ARTSCAPE:IT'S BEEN A long, tense wait over a cold, cheerless winter, but at last the sun has broken through for the cash-strapped arts community in the North, writes Jane Coyle.
After a high-profile campaign, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) has secured an uplift of £1.7 million (€2.2 million) through the NI Budget 2008-2011, and has announced its intention to plough £1.6 million (€2.1 million) of it straight back into the arts.
Ninety-six organisations will benefit from the total amount of £9.6 million (€12.5 million), with £100,000 (£130,000) earmarked to support individual artists. It is welcome news to the beleaguered arts sector, which had been bracing itself for another year of standstill funding.
"We've managed to lift levels of funding for most of our core arts organisations, building stability where it's needed most," says the ACNI's Roisín McDonough. "We were forced to close one of our major funding programmes at the end of last year due to the raid on lottery funding for the arts to fund the London 2012 Olympic Games, leaving 56 of our arts organisations clearly at risk. I'm delighted we've now been able to bring most of these organisations back in from the cold."
Nevertheless, the boost still leaves the North lagging far behind the per capita funding figure of the rest of the UK or the Republic of Ireland, with the ACNI publicly acknowledging there is still much ground to be covered in its ongoing struggle towards parity of funding.
Earlier in the week, the ACNI announced that it was giving £505,459 (€657,800) towards creative activity of a rather different kind. It is supporting 18 community-based projects, which form part of the £3.3 million (€4.3 million) Re-imaging Communities Programme, on behalf of the Shared Communities Consortium. Artists will work with local people "to tackle visible signs of sectarianism and racism, to create a more welcoming environment for everyone".
One of the first awards to come to fruition is the £18,000 (€23,500) given to Greater Village Regeneration Trust's Streetscape project in the staunchly loyalist Village area of Belfast. One element of the project is the replacement of an eerily dramatic paramilitary mural, showing the Grim Reaper and a masked UFF volunteer, with a painting of King William, an artwork reflecting the Orange culture of the community. Meanwhile, the debate will go on about whether these murals should be erased or left in place as a reminder of events in the recent past - and a hugely popular tourist attraction.
Venetian visions
In Venice at Farmleigh, you can see a slimmed-down version of Ireland's representation at last year's Venice Biennale, writes Aidan Dunne. It consisted of substantial exhibitions by just two artists: Willie Doherty, representing Northern Ireland, and Gerard Byrne, representing the South, and in terms of location and professionalism it was a benchmark in Ireland's involvement in Venice.
Byrne, who works mostly with film and photographic installations dealing with cultural history and associated issues, has built a substantial international profile in recent years and is participating in several projects abroad. These include this year's Biennale of Sydney, which opens on June 18th. He was invited to participate by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Culture Ireland has supported his work, a new film that looks at "the moment of minimalist sculpture in the 1960s".
Meanwhile, until the beginning of June another Irish artist, Cork-based John Kelly, is showing a large-scale sculpture, Yellow Peril (Square Eyes) in the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award exhibition in the Werribee Sculpture Park in Melbourne.
Kelly has proved to be an articulate and provocative cultural commentator recently, unleashing critical broadsides at the selection procedures of the Crawford Open exhibition and, more recently, taking the National Sculpture Factory in Cork to task over the handling of sculptural commissions for Cork's docklands. Kelly argues that the procedures discriminate against Cork-based artists.
Meantime, the shortlist for the 2008 AIB Prize, which aims to identify artists of outstanding potential, resident in Ireland, and help them advance their careers, has been announced. It features four artists.
Joy Gerrard, nominated by the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, makes sculptural installations and graphic works based on crowds and public spaces.
Eoin McHugh, nominated by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, has attracted a great deal of attention with his representational works exploring perception and representation.
Jackie Nickerson, nominated by the Gallery of Photography, is a photographic artist whose book Faith is based on life in Ireland's closed religious communities.
And Margaret O'Brien, nominated by the Droichead Arts Centre, is a printmaker and sculptor whose work deals inventively with extreme psychological states within social frameworks. The four emerged from a particularly strong field of entries. The overall winner will be announced on May 18th. The main prize is worth €20,000 and the three runners-up each receive €1,500.
RTÉ to screen Eden
Eden, the film version of Eugene O'Brien's very successful stage play, which RTÉ will broadcast on St Patrick's night, has been selected to screen in competition at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival - founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro - to take place in New York from April 23rd to May 4th.
The collaboration between director Declan Recks, producer David Collins and O'Brien (following Recks's and O'Brien's success on the RTÉ television series Pure Mule), was selected from 2,327 international submissions, and will screen as part of the World Narrative Competition with 11 other films from established film-makers, including writer-director Shane Meadows's This Is England.
The film was the closing gala film at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival last month - on the same night that Eileen Walsh won Best Actress for her role in Mark O'Rowe's Terminus in the Irish Times Theatre Awards. She and Aidan Kelly play the leads in what is a pretty hard reflection on a disintegrating marriage in the midlands - the dark, and occasionally humorous take on contemporary Ireland. It offers a a thankfully leprechaun-free TV option for the night that's in it. Eden is on RTÉ1 on Monday at 9.40pm.
The Irish Theatre Institute (ITI) is calling all theatre professionals to be included in what is bound to become the theatre bible - the Irish Theatre Artists database, a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute database of Irish theatre practitioners working today.
The ITI, which created both the Irish Playography and the Irish Theatre Handbook, is going live with the Arts Council-funded database soon. It will feature the profiles of actors, creatives and all involved in the business, each essentially creating their own web-page with plenty of space for a biography and photograph - a crucial tool for those who want to know and be known.
It's easy to update, and free for both inclusion and for use. Log on at www.irishtheatreinstitute.ie or make an appointment to visit the ITI at 17 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, tel: 01-6704906 or ita@irishtheatreinstitute.ie.
It's been a big week for Tommy Tiernan in the US: following a return appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, last night his one-hour special Something Mentall was to be screened on Comedy Network Comedy Central, and this week too it was released as a DVD and CD, with extra features and an interview.