International Research Conference

Venues: Light House Cinema, Dublin 7 and IMMA—Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 8

IMMA is hosting an international research conference to mark a century since the partition of Ireland and the subsequent formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The theme of the conference is self-determination and it focuses on the role of art and artists in shaping both of the island’s jurisdictions in the aftermath of the First World War. It is situating this work within a global context of emerging nation states and independence movements in this period. The conference seeks to examine the artistic responses to the historical events over time and across a range of territories, to generate new thinking and understanding about the cultural manifestations in response to these events, and to consider their significance in a contemporary context.

Drawing on Arthur Griffith’s call in 1919 to ‘mobilise the poets’ to help make Ireland’s case for independence on the international stage, this conference will reassess the role of art and artists in exploring the international movement towards self-determination, situating their work within a global context of redrawn imperial power, emerging nation states and independence movements post World War I.

This interdisciplinary conference will be of interest to artists, art historians, historians, literary scholars, geographers, political theorists, and anyone with an interest in the themes of self-determination and cultural production over the past 100 years.  

The conference will take place online and in person and will comprise a selection of in-person and online presentations from a number of invited speakers including Adom Getachew, political theorist Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago; Róisín Kennedy, Lecturer/Assistant Professor, School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD; Fearghal McGarry, Professor, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queens University, Belfast; Jessica Zychowicz, Director of Fulbright Ukraine and IIE: International Institute of Education Kyiv; Hussein Omar, Lecturer in Modern Global History, University College Dublin; Lisa Godson, Lecturer and Historian of Design and Material Culture, National College of Art and Design; and artist Jasmina Cibic, along with presentations drawn from a call for papers exploring themes such as “Political Imaginations”; “Official Culture”; “Visual Culture and the Establishment”; “Comparative Imaginations of Self-Determination”; and “Life, Art and Politics”.

This conference is part of a three-year initiative culminating in a major exhibition in 2023, supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.

Further details of the programme and to register: imma.ie