Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
Smashing Times and Front Line Defenders in partnership with Amnesty International, Fighting Words, ICCL, NWCI, & Trócaire implemented the 2020 Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival to showcase and highlight the extraordinary work of human rights defenders in Ireland and around the world, past and present, and the role of the arts and artists in promoting human rights today. The festival ran for ten days from Friday 16 October to Sunday 25 October 2020.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
The Dublin Arts and Human Rights festival 2020 moved online where the partners created a dedicated virtual space to share, celebrate, remember, explore, provoke and promote the arts for human rights. A total of 10,363 participants attended 33 events held over 10 days. The partners joined together with artists, activists, citizens, families, communities and all those interested in using the arts to celebrate and promote human rights and equality for all. The theme of this year’s festival was Voices of Hope, Courage and Resilience celebrating human rights and linking the arts to civil society, active citizenship and politics through a series of inter-disciplinary performances, film screenings, documentaries, theatre, music, dance, visual and digital art, poetry, literature, historical memory, discussions and arts-based workshops, featuring Irish and international artists and guest speakers celebrating and promoting dignity and respect for all people equally.
The festival was presented by Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality and Front Line Defenders in partnership with Amnesty International Ireland, Fighting Words, Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) and Trocaire. Creative partners included John Scott Dance, Poetry Ireland, dlr Mill Theatre, Dundrum, TheatreMaker.ie, and Trinity College Dublin.
The programme was multi-disciplinary and brought together key artists from each of the following areas: Interdisciplinary arts; dance; visual art; poetry and literature; theatre; film; music and original composition; theatre and Arts Archiving and historical memory and international artist practice. The Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival provided a space, a platform and a celebration of activities for artistic practice, for learning, for awareness raising and for transformation, bringing diverse communities together to promote an equal and fair society for all in today’s rapidly changing world.
Key objectives for sustainability
Key Objectives:
Developing an Artist Professional Development Programme to continue to promote and celebrate artists who use their platforms to address human rights issues.
The programme was held under the curatorship of artist Mary Moynihan and was used to bring artists together to connect and to explore ways to highlight the work of artists who are using their artforms to explore and celebrate human rights. The aim was to build a partnership regarding arts and human rights going forward after the festival. Sixty-two artists were involved and the programme was a huge success. There was unanimous agreement about the importance of continuing the artist professional development programme into the future. The festival provided the opportunity to showcase new or existing work and brought together a diverse group of artists to work collectively on adding additional value to the Festival Programme. It has also afforded the artists themselves the opportunity to highlight their work to a wider audience. The programme has continued into 2021, with artists meeting regularly online to engage in knowledge sharing and workshop sessions.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The festival was curated by Mary Moynihan, Artistic Director, Smashing Times with Tara Madden from Front Line Defenders working as co-curator in relation to human rights. An advisory panel for the festival was established with representatives from the partner organisations. Due to Covid-19 and a lack of access to cultural venues, the festival was successfully held completely online and featured public live stream events made up of a range of diverse performances, film screenings, virtual art exhibitions and creative presentations alongside post-show panel discussions and debates, all screened online. Over ten days the festival brought audiences a mix of artworks that included the very best performances, vibrant dance acts, live music, visual art exhibitions and family fun combined with stimulating discussion and debate.
This year, festival branding was implemented across all web platforms, live streamed events, and webpages. As the festival used many different online sites including youtube, zoom, the Smashing Times website to present the work, the branding helped to create a sense of cohesion across all channels.
Key objectives for inclusion
A key objective of ours was to make the festival as accessible as possible to as broad an audience as we could. Moving online enabled us to do so for audiences worldwide. We also made sure that the festival was made more accessible by making the majority of events completely free to the public. We also ensured that the events were available online after the launch time, so that audiences could watch the events at a time that suited them and their schedules.
Results in relation to category
We were able to engage with a variety of communities and organisations across Ireland and Northern Ireland and Europe in the celebration of arts for human rights.
Some of these communities included; Kildare Traveller Action, St Paul's CBS (school), The Junction NI, Towards Understanding and Healing (Junction NI), Arts Nomads, Arts and Human Rights Festival (Serbia).
Artists and speakers involved in presenting or showcasing work in one event were often invited to attend or participate in other events, thus creating an ecology for sharing, exploring, and networking.
The Arts and Human Rights Networking Day was also a great success, with speakers and artists from a range of backgrounds and disciplines meeting and interacting with an audience of over 100 online.
How Citizens benefit
Smashing Times used the Festival as a platform to showcase the work of its annual projects, engaging with communities to develop the project and present the work.
One example of this was our Traveller Mental Health documentary and festival event. The documentary was made by engaging with women from Kildare Traveller Action to discuss issues of equality and mental health, and was presented at the festival. In order to highlight the important work of these women, we invited them to take part in a post-show discussion, where they discussed the making of the documentary, the importance of arts for human rights, and the benefits of talking about mental health in an open and engaging way. Since then, Kildare Traveller Action have come on board as community partners at another project called State of the Art - Nation State as Both Violator and Protector of Human Rights. Artworks from this project will be presented at the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival 2021, and we will engage with the community to involve them in its presentation once again.
Innovative character
The Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival 2020 was the first festival of its kind to move online. Rather than cancel or postpone the event, the festival embraced the online platforms, curating an expanded programme to take advantage of technological innovations to reach a further audience than ever before.
The virtual exhibitions Emotional Landscapes and EU1979: A People's Parliament are perfect examples of this innovation in action.
Link to Emotional Landscapes Exhibition - https://exhibition.smashingtimes.ie/emotional-landscapes/
Smashing Times presented a virtual art exhibition titled EU 1979: A People’s Parliament and this online exhibition remembers the first 1979 European parliamentary elections through a celebration of the stories and names of the 67 powerful women MEP’s elected at that time. The exhibition features the biographies of all 67 women and a series of articles on the EU and democracy as well as a series of artworks created by artists from Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and France created in response to the women’s stories.
Link to EU 1979: A People’s Parliament Virtual Art Exhibition: https://exhibition.smashingtimes.ie/eu-1979-a-peoples-parliament/
