The Arts Council today announced the successful projects under its Making Great Art Work – Open Call awards.
The Open Call event is an Arts Council initiative which funds ambitious, one-off artistic projects by some of Ireland’s best artists and arts organisations.
More than €800,000 in total has been awarded to seven projects this year. Among the successful projects are a theatrical response to the housing crisis and an international arts festival for children aged under 6, and plans to reinvigorate Dublin’s James Joyce Street to reflect its rich artistic heritage.
The priorities for this year’s award is for projects that are large in ambition, irrespective of physical, temporal, or quantitative scale, and engage with the public, as audience members or as participants.
Speaking today, the Director of the Arts Council Orlaith McBride said:
“I am delighted to announce the seven successful projects for this year’s Making Great Art Work - Open Call awards. Collectively, they represent the work of some of the most dynamic and interesting artists in Ireland, and in their range and ambition they reaffirm the centrality of the arts and the importance of the voice of artists in our country.
The projects address a number of important issues faced by individuals, communities and societies today, from homelessness, to the development of young children, to the movement of finance internationally, to borders and territories, and to the nature of our urban spaces.”
The Making Great Art Work – Open Call successful projects are:
- Wide Eyes Early Years Festival presented by Baboró International Arts Festival for Children in Galway in Spring 2018: a four-day extravaganza of theatre and dance performances for young children and their families created by Europe’s finest producers of Early Years work.
- Crash Ensemble 20x20: Twenty new works by twenty Irish and international composers, performed in ten locations across Ireland throughout 2017 in celebration of the Crash Ensemble’s 20th year.
- Where We Live presented by THISISPOPBABY and performed during the Dublin Theatre Festival 2017: Five ‘in-situ’ plays on the theme of home and homelessness, created by leading Irish playwrights and a diverse cross-section of host communities throughout Dublin, to be.
- The Tree Line Project, curated by Oonagh Young and Mary Cremin, aims to reinvigorate James Joyce Street, a historic part of Dublin city centre, by playing passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses on an outdoor tickertape LED screen; by planting a variety of indigenous trees mentioned in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, and by inviting local residents to participate in a series of street events.
- LATITUDE by Marie Barrett is a site-specific, visual arts project about identity within an era of shifting borders. It will be presented as a film and a series of temporary sculptural forms at Malin Head, Co. Donegal and other cross border territories where Lookout Posts are sited.
- The Visible by Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson: A networked, multi-monitor, video installation of commissioned video studies by a selection of artists. The project aims to interrogate the concept of ‘the visible’ through references as diverse as international financial movements, marginalized peoples, disappearing nature and emerging science. The work will be presented in Ireland and abroad throughout 2017.
- Rediscovering 18th-century Irish State Music from Dublin Castle: Ireland's first Art Music by Peter Whelan. A concert at Dublin Castle (August 2017) featuring the premiere of two newly-discovered 18th-century odes written for the 'Irish State Musick'. The project aims to reconnect music of historical significance with its original location and animate Ireland's heritage in Classical Music.
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