The International Currents Gallery of the John David Mooney Foundation exhibits and offers residencies to international artists whose challenging work push boundaries and explore new territories. Lectures, workshops, and Master Classes are interwoven into Chicago’s diverse creative communities; exhibitions run concurrently in three galleries, each 4,000 sq. ft.
Since 2022, the Foundation’s Art Bridge Fellowships have supported “At-Risk” artists from war-torn countries, including 16 Ukrainian artists and one Palestinian artist from the West Bank.
The Albert I. Goodman Collection of wartime paintings, posters, and drawings from the 1960 and 70’s is on view in the third-floor gallery. This unique and important Collection serves as a study center for Chicago colleges and universities engaging in cross-cultural investigations. Ongoing are the Foundation’s environmental projects helping to control Climate Change in vibrant new ways through Art.
The JDMF is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 educational arts organization.
All events are free and open to the public.
Image: Performance: Daria Holovchanska, “Night Call I,” January 21, 2024. Photo by JDM.
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We are most grateful of Culture Ireland, who supported this event.
John David Mooney Foundation is pleased to present Drifting Sovereignty, a solo exhibition by Elaine Byrne, represented by Kevin Kavanagh Galleries, from 5th - 29th November 2025. This show, supported by Culture Ireland, will be opened by Consul General Brian Cahalane.
Drifting Sovereignty is a multidisciplinary exhibition that critically engages with the shifting nature of borders and the performance of power at geopolitical and environmental margins. Through photography, sculpture, video, and performance, the exhibition interrogates how sovereignty is both asserted and destabilized in contested spaces.
Contemporary borders are often represented as fixed lines on maps, yet such depictions obscure their social, political, and material complexity. Byrne's work shifts focus from the border as line to the borderscape--a dynamic, contested space shaped by governance, infrastructure, and lived experience. In doing so, the exhibition emphasizes the constructed and mutable nature of borders, which appear, dissolve, fracture, and overlap in response to both human and environmental forces.
The works traverse multiple geographies. In the California desert. Byrne photographs prototypes of the U.S.-Mexico border wall--monumental forms that embody both the spectacle and futility of territorial enforcement. In the Canadian High Arctic, she documents landscapes marked by forced Indigenous relocation, revealing how political decisions have reconfigured lives and land. In Svalbard, where Russian-owned land exists within NATO territory, she explores competing territorial claims in the context of climate change and resource extraction.
A central performance video shows Byrne walking across Arctic Sea ice--a minimal gesture that functions as a meditation on human presence within a rapidly changing landscape. This act underscores how environmental instability redraws boundaries once presumed stable.
Byrne's sustained engagement with borders positions them not solely as barriers, but as active agents in the production of identity, belonging, and exclusion. Drifting Sovereignty offers a critical reflection on the entanglement of geopolitical power, mobility, and environmental change, prompting urgent questions about the future of territory and the limits of control in an increasingly unstable world.
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