Self-Determination: A Global Perspective
This Autumn, IMMA presents a major museum wide exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective. The culmination of a three-year research project, this exhibition focuses on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft.
This exhibition brings together a range of Irish and international works, both modern and contemporary, that illuminate the shared experiences of the new states. In 1919, Arthur Griffith, writing from Gloucester Prison, urged his colleagues to 鈥榤obilise the poets鈥� to help make Ireland鈥檚 case for independence on the international stage. Griffith鈥檚 letter acknowledges the role of art and culture in developing international solidarities and justifying Ireland鈥檚 right, among other small nations, to 鈥榮elf-determine鈥�. It also highlights the new possibilities for artists in the early twentieth century, an era of collapsing empires and seismic geopolitical shifts, to articulate and enact radical modern and democratic principles.
This exhibition explores some of the common cultural strategies that emerged across many of the new nation-states including Finland (1917), Estonia (1918), Poland (1918), Ukraine (1917), Turkey (1923), and Egypt (1922), against the backdrop of the international movement towards self-determination, most famously articulated by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919. How did diverse countries understand the formation of the new state? How did their artists and poets imagine it? How was this situated within an international context? And how do contemporary artists today reckon with the legacies of this period?鈥�
Each of the new states produced its own cultural鈥痗omplexities, with its own traditions, histories, and industries to be reimagined in line with the new imperatives of modernity. Self-Determination: A Global Perspective explores common strategies and methodologies developed by artists, cultural practitioners, and others invested in the formation of a new state in the first half of the twentieth century.鈥�
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This Autumn, IMMA presents a major museum wide exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective. The culmination of a three-year research project, this exhibition focuses on the new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft.
This exhibition brings together a range of Irish and international works, both modern and contemporary, that illuminate the shared experiences of the new states. In 1919, Arthur Griffith, writing from Gloucester Prison, urged his colleagues to 鈥榤obilise the poets鈥� to help make Ireland鈥檚 case for independence on the international stage. Griffith鈥檚 letter acknowledges the role of art and culture in developing international solidarities and justifying Ireland鈥檚 right, among other small nations, to 鈥榮elf-determine鈥�. It also highlights the new possibilities for artists in the early twentieth century, an era of collapsing empires and seismic geopolitical shifts, to articulate and enact radical modern and democratic principles.
This exhibition explores some of the common cultural strategies that emerged across many of the new nation-states including Finland (1917), Estonia (1918), Poland (1918), Ukraine (1917), Turkey (1923), and Egypt (1922), against the backdrop of the international movement towards self-determination, most famously articulated by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919. How did diverse countries understand the formation of the new state? How did their artists and poets imagine it? How was this situated within an international context? And how do contemporary artists today reckon with the legacies of this period?鈥�
Each of the new states produced its own cultural鈥痗omplexities, with its own traditions, histories, and industries to be reimagined in line with the new imperatives of modernity. Self-Determination: A Global Perspective explores common strategies and methodologies developed by artists, cultural practitioners, and others invested in the formation of a new state in the first half of the twentieth century.鈥�
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This autumn, Irish Museum of Modern Art presents a major international exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, one of the largest exhibitions in the Museum鈥檚 history, opening on Thursday 30 November 2023.
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