About us
CityArts is dedicated to working with local communities and artists in Dublin to create new high quality arts programming in a community context. Over the past four years, following on from the Civil Arts Inquiry (2002-04), CityArts has created a significant new matrix of relationships, critical explorations and strategic partnerships aimed at negotiating improved arts provision for those sections of society traditionally excluded from the mainstream of cultural life within the city.
In recent years CityArts has developed a new set of flagship arts projects and areas that have moved steadily away from the traditional venue-based approach towards an exploration of public contexts and particular communities of interest. These projects include: Towersongs, Young Urban Arts and The Archive.
The opening of the new CityArts home on Bachelors Walk in central Dublin later in 2009 will afford new ways of engagement between the public and the arts with the building as a hub of activity connecting Dublin communities, artists and the international field of collaborative and socially engaged arts practice.
New programmes will include work by Qasim Riza Shaheen who will engage with the Filipino community around Capel Street in Dublin's north inner city; Palestinian artist Walid Raad, who will engage with communites of peoples displaced by conflict, to look at how history, in particular history marked by the trauma and the contradictory narratives of civil war can be represented; Collision, a unique collaboration between visual artist Kevin Laycock and composer Michael Berkeley; and City Song Lines, the second phase of Tower Songs, an interelated process of creating cross city dialogue between communitites experiencing regeneration through meetings, seminars, the sharing of evolving work citywide and internationally through city to city exchanges.
Collision by Kevin Laycock and Michael Berkeley
Collaborations, research and exchange visits with international partners are also a key aspect of the work of CityArts. These include specific strategic partnerships with those cities that are culturally twinned with Dublin (Liverpool, Barçelona and San Jose, California) and with a range of North/South, EU and international models of practice. Activity in 2009 includes a presentation of work by Tower Songs at the Transducers: Collective Pedagogies and Spatial Practices exhibition and conference at the University of Granada and the Centro Jose Guerrero, Granada, Spain in December 2009.
