When Annie Fletcher took over as Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2019, she didn’t anticipate she would become the director of an excess mortuary. But this is just one of the many curveballs thrown her way courtesy of the pandemic.

Last March, the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the site which houses IMMA, was designated as a temporary mortuary in the case of a Covid-19 surge. Fortunately, things haven’t come to that.

“It was amazing to be able to hand it over and say ‘yes, please how can we help?’ But then we were in a position to hand over the grounds to The Abbey, and there was that sense of sharing the site,” she says.

“The one thing we can offer is safe outdoor space in the city, so we did it locally at the beginning with artists groups and then with The Abbey. We normally run big commercial events which help our revenue hugely, but in the interim this idea of collaborating and sharing the space just makes sense. I’m so deeply uninterested in being competitive. I think people are really collegial. It’s all relative. We’ve all survived this incredibly crazy traumatic time, so it puts it all into perspective.”

Fresh from her role as Chief Curator at Van Abbemuseum, in the Netherlands, and working with art institutions around the world, including SALT Istanbul, New Museum, New York and L’Internationale network and De Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam, Fletcher had anticipated challenges of a different kind when she assumed the role. The first was encouraging IMMA and its artists to operate in a more global context. 

“I think a lot of artists are still defined within that English language discourse of America and Britain,” she says.

“There are such huge shifts going on and I think there is so much an organisation can do when it thinks about globality in a broader way. With things like Brexit, it’s a no-brainer. Although it’s slightly perverse with Covid because we can’t travel anywhere, I still think it’s a really important development.

“The things I missed, and again it goes back to this global conversation, certainly in Europe over the last few years, was seeing more articulation of Irish voices. Irish artists are brilliant. They always have things to say, but they weren’t always participating in these dialogues. So for me, the big challenge was how to bring Irish practice into those international dialogues.”

The funding quandary

Her second issue revolved around budget spending. “My sense coming back was people are still traumatised by the recession of 2008, and that culture of lament needs to stop. We have our budgets and we need to be quite generative and proactive and make wise decisions and not always lament how it was.”

The announcement last October of government funding to the value of €600,000, supported by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, has been a lifeline in this regard. The funding has already been earmarked for the acquisition of new works for IMMA’s collection by artists living and working in Ireland.

Rather than encouraging artists to produce new work during lockdown, Fletcher preferred a different approach. “A lot of the rhetoric around Covid was ‘let’s commission new work’ but why are we forcing artists to produce in the middle of a pandemic when it’s hard enough? Why don’t we just trust them and buy their work and stimulate the market on that level? Luckily, the Department agreed.”

“There are a lot of collecting institutions around, but nobody is staging a rigorous debate around what we are collecting.”

This crucial arts funding has prompted other questions Fletcher feels compelled to answer. “There are a lot of collecting institutions around, but nobody is staging a rigorous debate around what we are collecting. Are we going to end up with warehouses full of the same things? So I think it’s really exciting to have an intellectual coherence as to what it is.”

To that end, she’s been using this third lockdown to rewrite the museum’s acquisition policy. “I’m thinking about ideas of globality, being global connectors, being a catalyst for change, thinking ideas of radical inclusion. Really thinking what is the museum of the 21st Century and what would augment our collection in order to communicate those things, bring in artists in dialogue with each other. I’m really interested to bring major global collections to Ireland as well, so to think about Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America. There’s fantastic aesthetic differences to different cultural articulations that I’d really like to see here.”

Covid and change

Covid hasn’t just accelerated the prioritisation of the collection. It’s also prompting real change within the 31-year-old museum. “While it’s been a tough year for everybody, it’s given us lots of new perspectives. I feel like the old systems don’t work anymore. We were like this exhibition machine and there’s a real need to think in a more sustainable manner. It’s also really clear that the business models of the major museums like the Tate and MOMA don’t work. Look at how many staff they’ve furloughed. We haven’t furloughed anyone.”

In-house teams have been redeployed, utilising their skillsets. The visual education team audited the website and editorial groups have been formed across departments. “It gave us the opportunity, when we’re all working in our bedrooms, to break out into other Zoom rooms, doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes thinking in order to be ready to reopen. We brought people together, unleashed a whole level of creative energy, like junior staff who maybe wouldn’t have been able to collaborate before. In a way, when you’re closed for that length of time, you’ve nothing to lose.

“There’s so much we can do if we reset ourselves somehow. In a way, this third shutdown isn’t as bad for us. We now understand the importance of the grounds, we got letters from people who were laid off and coming up to every single class we offered in the People’s Pavilion, so we developed new audiences, and like everyone else, we developed bigger and better digital programmes.”

The grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the site which houses IMMA.

Last year’s summer school went virtual and was attended by 90 participants from all over the world. “Trying to schedule it was difficult because we had people from Manilla, Mumbai, as well as Cork and Limerick or wherever. It’s kind of fantastic to think about how you generate a new digital community. All those tools are there, we have them, it’s about how we reconfigure them now. Covid allowed us to think about what’s important. IMMA worked at such an incredible pace, it’s always been so productive, maybe overproduction has gotten us all in this mess in the first place.”

Having to shut the gates for every lockdown meant people couldn’t even use the green space IMMA provided, and that had a profound effect on Fletcher. “People were so upset, although they knew why. We are a civic space. It’s public space, it is owned by the public, so our intelligence should be about how we connect with the public and that there are different publics and different concerns. One of the staff said to me we have the white cube, which is the classic term for art spaces, but we also have a green cube. And I thought that was beautiful. We have 48 acres sitting here and why doesn’t everyone feel like they own it? Why aren’t the grounds of IMMA top of mind, civically, so they can use it for whatever they want? Reopening the grounds again, that surge of relief makes you understand the importance of it being owned by the people and for the people.”

Gender parity and inclusion

While gender parity in the art industry is improving, Fletcher is consciously working to address the gaps across the whole industry. “There’s a bigger consciousness of trying to create a space for women as directors. But I guess now is the time to think about minority communities and other perspectives as well. We’re really trying to be structurally more inclusive, but you’ll still find the highest prices are for male artists and the market launches male artists more, so it’s going to take a long time to change that thinking.”

Inclusion is at the heart of any civic space, but Fletcher knows there’s still work to do. “Going back to the historical idea of what a museum is, it’s one of the tools of modernity, right? And modernity was all about separating all of these specialisms and expertise so there’s an inherent violence to what a museum does. It takes things out of culture and puts them in a museum and says this is civilisation and that is not. So what you’re including and not including is really profound on that level.

“Museums are inherently white institutions also, so it’s fantastic to hear Lynn Scarf [Director of the National Museum of Ireland] recently talking about repatriating art work or cultural elements to spaces of post-colonial diaspora or new nations. I think acknowledging the violence of the museum is something we have to do. I’m not at all defensive about it, but I’m not naive either. You want to be consistent and precise, but you also want to understand there’s something quite odd about one particular perspective being the only arbiter of taste or culture. So the more voices, the better plurality, the more challenge. And that’s not to say ‘the doors are open, everyone come in’ (although I rather like that idea) it’s about having that debate. But we’ll never do it if we don’t think on a more global level. Dare to compare. To run comparatives. This is where being in dialogue with other situations is really important.”