Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art’s Summer Institute is pleased to present a talk by curator Aoife MacNamara Thursday, July 19th at 7 pm. The talk is free and everyone is welcome to attend.

Aoife MacNamara is Programme Director for Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London. Originally trained in sculpture at Limerick School of Art in Ireland, Aoife returned to Canada in the early 1990s where she taught at Concordia University while active in a number of artists run centres, including as Artistic Director at Gallery 101 in Ottawa. As an artist and curator, she works largely on collective projects and has shown in Ireland, the UK and Canada including the Ottawa Art Gallery, La Mois de la Photo de Montréal, Limerick City Art Gallery, Letterkenny Art Gallery, The Lighthouse: Scotland’s Centre for Architecture and the City, MoDA:The Museum of Design and Domestic Architecture and the Walter Phillips Gallery.

Aoife has published reviews, articles and catalogue essays for a range of institutions and galleries including Ottawa Art Gallery, Parachute, CIRCA and Art Monthly, and contributed essays to a range of publications including Anthony Kiendl’s edited collection, Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Cultures (2008). Between 2005-2008 she was Director of the AHRC-funded Spaces Buildings Make Research Group at Middlesex University during which time she contributed to a series of symposia including; Speculative Practices: Art, Architecture and Curating (Tate Britain, 2004); Informal Architectures (Banff and Tate Modern) and most recently, Spaces of History/History of Space: Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment, University of California, Berkeley, 2010. Recent work includes contributions to Spaces Buildings Make: A Laboratory for Critical Spatial Practice at the London Festival of Architecture/National Theatre in 2008 and the photographic project On This Site (2012), developed as part of her PhD theses at the University of Ulster. She is currently working on Botany, a series that explores the potential of painted botantical subjects as theoretical objects that invite considerations about history, death, erasure and grief in the context of climate change and lost habitats.

Plug In ICA’s Artist Lecture Series is generously supported by BMO Financial Group.