Research residency · January–December 2026
IMMA — Dwell Here
How can visual art lessen the burden of identity without pretending that identity disappears?
A one-year studio residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, developed through the Dwell Here research programme and its seasonal assemblies.
The research begins with South Asian Sufi shrines as complex sensory and social environments: places where scent, recitation, music, repetition, movement and shared attention produce forms of memory that do not depend on a single fixed narrative. At IMMA I am testing how aspects of that spatial logic can be translated into contemporary visual art while allowing what cannot be transported to remain visible as absence.
Clinical seeing as material
I trained and practised as a doctor before moving into public health and, later, art. The residency has brought that formation back into the studio as more than biography. Clinical seeing, interoception, containment, care, risk and bodily systems now shape decisions about scale, surface, proximity, thresholds and how a viewer is physically addressed.
The question is not whether an artwork can prove transformation. It is more exact: what conditions can art construct, and what does a body actually do when it encounters them?
Studio research
Painting, scrolls, textiles, objects and installation developed through material tests, reading, drawing and maquettes.
Institutional research
Engagement with IMMA’s site, programme, peers and visiting mentors through Dwell Here’s research assemblies, studio visits and public exchange.
Downstream outcome
States, Stations at Luan Gallery was developed during the residency, carrying research on bodily attention into a newly commissioned four-part installation.
Public record
IMMA artist and residency profile ↗
IMMA 2026 Summer Programme ↗
Related work: States, Stations →
Dwell Here: One Year Residency, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. January–December 2026.
Studio
Research wall and working assemblage, IMMA studio, 2026.
Samir Mahmood in his IMMA studio, 2026.