The 2025 book Peace, Unconditional! Peace Policies and Practices in Yugoslavia and Beyond makes the case for peace to be treated as something critical in its own right. Historically, warfare, conflict and violence are given considerably more attention, and peace is often simply the absence of war.
Peace is more difficult to aestheticise as it is a continuous messy process, rather than something readily assigned to a time, date, obvious moment and figurehead. Unlike the moment of victory in war, peace requires ongoing negotiations, legal frameworks, active forgetting and compromise, which can be more difficult to encapsulate in an artwork.
Against the backdrop of a world increasingly defined by conflict, geopolitical tension, democratic erosion and cultural polarisation, in March, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin launched a multifaceted research project that looks to consider peace, not as an endpoint, but something continuously made, unmade and reimagined.
Technologies of Peace uses speculative research to investigate how we can consider art as a lens through which to look at peace across Europe since 1989, positioning artistic practice not as commentary, but as a working technology capable of shaping civic life, holding memory, and opening space for rehearsing our collective futures.
The provocation of the term “technology” is central. Peace here is understood as something constructed through systems – legal, political and economic – but also through cultural forms of exhibition-making, publishing, language and artistic experimentation.
The exhibition embodies this expanded definition, tracing trajectories from conflict through negotiation to the unstable terrains of post-conflict life. Ireland’s own Good Friday Agreement is reframed not as closure, but as a complex and inevitably incomplete architecture; one that critically stabilised violence but leaves behind structural inequalities and generational trauma.
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This insistence on ambiguity and forgetting resonates across Europe, particularly in the Balkans and post-communist states, where peace has similarly emerged as a conditional and ongoing negotiation process.
What distinguishes IMMA’s approach is its long-term commitment to this research programme beyond the exhibition itself. Isobel Harbison’s Recording History project exemplifies this. We have commissioned her to gather long-form oral histories from artists and film-makers active in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1990.
The project builds a vital counter-archive shaped by voice, memory and lived practice rather than institutional authority, which is particularly important when working in post-conflict environments. The decision to house these recordings within the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland ensures their public longevity, but the deeper significance lies in their method: listening as a technology of peace.
This ethos of sustained engagement and shared inquiry is mirrored in IMMA’s Dwell Here residency programme. Structured around seasonal research assemblies, Dwell Here offers artists and thinkers the time and conditions to “dwell” within the complexities of place, history and relation. Its framing of Technologies of Peace as a research theme underscores the idea that peace is something to be studied, tested and collectively produced.
If there is a unifying thread across IMMA’s programme, it is a refusal of closure. Peace is not presented as a fixed state, but as a field of ongoing negotiation, marked by reverberation, contradiction and possibility.
Our fixed position is only that of the place from which we speak – but we are in open dialogue. By integrating exhibition, research, residency and public discourse, Technologies of Peace positions the museum not as a repository of finished narratives, but as a site of active inquiry.
In doing so, it affirms the capacity of art not only to reflect the world, but to participate in its repair.
Sheena Barrett is the head of research and learning at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin
