We start the month with our symposium, 2023: Future Retrospectives, which offers the opportunity to engage on the role art plays in commemoration from the imagined standpoint of the year 2023.

From this future vantage point, 2016 will likely be the key year in the decade of centenaries. Joining us at the symposium will be many of the artists who made such magnificent work as part of ART:2016, the Arts Council’s special commemorative programme.

In ART:2016, we wanted to create a programme that supplemented, and if necessary subverted, formal official narratives. We wanted to create platforms for artistic perspectives, though not histories; that would lend invaluable insights. We asked artists to create work for a specific moment in time, and to evoke and interpret times past. In doing so for an audience, the future will be influenced and be different. 

This open process of encouraging artists to respond with work of ambition and scale, with an independent jury, continues and is now a feature of our supports to artists.  A lasting legacy of Art:2016 is our desire and ability, through our new strategy Making Great Art Work, to imagine new ways of supporting artists, shifting our approach to budgeting and creating more opportunities for ‘other and emerging’ by breaking us out of our historical patterns of funding.

In parallel, as promised in our strategy, we will continue to advocate for the distinctive and important role of the artist in society and in national cultural policy.

Yours sincerely,

 
Orlaith McBride