Image: Hunt Museum
The Hunt Museum in Limerick is presenting 'OUR: Conversations with the Collection', an exhibition running from 24 April to 20 September 2026 in the Temporary Exhibition Gallery. The show is billed as a concurrent partner to 'Óir, Ore' and is structured around a simple but durable curatorial question: what happens when contemporary art is placed in direct dialogue with historical artefacts?
According to the museum’s exhibition text, the project explores how the meaning of objects is amplified when works from different periods and contexts are shown together. Rather than treating the museum collection as a fixed historical record, the exhibition frames it as a living source of interpretation, one that can be re-read through contemporary artistic practice. In doing so, it places emphasis on the role objects play in human culture, not only as material things but as carriers of memory, value and story.
The exhibition includes works by Ibrahim Mahama, Cecilia Bullo, Guggi, Eithne Jordan and Sonja Landweer, alongside pieces by Henry Moore, William Scott and Giorgio Morandi. That combination points to a deliberately wide-reaching conversation across geographies and generations. The source material does not specify individual pairings or interpretive themes for each artist, but it does make clear that the exhibition depends on juxtaposition: museum objects and modern or contemporary works are brought into the same field so that meanings can emerge through comparison rather than isolation.
The Hunt Museum’s own description stresses continuity across time and geography, describing the presentation as a way to reveal the “quiet power of objects” to shape human stories. That focus gives the exhibition wider relevance within current museum practice, where many institutions are rethinking how collections can speak to present-day audiences without losing historical specificity. Here, the collection is not presented as an endpoint, but as part of an ongoing cultural exchange.
The show is also notable for sitting alongside 'Óir, Ore: Four Millennia of Limerick Silver and Gold', which is running over the same dates at the museum. The two exhibitions appear to form a broader summer programme that uses material culture as a lens for examining heritage, authorship and value. In that context, 'OUR: Conversations with the Collection' extends the museum’s interest in the histories embedded in objects while opening that discussion to artistic voices from beyond the collection itself.
The exhibition is on view with general admission at the Temporary Exhibition Gallery, Hunt Museum, in Limerick. For visitors and for the wider museum field, its significance lies in the curatorial proposition it makes: that contemporary art can deepen the reading of historical artefacts, and that old objects can generate new meaning when they are allowed to converse with the present.
