SMALL PRINT:DUBLIN CONTEMPORARY announces today the first group of artists to take part in the ambitious exhibition in the city this autumn. Since the launch last July when it was was billed as "Ireland's largest-ever visual arts" event, it has had something of a troubled history. The original artistic director, Rachel Thomas, was replaced last month by two curators, Jota Castro and Christian Viveros-Fauné, and there was a change in the thematic focus of the event now titled Terrible Beauty – Art, Crisis, Change The Office of Non-Compliance.
Up to 60 artists, a mix of emerging and established names, are expected to participate and the first 15 names include four Irish ones: Brian O’Doherty, James Coleman, Niamh O’Malley and Richard Mosse.Coleman and O’Doherty are well regarded internationally and both have close associations with Imma where their work is well represented. O’Malley is just getting established and Dublin-born Mosse is noted for his images of conflict and its consequences, including a sequence from Iraq where he photographed the ruined palaces of Saddam Hussein and a series from the Congo.
The other artists come from a wide geographical spread: Nina Berman (US), Tania Bruguera (Cuba), The Bruce High Quality Foundation (US), Fernando Bryce (Peru), Chen Chieh-Jen (Taiwan), Dexter Dalwood (UK), Omer Fast (Israel ), Goldiechiari (Italy ), Patrick Hamilton (Belgium), Jim Lambie (UK), Superflex (Demark), Wang Du (China), Lisa Yuskavage (US). The exhibition is to run from September 6th to October 31st. No venues have been announced but there is likely to be once-off usage of some buildings and sites as exhibition spaces in addition to galleries.
Originally Dublin Contemporary was to be set around the theme of “silence” but the new curators jettisoned the Joycean link and looked to W B Yeats’s Easter 1916, to borrow a title they feel “captures the spirit of the present time”. Castro, a Franco-Peruvian artist who was curator of the Volta art fair in New York, and Viveros-Fauné, a former art dealer and writer on contemporary art, have worked together on a show in Liverpool. The event has been funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport.
