The Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan today announced the selection of artist, Eva Rothschild and Curator, Mary Cremin to represent Ireland at the 58th Venice Art Biennale in 2019.

Eva Rothschild has proposed a pavilion that will build on current dialogues around notions of precarity, environmental change and the ongoing political instability – and how that impacts us personally. Through her use of materials and sculptures she will create an immersive environment that asks the audience to question what our role is as global citizens and how do we affect change in the current political stage.

Eva Rothchild; ‘I am delighted and honoured to have been chosen to represent Ireland at Venice 2019, I look forward to working closely with Mary Cremin and the team at Void to develop the pavilion. My intention is to make a sculptural environment which engages with current social changes through embodiment, presence and materiality. I want to create a situation that suggests multiple sculptural possibilities for rearrangement and reordering in which it becomes difficult to distinguish renewal from collapse’.

Commissioner/Curator for Ireland at Venice 2019, Mary Cremin, is Director, Void Gallery in Derry-Londonderry, which will be supporting the delivery of the exhibition. Cremin says, ‘Eva Rothschild is a significant artist of international and national importance. I am very excited and honoured to be working with her on the Irish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2019. We will be supported by the fantastic team at Void Gallery. This project will be one of Ireland’s most exciting and visually dynamic pavilions, highlighting the strength and diversity of Irish artistic practice and build on the existing reputation of Irish artists internationally’.

The Venice Arts Biennale is one of the most important international stages for the visual arts, attracting over half a million visitors. The selection of the team to represent Ireland was made following an open competitive process with international jury members. Ireland at Venice is a partnership initiative of Culture Ireland and the Arts Council.

RDS have announced Amanda Coogan as the 2018 curator of the RDS Visual Art Awards. The RDS Visual Art Awards provides a platform for graduating artists as they transition from student into early professional career. It does this by curating an exhibition of some Ireland’s best visual art graduates each October and offering a prize fund of €30,000. Curators are visiting colleges over the coming weeks and months.

Amanda Coogan is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across the medias of live art, performance, photography and video.
amandacoogan.com

In 2018 the selected artists will work with a professional artist/curator and have the opportunity to win a share of the €30,000 prize fund. The RDS Visual Art Awards judging panel selects the winners of the €10,000 RDS Taylor Art Award , the €5,000 R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award and in 2018 a new cash award of €2,500. Also on offer is a three-month residency award (summer 2019) in partnership with the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI) in Paris. The Director of CCI will select the winner from the exhibitors who applied for the residency on their online application form. This award is sponsored by Mason Hayes and Curran who have a long history of supporting Irish artists.

A new award this year is the RHA Graduate Studio Award which gives the winner access to a studio for one year in the RHA, Ely Place, Dublin 2. They will also have access to all classes and masterclasses in the RHA School for the duration of the prize (December 2018 to December 2019). This award is valued at €5,000 and comes with a cash stipend of €2,500 (sponsored by the RDS). The winner of this award will be selected by the RHA School Principal in consultation with the RHA Director and Senior Curator. Interested applicants must tick the box on the online application for to be considered for this prize.

Each exhibiting artist receives a stipend of €500 to assist with any exhibition related expenses.

For more information visit: rds.ie/RDS-Visual-Art-Awards

Basic Space is proud to announce Vukasin Nedeljkovic of the Asylum Archive, an archive of asylum and direction provision in Ireland as the recipient of the Basic Space Artist Residency 2018.

The direct provision scheme was introduced in Ireland in November 1999 to accommodate asylum seekers in state-designated accommodation centres. There were more than 160 centres located across the country, some of which include former convents, army barracks, hotels, and holiday homes. Most of the centres are situated outside cities on the periphery of society. The decision to house asylum seekers in remote state centres significantly reduces their possibilities for integration, leaving them to dwell in a ghettoized environment.

Direct Provision Centres are the primary focus of Nedeljkovic research. The ‘new’ category of institutions that are ‘deprived of singular identity or relations’ where the undefined incarceration is the only existence. The identity of asylum seekers is unknown; ‘their identity is reduced to having no known identity.’ Direct provision centres are ‘non-places’ where asylum seekers establish their new identity through the process of negotiating belonging in a current locality.

From April 2007 to November 2009, Nedeljkovic was housed in Direct Provision Centres while seeking asylum. The Asylum Archive grew from that experience: ‘I kept myself intact by capturing and communicating with the environment through photographs and videos. This creative process helped me to overcome confinement and incarceration.’

Through Asylum Archive Nedeljkovic examines the notion of direct provision; constructing a theoretical framework on the issues of memory, power, authority, detention and supervision.

Asylum Archive is a platform open for dialogue and discussion inclusive to individuals who have experienced a sense of sociological/geographical ‘displacement’, social trauma and violence. It is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the life of people who came to Ireland to seek protection.

Asylum Archive’s objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists and immigration lawyers, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive documentary cross-platform online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.

Nedeljkovic intends, throughout the Basic Space Artist Residency, to continue to documenting Direct Provision Centres and in particular, focus on two closed Direct Provision Centres that are in the immediate locality from the Unit 4: Gardiner Place DP Centre and Georgian Court DP Centre. This will be culminating in a visual display at Unit 4 and a possible panel discussion on Direct Provision and my work.

The BS/AR ~ Asylum Archive is part of a multi-site programme of exhibitions, residencies and public programmes looking at institutional attitudes, community spaces and education. As part of our Incubation Space Residency with Dublin City Arts Office, Basic Space will work with Vukasin Nedeljkovic to produce a series of public programmes and establish collaborations and partnership with artists, researchers, writers and curators in addressing the concerns of the Asylum Archive.

Dublin City Council Arts Office’s Incubation Space Award is intended to enable innovative artists, arts companies/collectives from any discipline to research and develop new works or collaborative methodologies, over a period of one to six months, through the provision of dedicated work-space. Basic Space is among the 2018 recipients of this award.

basicspace.ie/

TULCA Festival of Visual Art is pleased to announce the 16th edition of the Festival titled ‘Syntonic State’ will be curated by independent Irish curator and artist Linda Shevlin.

Linda Shevlin is an independent curator and visual artist based in Co. Roscommon, Ireland. Linda has curated, facilitated and managed both large and small-scale visual arts projects including the 53rd Venice Biennale where she was project manager for the representative artists Gareth Kennedy & Sarah Browne.

In 2017 she was the invited curator for the Hennessy Art Fund, purchasing new works for the IMMA collection and also co-curated the visual art programme for Bealtaine Festival with festival director Tara Byrne where she developed projects with numerous Irish artists including Vivienne Dick, Kathy Prendergast, Kevin Gaffney, Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti.

In 2016 she curated Radical Actions at RMIT Galleries, Melbourne as part of Culture Ireland’s 2016 International Programme ‘I Am Ireland’. The exhibition featured works by Duncan Campbell, Jesse Jones, Kennedy Browne and Seamus Nolan.

Other recent independent curatorial projects include Americana: Future Rural featuring John Gerrard (IE), Brian Duggan (IE), Kim Shively (USA) and M12 Studio (USA) at The Dock, Leitrim and Amharc Fhine Gall X commissioning Ella de Búrca, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Morriarty.

She has been awarded the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Curatorial Residency award for three consecutive years (2013 – 2016) and in that time has produced a series of events and exhibitions in County Roscommon including newly commissioned works by Maria McKinney (IE) and Sean Lynch (IE); public art projects by Sean Rafferty (AUS), Ruth E. Lyons (IE) and Deirdre O’Mahony (IE), exhibitions by Martin Parr (UK), Duncan Campbell (IE) & Eamon O’Kane (IE) and a symposium titled The Workers with contributions from Adam Sutherland of Grizedale Arts (UK) & M12 Collective (USA) among others.

tulcafestival.com

Ruth McCarthy, Director of Outburst Queer Arts Festival, has been awarded the hugely prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award 2018. Ruth’s Breakthrough grant will support her vision to realise Outburst’s potential as a leader in queer arts development, both in Northern Ireland and offering international leadership too. It will offer financial support for her full time work as Director of the Festival, allow her to build a small team, and enable Outburst to activate as a commissioner and producer of ambitious new queer work.

Ruth McCarthy is the driving force behind Outburst, a pioneering LGBTQ+ arts festival in Belfast. First developed as a collective-run community festival in 2007, it has evolved into one of the leading international festivals in Northern Ireland. Instrumental in the development of alternative LGBTQ+ culture and arts in the North over the past twenty years, Ruth has developed a strong grassroots dynamic as fundamental to Outburst’s programme. She is also establishing the festival as a platform for artistic exchange and international discourse with LGBTQ+ artists and activists in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Jamaica that she has facilitated in recent years.

Under Ruth’s leadership, Outburst advocates for both social and legislative change, Northern Ireland being unique to the UK and Ireland in that marriage equality has not yet been achieved there and health inequalities for LGBTQ+ people are higher than in other regions. Outburst is a strong voice in the face of the homophobia and intolerance experienced there, through supporting the development of queer arts and showcasing ambitious queer work.

phf.org.uk/programmes/breakthrough-fund

Peadar McDaid was announced as winner of the Derek Hill Foundation Prize at the Glebe Gallery and House Easter Art competition on Good Friday night, Donegal. The annual Open Easter Exhibition showcases works by many artists from the North West of Ireland.

The overall winner of the Derek Hill Foundation Award 2018 was Peadar McDaid who has been a visual artist for more than 30 years. Peadar works as an art tutor in unique art programme that he created  in 2002 for people recovering from mental ill health. The programme is part of the HSE west Mental Health Service in Letterkenny.

Glebe House, the home for nearly thirty years of the renowned artist Derek Hill, is situated on rising ground, beside Lough Gartan, east of Glenveagh National Park , Co. Donegal.

Void Gallery has announced Maeve Butler as their new Head of Access & Engagement. She begins her post on Wednesday 4th April.

On her new position, Maeve said: “I am delighted to be joining the team at Void, I look forward to building upon the work of Void Engage and to working with local communities to create a culturally inclusive Access and Engagement programme.”

Maeve Butler has extensive experience working in the Visual Arts. Previous roles include Gallery Development Manager for Photo London; Assistant Curator in the Touring department of the Hayward Gallery organising the exhibitions, Elizabeth Price Curates, Art From Elsewhere and Listening; Exhibitions Manger and Galleries and Museums liaison for Antony Gormley Studio where she oversaw the installation of large-scale commissions and exhibitions worldwide; Exhibition Manager at the Royal Academy of Art, London where she managed various exhibitions including Anselm Kiefer; From Paris, A Taste for Impressionism and Mexico: A Revolution in Art. Maeve also spent 4 years working at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, working with a wide variety of contemporary and modern artists including Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lucian Freud, Rivane Neuenschwander and Isaac Julien. She was part of the founding team of Dublin Contemporary.

Culture Action Europe have announced the appointment of Tere Badia to the post of Secretary General. Tere will join CAE as of 1 April 2018, complementing the experience and skills already present in the CAE board and team.

Tere Badia holds a degree in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona and a MA in Information and Knowledge Society by the IN3 (Internet interdisciplinary Institute) of the UOC.

She is dedicated to cultural research and production in various formats. She has carried out several studies on cultural policies, networks and R+D+i for visual arts. Tere has curated exhibitions and projects of contemporary art. She has been professionally linked to the Interarts Observatory in the 90’s, the communication and multimedia agency Goetzinger&Komplizen (Karlsruhe). Tere coordinated the platform DISONANCIAS in Catalonia for the promotion of the relations between artists and research departments of companies and organizations, as well as the network of visual arts production spaces of Catalonia xarxaprod. Until January 2018, Tere Badia was director of Hangar – center for artistic production and research in Barcelona.

cultureactioneurope.org