At 10pm on a Thursday night, a fox slips out from the shadows at the gates of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).
Historian Barry Kehoe follows close behind, regarding the fox with professional suspicion. A guide for the night, Kehoe leads the way up a path by now well trodden; he has just shy of 25 years at IMMA under his belt. Kehoe adjusts his head lamp and offers a small torch as the sky quickly darkens.
He heads towards the courtyard as the fox disappears into a hedge. Presumably he has rounds to do.
By day, IMMA is full of chatter and curated light. But by night, it’s quieter and more theatrical. The building looms in a way it doesn’t during daylight hours, suddenly more mausoleum than gallery.
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“We’re walking with Dublin’s dead,” Kehoe says, referencing the graveyard a stone’s throw away on the site of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham on the west side of Dublin city. He speaks in hushed tones as if not to disturb them.
Built between 1680 and 1684, the Royal Hospital was once home to hundreds of retired soldiers and was the capital’s main burial grounds. In more recent history, a temporary mortuary was erected on the old hospital grounds in grim anticipation of a Covid-19 surge in 2020.
Today it houses more than 4,500 contemporary artworks by Irish and international artists.
Kehoe is not alone within these walls. Aside from the company of ghosts of Ireland past, somewhere in the east wing is artist-in-residence Eoghan Ryan. He lives onsite, in the old stables at the edge of the museum complex only a short walk from the main building.
Ryan’s immaculate studio shines like a beacon on the otherwise darkened campus. Inside, the walls are painted with brightly coloured trains and a desk in the corner is covered with the works of Thomas Kinsella. The collection is inherited, says Ryan; the poet was his grand-uncle.
The multidisciplinary artist from Dublin moved back from Berlin and has lived on IMMA’s grounds since January, one of a lucky few who have been granted a place on the museum’s Dwell Here residency programme.
While Ryan’s stay lasts a year, others are here on a shorter contract.
“If people come for a month, they’re really on a different buzz,” he says. “The tempo shifts.”
The blurring of domestic and professional quarters is not unfamiliar to Ryan.
“I don’t know if it’s the healthiest relationship,” he says, as he thinks aloud, “to be so close to the institution that you’re working in. But it’s something I’ve been doing a lot in my life.”
Much of his artwork – a blend of performance, puppetry and video installations – wades “through the entanglements with institutions”, meditating on systems of power.
“So living close, at that line between where something is made and something is shown, is kind of interesting.”
A few days after we meet, Ryan’s latest project – a collaborative dance performance piece – takes place on IMMA’s grounds.
“It’s a very specific mode that I really enjoy, being in a place and getting to know a place as a stage. You start to see things in a different way.”
There are some uneasy contradictions, as well, that the artist grapples with.
“You’re living in a completely surreal situation, especially when there’s a large housing crisis in the city and you’re living in a gated ex-military hospital,” says Ryan.
“It’s very odd. It adds to the theatre of things. Everything starts to feel weirdly fictional when you come home from the pub and have to press the gate.”
But eventually, “you do start to switch off from the strangeness of it all”.
“There is something comforting about knowing if you get really scared at night, you can go over to the security guards with a blanket. It’s nice to know they’re there,” he says.
One of the security guards on night duty, Keely Raghavendra, takes a brief pause from patrol to say hello.
“Sometimes I scare myself,” Raghavendra says.
When it gets into the wee hours of the morning, the shadows can start to play tricks on even the most grounded guard.
“I saw something in a basement. When I opened the door someone was looking at me. I was scared for a second, then I closed it and relaxed. Then I opened it again and it was gone,” he recalls.
[ Lunch with a side of art: Seven Irish galleries with great cafesOpens in new window ]
After a sound sleep knowing security have his back, Ryan’s days to tend start early, usually at about 6.30am. Looking out the bedroom window in the morning, he often finds a spectacle.
“You wake up and there’s always something weird. I woke up last Wednesday and there were just a load of soldiers rehearsing for the commemoration‚” he says, referring to last month’s National Day of Commemoration Ceremony.
“I opened the blinds and was like: ‘Oh great, this is happening today.’”
With the exception of the museum’s resident seagulls who continue to swoop and squawk even at night, the museum’s courtyard feels otherworldly – strangely detached from its city setting.
IMMA’s permanent collection at night is a sight to behold. Much of the artwork takes on a new energy.
“When the lights are fully on, the red is a lot more dominant,” says Kehoe, considering Vik Muniz’s Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll.
“Seeing it now gives a completely different sense and feel to it.”
Bluer hues are more present in dimmer lighting, giving the portrait’s young subject a melancholy look.
Machines whirr and hum, keeping control of the galleries’ humidity levels and providing ambient background noise for a steady stream of consciousness as we take in the art. An audio loop of bird song from a distant installation filters through.
Kehoe steps inside IMMA’s baroque chapel, which was consecrated in 1686. It is pitch black. Stained glass windows gifted to the Royal Hospital by Queen Victoria in 1849 cast an eerie reflection on to the chapel wall.
“You can sort of feel the weight of history in this part of the building that you don’t quite feel in the rest of it, because it still has that very ceremonial element to it,” Kehoe says, shining a torch over the decorative windows.
“They used to lock the pensioners out of the chapel because if they came in here during the daytime they’d fall asleep.”
From there, Kehoe walks on to the Master’s Quarters, the palatial dwelling place of the hospital’s masters and their families.
Passing from the old diningroom through deserted corridors, Kehoe comes to stand in the Oak Room. He says it contains the strongest poltergeist presence.
“There’s a lot of potential about these rooms in terms of great events. It’s believed that some of the leaders of the 1916 Rising may have been questioned here before their executions,” he says.
A light drizzle starts to fall as Kehoe enters the Master’s Garden, an expansive green space dotted with fruit trees and cherub statues. The isolated cherubs once formed part of the triangular plinth of the Victoria Statue removed to the Royal Hospital from Leinster House, home to Dáil Éireann, in 1948.
“It’s a strange sound oasis. The walls and the trees kind of cut out the city’s sound,” says Kehoe.
Apartment blocks and cranes join Phoenix Park’s Wellington monument on the city’s night-time skyline above the treetops.
“Weirdly, the city is growing up around us. When I started working here you wouldn’t have had any of that in the skyline so you wouldn’t have seen anything over the wall of the garden,” says Kehoe.
A swarm of bats descend at the headstone of Master Lord Frederick Roberts’ beloved warhorse, Volonel.
Erected in the garden in 1899 with great ceremony, the headstone’s original location meant it could be seen from the windows of the Master’s Quarters.
Lord Wolseley, who preceded Roberts, also buried his treasured dog Caesar in the garden, under a mulberry bush.
Moving from one miniature cemetery to a far greater one, Kehoe’s tour arrives inside the gates of Bully’s Acre where more than 200,000 estimated burials were made.
As the main public burial ground for Dublin city before Glasnevin Cemetery, dating from the early 1600s until 1833, there are a few big names in the soil beneath.
The remains of Brian Boru’s son and grandson are thought to have been buried here after the Battle of Clontarf.
Bully’s Acre was subject to much body snatching over the years. In more recent history, Robert Emmet was laid to rest here following his 1803 execution up the road from here on Thomas Street. However, his body was later secretly dug up and taken elsewhere; its final resting place a mystery.
At the far end of the grounds, the Royal Hospital’s recently restored military cemetery lies unlit and exposed to the open road.
An ambulance blares past as the museum sleeps behind the walls. The night outside holds many more stories beyond the Royal Hospital.
Next in the “One Night in Dublin” series - a night out with Dublin’s street cleaners - on Wednesday
