Seán Kissane on the modern art of self-determination

Leading with President ­Woodrow Wilson’s appropriative rhetoric on the concept (at the peace talks in ­Paris, 1919) this ambitious and ­brilliantly researched exhibition ­interrogates how artists from ­emerging states ­responded to a newfound autonomy.

I interviewed one of the curatorial team, Seán Kissane.

Can you describe the structure of the project and how it came about?

IT has a discursive nature because we started off with an idea from our director Annie Fletcher around four years ago to do something on self-determination.

We had a workshop and panel ­discussion where we had invited ­experts from the territories we were trying to feature – Egypt, the ­Balkans, the Baltics, Finland, the Ottoman Empire. We wanted to ask what self-determination meant in your own ­history and culture. We were ­thinking about reinvention, the idea of the tabula rasa.

We had to listen to the ­narratives of each place and then after a ­ conference and a long period of ­discussion, my job as a curator was to turn those discourses into objects.

How we could find a set of objects that told the stories of ­self-determination across all these ­different ­territories.

How did you go about that?

WE got a huge digital Miro board and wrote up all the words we kept hearing: “tradition”, “the vernacular”, “costume”, “modernity”, ­“feminism”, “equal rights” and so on, then corralled them into shapes.

We quickly identified the very strong tendency to dwell on a mythic past, a mythology as a form of ethnography which could be deployed in the name of statecraft.

So, in the individual rooms you might find a Turkish work, an ­Armenian work, an Irish work, a ­Latvian work – all of which are using the same methodology. The artists are different, they never knew one another, but aesthetically the same tendencies are identified.

With a taste for modernity?

VERY much so – we see this with the building of Ankara, as featured in one of the rooms, where the Turks saw themselves as no longer Ottoman but Turkish and got the most modern German engineers to design their new capital.

The Stormont building is discussed too – which of course used classical language emphasising, in contrast, a desire for conservatism.

How do artists other than architects explore these ideas? Can you say something about Arthur Griffith’s concept of ‘mobilising the poets’?

WE hold dear, within our nationalist story, that the Irish were the first to break away from the British Empire, and how heroic that was. What you might talk of as “Irish Exceptionalism”.

But we were not the only ­colonised whites. The Estonians had a ­similar experience, so did Latvia. Then there’s the Balkans where the ­Austro-Hungarian empire ruled over the ­Bosnians.

Remember that after the First World War it was the territories of the losers that the winners considered granting self-determination. The fates of countries run by France or Britain were not open for discussion at that time.

The poets come in as “soft ­power”, trying to make their stories of a ­distinct culture that deserves to be self-determined.

What about countries that haven’t achieved true self-determination – do you examine them?

WE do talk about fleeting states – those that lasted only a short-period, or like Ukraine where self-determination hasn’t been guaranteed, and that how once you achieve independence you don’t necessarily keep it.

Are there clues in these experiences of self-determination as to how some states go rogue, go fascist?

THAT’S a tricky question. One answer is that as curators we tried to remain “innocent” of the future.

We tried not to curate with hindsight.

But we do show that the results of heroism – images of freedom ­fighters, say – often co-exist with ­others of ­refugees and victims.

One of the paintings from the ­National Art ­Museum of Ukraine is by Manuil Shechtman from 1929. It’s called Emigrants and shows a Jewish family on the run after a pogrom.

The work has an obvious prophetic power as ­regards the Holocaust.

Can you say something about the involvement of contemporary artists in the show?

WE wanted to have a spread that maps the territories mentioned ­earlier. So, we have Minna Henricksson’s wall drawing on the limits of the State – as regards ­woman’s rights – in both Finland and Ireland.

Minna shows us how civil rights for woman, in both countries, became unpicked with a gradual erasure of agency and autonomy. Then there’s Banu Cennetoglu from Turkey, with a work about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Each of the letters of the ­declaration becomes a golden balloon which will deflate as the show goes on, as a ­reminder that such rights can never be taken for granted.

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective is on at IMMA until April 21, 2024