Annie Fletcher, a noted international curator and the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), will be visiting Helsinki and presenting a talk at PUBLICS on February 25, from 6–8 pm.

Annie Fletcher will discuss the major exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective. This exhibition, which will travel from IMMA to several partner museums across the Nordic and Baltic region, is the culmination of a three-year research project. It explores the nation-states that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War and examines the role of art and artists in shaping national identities, nation-building, and statecraft.

The exhibition Self-Determination: A Global Perspective explores some of the common cultural strategies that emerged across many of the new nation-states including Finland (1917), Estonia (1918), Latvia (1918), Poland (1918), Ukraine (1917), Turkey (1923), and Egypt (1922), against the backdrop of the international movement towards self-determination, most famously articulated by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919. How did diverse countries understand the formation of the new state? How did their artists and poets imagine it? How was this situated within an international context? And how do contemporary artists today reckon with the legacies of this period?

Each of the new states produced its own cultural complexities, with its own traditions, histories, and industries to be reimagined in line with the new imperatives of modernity. Self-Determination: A Global Perspective explores common strategies and methodologies developed by artists, cultural practitioners, and others invested in the formation of a new state in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bio

Annie Fletcher is currently Director of IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). Previously she was Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10).

In 2012, she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on International juries, including the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the 2016 Irish Pavilion at Venice; the 2015 Köler Prize, Estonia; the 2014 Turner Prize, UK; the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award, Hungary; and the 2011 BC21 Art Award, Austria.

More information about the event will follow soon. Read more about the exhibition here.