The biggest contemporary art exhibition ever held in Ireland takes place in Dublin later this year. It aims to put the Irish capital firmly on the map as an international center for the visual arts.
When you think of contemporary visual arts, Dublin is not a city that immediately comes to mind. But now an ambitious bid is being launched, supported by the Irish government, to change all that. The first Dublin Contemporary festival takes place for eight weeks during September and October this year, and will showcase Irish artists alongside some of the cream of talent from all five continents. But can Dublin Contemporary really make a mark, along the lines of the Venice Biennale?
“The ambition for it is to be a blockbuster exhibition – that’s the kind of budget we have, and that’s the kind of goal we have set out for ourselves,” says lead curator Christian Viveros-Faune. “And it is supposed to repeat, it’s a Quinquennial, which is it happens every five years,” The New York-based curator and writer was headhunted by organizers to take over the running of the festival, following the departure of the original artistic director Rachel Thomas at the start of this year.
Viveros-Faune is a former director of the prestigious Chicago Arts fair NEXT and VOLTA NY in New York, and has written for several prestigious art publications including Art in America, Art Review and The New Yorker. He insisted on having Jorge Castro as his co-curator, a Brussels-based Franco-Peruvian artist, curator and former UN and EU diplomat. Castro has curated exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, and major exhibitions in Spain. The pair took over the reins in February, just seven months before the massive project was due to open, and immediately changed the theme.
“I would have never considered taking the job to do somebody else’s show,” says Viveros-Faune, “That was really one of the stipulations that we wanted. We were never filling in. We were doing our own exhibition. Thankfully, the previous group had really not done a tremendous amount of work, and they really only had a couple of artists on board. So we almost had a blank slate to work with, which in this case turned out to be a blessing.”
The theme they chose Terrible Beauty—Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non‐Compliance, addressed the “elephant in the room”, he says. The title of the show is taken from the famous WB Yeats poem Easter 1916 in which he responded to the dramatic political developments of the time. It’s hoped Dublin Contemporary can also highlight art’s potential for commenting on current events in Irish life. “I think any major cultural event in Ireland has to identify the overarching social, cultural and economic issue that not only the nation is facing, but the entire world is facing," says Viveros-Faune, “What we want to do is basically explore the connection between art and these kinds of crises - art and life in a certain sense.”
Although the final line-up of artists has yet to be confirmed, Viveros-Faune says there are several who are confirmed that have the potential to be really exciting. “Richard Mosse, for example, is an Irish artist that has been taking tremendous photographs in the Congo, at some significant personal risk, I should add. They are significantly more than just ordinary photographs. They are taken with an infra-red camera in the day, and they actually make the 20-year-old “generals” look almost feminized because they seem to be sporting pinkish or fuchsia uniforms. So that’s one example of terrific work.”
“There’s a collective called the Bruce High Quality Foundation, from America, and they are looking to investigate the connections between art and life. They are currently touring art schools here in the States – and essentially they want to kick-off their European tour in Dublin, hopefully Trinity College. And then, you know, Lisa Yuskavage is one of the biggest living painters in the world, she has a show at the RHA.”
Others artists confirmed include Nina Berman (USA), Tania Bruguera (CUB), Fernando Bryce (PER), Chen Chieh-Jen (TW), James Coleman (IRL), Dexter Dalwood (GBR), Wang Du (CHN), Omer Fast (ISR), Goldiechiari (ITA), Patrick Hamilton (CHI), Jim Lambie (GBR), Brian O’Doherty (IRL), Niamh O’Malley (IRL), and Superflex (DEN).
The curators are hoping that the festival will viewed as a fresh new upstart on the contemporary arts circuit that is looking to be immediately relevant. They’ve promised that the art on view will bring in people who are not specialists in the visual arts and will be “very provocative”. Much of the art will be in on display at a cluster of buildings on Earlsfort Terrace, while others will use some of the well-established art institutions across the city. The festival is already leading to some interesting collaborations involving some of those institutions.
Meanwhile the city of Dublin itself will be used as a canvas, with street art inspiring and provoking public interest. Over and above the numbers attending, and the coverage Dublin Contemporary 2011 gets in the media, there is one other way that Viveros-Faune will be measuring its success. “That is the fact that we are putting on the biggest exhibition of contemporary art that Ireland has ever seen. And I think that in itself is going to raise the bar on efforts after 2011 and hopefully inspire some artists, and young potential commentators, and people who are not yet interested in the arts to possibly become more engaged. Those things are not so readily quantifiable immediately but they do have a lasting significance.”
Dublin Contemporary 2011 takes place Sept 6th – Oct 31st.
A version of this article appears in the summer edition of Irish Connections magazine
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