Project Arts Centre was initially conceived as a festival and soon developed into a voluntary, artist-led co-operative in 1966. It is now an independent, not-for-profit, multi-disciplinary art centre housed in a purpose-built, unique blue building designed by Shay Cleary Architects, located in the heart of Dublin. With two auditoriums, a gallery and a foyer space used as a temporary office for many art practitioners, Project Arts Centre has become a critical platform for visual arts, experimental dance, music and theatre. The gallery’s visual art programme commissions and produces artworks, and presents exhibitions by collaborating with contemporary artists, writers and curators from all over the world. Project Arts Centre remains at the forefront of cutting edge art in Ireland and is dedicated to enabling artists to create work of high quality and ambition, while cultivating an atmosphere of adventure and creative enquiry for audiences and artists alike.

The Visual Arts programme at Project Arts Centre is broadly informed, reacting to the social and political fabric of both Ireland and a more globally positioned dialogue. The programme is built with an intentional diversity in its approach to contemporary art, designed to engage and surprise, but also invariably seeking to reveal or activate ideas about art itself. As the gallery is a single, windowless room with many views, installations have the potential to reinvent the nature of the space, with many artists and curators presenting exhibitions as being somewhere other than a white cube, perhaps a theatre, a cinema, or a museum.

While presenting an international programme, Project Arts Centre takes an active role in creating bridges between the local and international, by connecting artists in theory, exhibitions, and events, as well as organizing international visits to artists’ studios from visiting curators.

As a multidisciplinary arts centre, Project has a full programme of theatre, dance, music and performance, with over 600 events every year. The main areas of programming in the visual arts have been new commissions towards solo exhibitions with Irish and international artists such as Gerard Byrne, Aurélien Froment, David Malkjovic and Rosa Barba, and Jesse Jones; group exhibitions exploring European political realities, or philosophical understanding through artworks, such as The Prehistory of the Crisis 1 & 2, Blackboxing or Nonknowledge; and group projects that abandon or accelerate the exhibition motive altogether, such as PHILIP, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, Aion Experiments, Exhibitions, or Clemens von Wedemeyer’s, The Repetition Festival Show.

Project Arts Centre presents approximately 6 exhibitions each year.

Most outstanding projects in recent years:

General Idea, 2006 / PHILIP, 2006 / Blackboxing, 2007 / The Flight of the Dodo, 2008 / Nonknowledge and In the Dark, 2008 / Monument to Another Man’s Fatherland, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, 2008 / The Prehistory of the Crisis (2), 2009 / A Landscape of Known Facts, Katya Sander, 2010 / Exhibitions, 2010.

Project Arts Centre’s public program is built from the exhibitions programme; often round-table discussions and single lectures with artists will accompany exhibitions, as well as developed performative, or “informative” events. Project Arts Centre tries to avoid a generic, fall-back position to public mediation, or the performance of information and expansion of knowledge. The forms of public programmes are imagined from the concepts of the exhibitions, and seek to enable spectators in an autonomous, entertaining, and inspiring experience of the common lecture.

Accompanying the exhibition Nonknowledge, 2008, was an event titled In the dark, a lecture performance by Brian Dillon and Declan Long and culinary experience, all taking place in a pitch black gallery. For Clodagh Emoe’s solo exhibition Cult of Engagement, 2009, a lecture was staged by Mark Fisher and an “informance” by Sally O’Reilly, using Emoe’s sculpture derived from Greek theatre stages as platforms. Project Arts Centre also presented a stage of the travelling festival, If I can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, 2009, uniting the gallery and both auditoriums in a week long series of visual artists’ performances.

Project Arts Centre develops and initiates knowledge-based projects that are independent to exhibitions and performances.

Recent examples include (Knowing not to know), 2009, a large philosophy reading group throughout the year, and Curatorial Symposium, 2009, which brought together very diverse guest speakers from around the world, exploring and lecturing on their experience of curating.

As a venue, Project Arts Centre also hosts symposia or seminars in collaboration with GradCAM, the Graduate School for Creative Arts and Media, as well as a number of Dublin-based 3rd level education programmes.

Project Press is the publishing arm of Project Arts Centre, and in recent years has published a number of artist or exhibition-centered books such as, Make Everything New, Grant Watson (ed.), 2006; PHILIP, group authored, 2007; Théâtre de Poche, vol 1, Aurélien Froment, 2007; Permaculture, Grant Watson and Sarah Pierce (ed.), 2008.

Project Press has recently published, Forms of Imagining #1, Tessa Giblin (ed.), 2010, the first in a series of books that will expand and document the activities of the exhibitions programme at Project Arts Centre.

Gallery, 100 m²; Auditorium, 200 seats; Cube (auditorium) , 80 seats.