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Building on President Woodrow Wilson’s appropriative rhetoric on the concept (during the Paris peace talks in 1919), this ambitious and brilliantly researched exhibition interrogates how artists from emerging states responded to new autonomy.
I interviewed one of the members of the conservation team, Seán Kissane.
Can you describe the structure of the project and how it came about?
IT has a discursive character because we started about four years ago with an idea from our director Annie Fletcher: to do something about self-determination.
We organized a workshop and a round table during which we invited experts from the territories we were trying to present: Egypt, the Balkans, the Baltics, Finland and the Ottoman Empire. We wanted to ask you what self-determination meant in your own history and culture. We were thinking about reinvention, the idea of a clean slate.
I had to listen to the stories of each place and then after a conference and a long period of discussion, my job as curator was to transform these speeches into objects.
How could we find a set of objects that told the stories of self-determination across all these different territories.
How did you go about doing this?
WE got a huge digital Miro board and wrote down all the words we kept hearing: “tradition”, “the vernacular”, “costume”, “modernity”, “feminism”, “equal rights”, etc. , then we grouped them into shapes.
We quickly identified a very strong tendency to dwell on a mythical past, a mythology as a form of ethnography that could be deployed in the name of the art of governing.
So in the individual rooms you might find a Turkish work, an Armenian work, an Irish work, a Latvian work – all using the same methodology. The artists are different, they never knew each other, but aesthetically the same tendencies are identified.
With a taste for modernity?
This is absolutely true – we see this with the construction of Ankara, as shown in one of the rooms, where the Turks no longer considered themselves Ottomans but Turks and asked the German engineers for the most modern to design their new capital.
The Stormont building is also mentioned – which of course uses classical language emphasizing, in contrast, a desire for conservatism.
How do artists other than architects explore these ideas? Can you say something about Arthur Griffith’s concept of “mobilizing poets”?
As part of our nationalist history, WE hold dear that the Irish were the first to secede from the British Empire, and how heroic that was. What we could call “Irish exceptionalism”.
But we were not the only white people colonized. Estonians had a similar experience, as did Latvia. Then there are the Balkans, where the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled over the Bosnians.
Recall that after the First World War, it was the territories of the losers that the victors considered granting self-determination. The fate of the countries led by France or Great Britain was not yet up for discussion.
Poets step in as “soft power,” trying to tell their stories about a distinct culture that deserves self-determination.
What about countries that have not achieved true self-determination – are you looking into them?
WE are talking about short-lived states – those that only lasted a short period of time, or like Ukraine where self-determination was not guaranteed, and that’s how it is once you get there. independence we don’t necessarily keep it.
Are there any clues in these self-determination experiments about how some states are becoming rogue, fascist?
This is a delicate question. One answer is that as conservatives we have tried to remain “innocent” about the future.
We tried not to organize in hindsight.
But we show that results of heroism – images of freedom fighters, for example – often coexist with images of refugees and victims.
One of the paintings in the National Art Museum of Ukraine is by Manuil Shechtman and dates from 1929. It is called Emigrants and depicts a Jewish family fleeing after a pogrom.
The work has obvious prophetic power about the Holocaust.
Can you tell us about the involvement of contemporary artists in the exhibition?
WE wanted to have a board that maps the territories mentioned earlier. Thus, we have Minna Henricksson’s wall which draws the boundaries of the state – as far as women’s rights are concerned – in Finland and Ireland.
Minna shows us how women’s civil rights, in both countries, were left aside with a gradual erasure of agency and autonomy. Then there is Banu Cennetoglu from Turkey, with a book on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Each of the letters in the declaration becomes a golden balloon that deflates as the show progresses, reminding us that such rights can never be taken for granted.
Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is ongoing at IMMA until April 21, 2024
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