Art & Design

Sara Keating on Culture: A history of art as a tool for nation building

Exhibition at IMMA highlights the open and plural beginnings of Ireland’s original national project

Dniproges Dam, by Dmytro Vlasiuk, painted in 1932, portrays builders at work on a major infrastructural project for the newly independent Ukrainian state. Self-Determination: A Global Perspective sets the Irish national narrative against those of other emerging nation states in Europe in the wake of World War I

As 2024 begins, we say goodbye to the Decade of Centenaries, that ten-year rolling commemoration of the events that led to the foundation of the state.

From the formation of the Irish Volunteers to the 1916 Rising, the Civil War to the first sitting of the Dáil, the key markers of Irish sovereignty have been a linchpin and important inspiration for Irish cultural activity over the last decade, as Irish artists celebrated and interrogated the ...