The Kite Ballet, 2024 by Thaís Muniz and The City Beneath Me, 2025, by Charlie Dineen,  are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA to link with themes of two other major programme strands at the museum running in September; the group exhibition Staying with the Trouble (until 21 September 2025) and Earth Rising, the festival of art and ecology based around ideas within the exhibition (12 – 14 September). The exhibition and festival are inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, Staying with the Trouble, and feature contemporary Irish and Ireland-based artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time. Muniz and Dineen’s works in particular focus on land and land use in relation to ancient sacred sites of pilgrimage, collective rites and ritual, past or present day, from the Itapuã area in Salvador, Brazil, to the The Paps of Anú in Kerry, Ireland.

About the films

Thaís Muniz, The Kite Ballet, 2024, 11:47minutes

The Kite Ballet intertwines poetic and mythical elements with political, historical, and symbolic themes. The film portrays a group of local kite runners in their weekly communal ritual, highlighting the threat of private development and ecological displacement to another Afro-Indigenous sacred territory, where joy and spiritual practices have thrived for centuries. The film advocates for play and negotiation with nature as revolutionary acts, amplifying the voices of local activists from the Itapuã area in Salvador, Brazil.

A film by Thaís Muniz Featuring the kite runners: Bruno Hilário, Eduardo Nogueira, Igor Picolé, Jean Santana, Jonas Muzenza, Larissa Ferreira, Natalie Rosa and Vitória Jesus.

About the artist
Thaís Muniz is a Brazilian-Irish visual artist working across multiple mediums to explore the intersections of inherited and acquired identities, memory, transit, and inward love. Her community-oriented practice unfolds through intimate, collective learning processes, including workshops, performances, installations, sculptures, and film. Muniz’s work engages with the reimagination of realities through mechanisms of refusal, education, dreaming, and personal magic. She examines representations of ‘otherness’ through the experiences of global majority communities and displacement within postcolonial contexts, activating spaces and responding to the geopolitics of place. Her practice emerges from an urgent need to challenge the status quo, honouring identities and histories while building bridges and opening conversations across cultures and communities.

Charlie Dineen, The City Beneath Me, 2025, 2:56 minutes

For 7,000 years, at Bealtaine in May, pilgrims have walked the path from the holy well at The City in Shrone, Kerry, to the top of The Paps of Anú. The Anú mountain area was known as a fertility goddess revered by pre-Christian agricultural communities as the guardian of cattle and health. The mountains were venerated as the source of wellbeing for the surrounding land with prehistoric cairns on each of the summits and pilgrimages and ritualistic displays of devotion to her being held in springtime. The City Beneath Me reactivates these rituals on the Paps’ slopes. Dineen’s reimaginings are an honouring of lost traditions on the ancient sacred paths as well as a summoning of the spirits of his ancestors who permeate the thin air between worlds on this holy ground.

About the artist
Charlie Dineen is a Dublin-based artist and film maker working primarily with multiformat analogue photography and film. His work spans abstract and conceptual approaches, street photography, documentary, and self-portraiture. Central to his practice is a deep belief in the enduring magic of analogue processes and the creative possibilities that are carried through an unbroken chain of light in the darkroom. Dineen’s evolving film work is grounded in the same sensibility that defines his photographic practice and demonstrates a deep understanding of the medium. Layered sound and visuals are elegantly and emotively interwoven to create work that is atmospheric, resonant and distinctive.

This documentary film by Rita Mae Pettway and Louisiana P. Bendolph, Making a Gee’s Bend Quilt the Old Way, 2024, is screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA to link with and mark the closing of the exhibition Kith & Kin, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, which runs in the Courtyard Galleries until 27 October 2025. Kith & Kin features the work of African American women from a small Alabama community whose textile works have become symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride, celebrating African American culture and heritage.

The screening is also programmed to coincide with Black History Month. Black History Month is an annual celebration of the history, lives and culture of the African diaspora, celebrated in Ireland and UK throughout the month of October.

About the work

Rita Mae Pettway & Louisiana P. Bendolph
Making a Gee’s Bend Quilt the Old Way, 2024
39:35 minutes
Commissioned by Souls Grown Deep  

In Gee’s Bend, Alabama, USA, a community that directly descends from those enslaved on the cotton plantation established there, the rich quiltmaking tradition was originally born out of a need to keep warm in unheated homes during the winter months. Due to the scarcity of resources, the majority of quilts well into the twentieth century were made out of old work-clothes and other used materials such as fertilizer and flour sacks. Even as a wider variety of cheap fabric became available in the second half of the twentieth century, the recycling of old materials continues to be a central tenet of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend.

Still, Rita Mae Pettway notes, ‘The way we used to quilt them, it ain’t the way we do it now.’ Making a Gee’s Bend Quilt the Old Way marks the first time the process of creating a Gee’s Bend quilt using traditional methods from the early to mid-twentieth century has been fully documented – from beating the cotton to stitching the quilt top by hand. In this film, mother and daughter Rita Mae Pettway and Louisiana P. Bendolph share their family and community’s story, demonstrate and explain their artistic approach in detail, and reflect on how their methods differ from those commonly used today. Working together side-by-side, their collaboration illustrates the strength of a matrilineal tradition, one in which the passing down of aesthetic knowledge and skills across generations has been essential to the continued vitality of the Gee’s Bend tradition to this day.

About the artists

Rita Mae Pettway (b. 1941) was raised in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, by her grandmother, Annie E. Pettway,who taught her how to quilt as a child. Now in her eighties, she has been quiltmaking ever since she completed the first quilt of her own at the age of fourteen. Like her grandmother, she embraces an improvisational approach, avoiding patterns in favour of her own artistic vision and intuition—resulting in highly original and colourful pieces. As Pettway puts it, “I want to come up with what I want to make.” Her work is held in permanent collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, and the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH.

Louisiana P. Bendolph (b. 1960) is the daughter of Rita Mae Pettway and the great granddaughter of Annie E. Pettway, both notable quiltmakers. Having completed her first quilt at the age of twelve, Bendolph was inspired to return to quiltmaking in adulthood after being deeply moved by seeing quilts made by her relatives and community in the landmark 2002 exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. With a preference for new, store-bought fabrics over recycled materials, colour is the most important aspect of Bendolph’s artistic process, much like her mother. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA.