m hoping that – what I’m calling rather grandiosely – this global community, is on-site in a robust fashion to speak back to the museum, while we’re in the process of developing the research curriculum and that they might actually be part of the iteration of the research. The residents are all very interested in the archives, the histories and the collection as well. I’m hoping that these two things go in tandem together through this massive new project of digitising. Salt was so important; they digitised 9 million archive pieces. There have been amazing projects in Britain around this huge drive to digitise and archive. It’s really important for us to be a part of that history-making, but also to locate what has been produced with confidence and speak about it in dialogue with the world. That’s the plan for the next five years. 

CS I spoke to someone from New York who said that the politics and money supporting their institutions often dictates the artists’ research, voice and potential politics. We’re in a terrifying moment for certain people. You’re in an amazing position where you can envisage it as a curator. Is portraying things freely a consideration for you? 

AF Of course. You just keep going until somebody says stop. The way in which we frame things an awful lot of the time is in terms of something that I call “speculative research”. Self- Determination, for example, was a speculative research project. It wasn’t about saying we have the answers, but rather trying to open up new questions. The dominant funding from the state is helpful right now. There seems to be an understanding and respect for the need for culture to be a tool for the future of Ireland. Weirdly, we’re not ripping ourselves apart and self-censoring in the way that many places are. The most painful place to watch at the moment is Germany, right? This a place where the global art world lived and went to for its freedoms, and now it’s torturous to see what’s going on. Ireland is living in a particularly interesting moment; there are lots of things that need improving. Our young people are exported in their droves because they cannot afford to live here anymore. Immigration and the brain drain is real. I’m part of the previous generation that left in the 1990s. The decimating effect of that cannot be underestimated. It keeps us parochial and slightly afraid; it’s not all rosy for sure. The smartest thing is to recognise the capacity and possibility of a European mid-scale museum because I think that business model works in relation to freedom compared to the American model. There’s something about that aspirational financial model that’s difficult, especially in relation to content. That’s where I like talking to other colleagues, like in Ljubljana, or Antwerp, because we all work with budgets of somewhere between €8-10 million a year. It’s not massive but it’s perfectly workable if one makes smart strategic decisions. .