The Geneva Window curated by Isobel Harbison

• Preview Thursday 27th January 6pm to 8pm
• Exhibition continues to 26th February 2010

‘The Geneva Window’ is the name of a stained glass window by Harry Clarke depicting scenes from Irish literature written between 1900 and 1925. It had been commissioned by the Irish government in 1926 to represent the country in the League of Nations building in Geneva. Censored upon completion in 1930 for the literary extracts it depicted, it was never sent to Switzerland.
In 1988, it was acquired by an American collector and given to the Wolfsonian Museum Florida where it now hangs in a room that ‘deals with national identity’. Here, now, some of its many stories are extracted as metaphoric windows through which to look at contemporary art. Works by Dara Birnbaum, Steven Claydon, Lewis Klahr, Mark Leckey and Elodie Pong each explore ‘identity’ as a malleable thing,continuously reconfigurable through the objects, images and stories that history bestows.