Dragana Jurisic, Jessie, 2016

I’m very pleased to share details of an exhibition I’ve curated and just opened at Lismore Castle Arts, at St Carthage Hall, in Lismore Co. Waterford

The Museum of August Destiny (17 July – 4 September) features six artists born or working in Ireland and explores the resonance of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a century after it was written. The participating artists are Aideen Barry, Mark Clare, Amanda Coogan, Anthony Haughey, Dragana Jurisic and Sarah Pierce.

The exhibition proposes an alternative means of making 1916 again manifest, by creating a ‘capsule’ museum responding to the final line of the 1916 Proclamation:

In this supreme hour the Irish nation must by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worth of the august destiny to which it is called.

The Museum of August Destiny has commissioned each artist to respond to one of six ‘visions’ of Irish destiny set out in the Proclamation: (1) sovereignty and ‘unfettered control of Irish destinies’; (2) religious and civil liberty; (3) equal rights and opportunities for citizens; (4) the pursuit of happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts; (5) cherishing the children of the nation; and (6) oblivion of the differences ‘which have divided a minority from the majority in the past’.

Housed within museum cases on loan from the Pearse Museum at St. Enda’s, Rathfarnham, the six artworks present individual meditations (utilizing sounds/objects/images) on the realization or retreat from our ‘august destiny’. A seventh case will host rotating contributions from the residents of Lismore and its surrounds: making visible a range of political, personal, conceptual, utopian, critical, and condemnatory responses.

The essay accompanying the exhibition can be downloaded here.

Lismore Castle Arts
General opening: Monday – Sunday, 10.30 – 5.30
St Carthage Hall opening hours: Friday – Sunday, 1-6 pm
Running: 17 July-4 September
Admission to St Carthage Hall is free