IMMA’s major new exhibition brings together more than forty artists from across Europe, alongside significant works from the museum’s permanent collection to ask how societies rebuild trust, preserve memory, and imagine shared futures after periods of division and violence.
Peace is notoriously difficult to picture. War, by contrast, has become one of the defining visual languages of the twenty-first century, its images circulating with relentless speed across news broadcasts, livestreams, and social media feeds. We have become accustomed to seeing destruction documented in real time, conflict analysed from every angle and violence absorbed into the daily rhythm of contemporary life. Peace rarely commands the same attention. It is quieter, slower, and less spectacular; an ongoing process rather than a singular event.
It is this imbalance that lies at the heart of Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989-2026), IMMA’s major exhibition opening on the 12th of September 2026 to the 9th of May 2027. Bringing together more than forty artists from across Europe, alongside significant works from the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition shifts the conversation away from conflict itself to the complex and often invisible labour that follows it. Rather than presenting peace as a final destination, it asks how societies rebuild trust, preserve memory, and imagine shared futures after periods of division and violence.
For audiences in Ireland, that question feels particularly resonant. Nearly three decades after the Good Friday Agreement, peace on this island remains something that requires continual care rather than passive inheritance. By placing Irish artists including Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, Sandra Johnston, and Paul Seaweight in dialogue with artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia, Cyprus, and beyond, Technologies of Peace situates Ireland’s own experience within a broader European story of transition, remembrance, and repair. At a moment when war once again shapes the political and cultural landscape of Europe, IMMA’s ambitious exhibition asks not simply what art can say about conflict, but whether it can help us understand the quieter, more demanding work of peace.
The timing of Technologies of Peace feels anything but incidental. Europe is once again confronting profound political uncertainty, from the continuing war in Ukraine to renewed debates around borders, migration, nationalism, and democratic resilience. Against this backdrop, questions of conflict have become increasingly familiar, yet conversations about what comes after conflict, such as how fractured societies heal, how shared identities are rebuilt, and how peace is actively sustained, often receive far less attention.
It is this territory that IMMA’s exhibition seeks to explore. Spanning artistic practices from 1989 to the present day, Technologies of Peace reflects on the decades following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the conflicts that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the political and cultural transitions that have shaped contemporary Europe. Rather than presenting these histories as discrete national narratives, the exhibition traces unexpected connections across borders, revealing how memory, displacement, language, and cultural identity continue to reverberate long after violence has ended.
Ireland occupies a distinctive position within the wider European conversation. As the country prepares to hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2026, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on the Good Friday Agreement, not simply as a landmark political achievement, but as an ongoing process of negotiation and compromise. In placing Ireland’s experience alongside those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia, Cyprus, and elsewhere, Technologies of Peace suggests that peace is a less permanent state than a continual practice, one that demands vigilance, empathy, and an openness to dialogue.
At first glance, the title Technologies of Peace seems almost contradictory. The word ‘technology’ tends to evoke machines, digital innovation, or scientific progress, yet here it is used in a broader sense: as a system of knowledge, a set of practices, or a collection of tools through which peace can be built and sustained. In this context, technology is as likely to be found in language, education, architecture, collective memory or artistic expression as it is in any physical object.
This expansive understanding of the term shapes the exhibition’s five thematic chapters: Technologies of Peace, Language & Translation, Trauma & Reverberation, Ecology & Architecture, and Imagining Futures. Together, they suggest that peace is not a singular achievement but a continual process of repair. Language can become a means of reconciliation, just as silence can perpetuate division. Architecture can preserve memories of violence or offer spaces for communities to gather anew. Ecological restoration, too, becomes intertwined with social healing, reminding us that landscapes, like people, carry the traces of conflict.
If this sounds ambitious, it is because the exhibition embraces complexity rather than easy conclusions. There is no suggestion that art alone can resolve political conflict. Instead, Technologies of Peace proposes that artists occupy a unique position within public life: creating spaces where difficult histories can be revisited, contested, and reimagined. Contemporary art may not offer political solutions, but it can ask questions that politics alone cannot answer, opening conversations around memory, identity, and coexistence that remain essential to any lasting peace.
Rather than illustrating a single historical narrative, the exhibition encourages visitors to move between personal testimony and collective experience, between local histories and shared European concerns. In doing so, it offers a reminder that peace is rarely dramatic or absolute. More often, it is found in acts of listening, translation, remembrance, and care: the quiet, often unseen practices that allow societies to move forward without forgetting the past.
While Technologies of Peace unfolds through broad themes, its real strength lies in the diversity of artistic voices brought together under its expansive curatorial framework. Spanning generations and geographies, the exhibition brings together artists whose work emerges from lived experiences of conflict, displacement, political transition, and cultural renewal. Rather than offering a single narrative of post-conflict Europe, they reveal a continent shaped by multiple, often overlapping histories.
Among the exhibition’s most internationally recognised participants is Marina Abramović, whose pioneering performance practice has long explored endurance, vulnerability, and the limits of the human body and mind. Although her work has often transcended explicit political commentary, her Yugoslav background inevitably informs a practice that continually returns to questions of memory, identity, and resilience.
Elsewhere, artists such as Petrit Halilaj and Šejla Kamerić draw directly on the legacies of conflict in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina respectively. Their work reflects on the lasting emotional and psychological impact of war, while resisting narratives that reduce these histories solely to trauma. Instead, both artists seek out moments of tenderness, imagination, and renewal, demonstrating how personal memory can become a means of cultural repair.
Irish audiences will undoubtedly find particular resonance in the inclusion of artists whose practices have examined the complexities of this island’s own recent history. Through works from IMMA’s permanent collection, figures including Willie Doherty, Sandra Johnston, and Paul Seawright bring decades of artistic engagement with the legacy of the Troubles into conversation with wider European experiences of division and reconciliation. Their presence reinforces one of the exhibition’s central propositions: that Ireland’s peace process is neither isolated nor complete, but part of an ongoing international dialogue about memory, justice, and coexistence.
Artists such as Rita Duffy, Indrė Šerpytytė, Christodoulos Panayiotou and the collective Slavs and Tatars broaden the conversation still further, exploring themes of language, migration, cultural identity, and contested histories. Working across photography, installation, sculpture, performance, and moving images, they remind us that peace is not simply negotiated through political agreements, but also through the stories societies choose to preserve, the languages they speak, and the histories they are willing to confront.
Taken together, these artists resist easy optimism. Their works do not present peace as a settled achievement or offer neat resolutions to histories of violence. Instead, they acknowledge its fragility, suggesting that the work of reconciliation is never truly finished. It is this tension, between remembrance and hope, grief and possibility, that promises to make Technologies of Peace one of IMMA’s most thought-provoking exhibitions in recent years.
If Technologies of Peace arrives with an ambitious premise, it also arrives with an unusually timely one. In an age when conflict is endlessly documented and consumed, IMMA’s exhibition asks visitors to consider something less visible but no less urgent: the cultural work required to sustain peace long after political agreements have been signed. The exhibition makes no claim that contemporary art can resolve conflict or heal historical wounds. What it can do, however, is create a space for reflection, dialogue and, perhaps, a renewed capacity to imagine shared futures.
Words: Kate Greene
Featured Image: Peach Caryatid Detail – Visual, Carlow 2021 – Photography by Ursula Burke
The Irish Museum of Modern Art presents: Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989-2026) opens on September 12th and runs until May 9th, 2027.
