Dublin's Busiest Arts Centre - Project Arts Centre, Ireland
... the city's most interesting venue ...You never know what to expect, which makes it all that more fun... Lonely Planet
Choose from theatre, music, dance, visual arts and everything in between at Dublin's busiest arts centre.
Project Arts Centre is Ireland's leading centre for the development and presentation of contemporary art, dedicated to supporting artists and protecting the next generation of Irish artists across all forms of the performing and visual arts.
Check us out at projectartscentre.ie
Conjuring for Beginners - Visual Arts Exhibition at Project Arts Centre, Dublin - Teaser 1
A glimpse of what you can expect to see from Conjuring for Beginners at Project Arts Centre, running until 11 August 2012.
Visual arts is taking over the building to present three unique exhibitions and our most ambitious project to date.
Conjuring for Beginners has transformed the building; the Space Upstairs has become a giant gallery filled with sculpture on an enormous scale, by one of Ireland's most promising young artists Sam Keogh; the Cube is home to a trio of artworks, light, sound and video installations by Janice Kerbel (CA/UK), Zbynek Baladrán (CZ) and the 2010 Turner Prize winning artist Susan Philipsz (UK); and in the gallery the final piece of the exhibitionis a collection of sculptures as the works of Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel (FR), Angela Fulcher (UK/IE) and Ruth E. Lyons (IE) play out side by side.
This Beach presented by Brokentalkers in association with Project Arts Centre
On a private beach, a family celebrate a wedding....
A blistering satire of western privilege, xenophobia and fortress Europe made in response to the global refugee crisis
This Beach wowed critics and audiences during its sold out run in 2016. Don’t miss your chance to see this urgent and important work from one of Ireland's most exciting theatre companies.
“Brokentalkers, one of the country’s most fearless and path breaking theatre companies” The Irish Times
This Beach is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin from 16 - 18 November book tickets at projectartscentre.ie
National Tour 2017:
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
8pm Friday 10th November
Town Hall Theatre Galway
8pm Monday 13th November
Project Arts Centre Dublin
7.30pm Thursday 16th – Saturday 18th November
Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire
8pm Thursday 23rd November
Lyric Theatre Belfast
Saturday 25th November
The Everyman Cork
8pm Monday 27th – Wednesday 29th November
Mermaid Arts Centre Bray
8pm Friday 1st December
Brokentalkers in association with Project Arts Centre present This Beach
On a private beach, a family celebrate a wedding....
A blistering satire of western privilege, xenophobia and fortress Europe made in response to the global refugee crisis
This Beach wowed critics and audiences during its sold out run in 2016. Don’t miss your chance to see this urgent and important work from one of Ireland's most exciting theatre companies.
“Brokentalkers, one of the country’s most fearless and path breaking theatre companies” The Irish Times
This Beach is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin from 16 - 18 November book tickets at projectartscentre.ie
National Tour 2017:
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
8pm Friday 10th November
Town Hall Theatre Galway
8pm Monday 13th November
Project Arts Centre Dublin
7.30pm Thursday 16th – Saturday 18th November
Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire
8pm Thursday 23rd November
Lyric Theatre Belfast
Saturday 25th November
The Everyman Cork
8pm Monday 27th – Wednesday 29th November
Mermaid Arts Centre Bray
8pm Friday 1st December
Dublin Oldschool back at Project Arts Centre! (Theatre Trailer)
A play about brothers, Dublin and dance music
Following a sell-out run at Project Arts Centre, a dirty weekend at Cork Midsummer and a pitstop at Elec-tric Picnic, the Tiger Dublin Fringe smash hit and winner of Best Fringe Performers Award, Dublin Old-school returns to Project Arts Centre, Dublin, this January.
Book tickets and find out more at
Join Jason, a wannabe DJ on a chemically enhanced trip through the streets of Dublin as he stumbles from one misguided misadventure to another. Somewhere between the DJs, decks, drug busts and hilltop raves, he stumbles across a familiar face from the past, his brother Daniel.
Daniel is an educated, homeless addict, living on the streets of Dublin. The brothers haven’t seen or spo-ken to each other in three years but over a lost weekend they reconnect and reminisce over tunes, trips, their history and their city. Two brothers living on the edge, perhaps they have more in common than they think, but how long can this the buzz last?
Dark comedy, family drama and spoken word odyssey – Dublin Oldschool is a new play that snaps, crackles, raps and rhymes, with high octane performances by Emmet Kirwan (Sarah & Steve) and Ian Lloyd Anderson (LOVE/HATE), directed by Phillip McMahon.
Dublin Oldschool
A new play by Emmet Kirwan
12-16 January 2016 – SIX PERFORMANCES ONLY
This Beach at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
On a private beach, a family celebrate a wedding....
A blistering satire of western privilege, xenophobia and fortress Europe made in response to the global refugee crisis
This Beach wowed critics and audiences during its sold out run in 2016. Don’t miss your chance to see this urgent and important work from one of Ireland's most exciting theatre companies.
“Brokentalkers, one of the country’s most fearless and path breaking theatre companies” The Irish Times
This Beach is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin from 16 - 18 November book tickets at projectartscentre.ie
National Tour 2017:
Draíocht, Blanchardstown
8pm Friday 10th November
Town Hall Theatre Galway
8pm Monday 13th November
Project Arts Centre Dublin
7.30pm Thursday 16th – Saturday 18th November
Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire
8pm Thursday 23rd November
Lyric Theatre Belfast
Saturday 25th November
The Everyman Cork
8pm Monday 27th – Wednesday 29th November
Mermaid Arts Centre Bray
8pm Friday 1st December
Niamh O'Malley talks about her new exhibition, Garden, at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Niamh O'Malley is an Irish visual artist who lives and works in Dublin. Her practice includes video, drawing and sculpture, through which she develops projects that interrogate the documentary tradition.
Here she talks about her new exhibition 'Garden' commissioned by Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in which she takes us into a personal landscape using video and sculpture -- the garden which she and her family shape and create with the changing seasons. Featuring a new video installation and a large painting on glass, this landscape will be revealed through screens, mirrors and windows.
'Garden' runs at Project Arts Centre from 26 April to 22 June 2013.
Find out more and see photos at
Project Arts Centre talk about new Visual Arts Exhibition, Conjuring for Beginners
Artistic Director Cian O'Brien and Exhibitions Manager Rachael Gilbourne talk about Conjuring for Beginners which runs at Project Arts Centre, Dublin until 11 August 2012.
Visual arts is taking over the building to present three unique exhibitions and our most ambitious project to date.
Conjuring for Beginners has transformed the building; the Space Upstairs has become a giant gallery filled with sculpture on an enormous scale, by one of Ireland's most promising young artists Sam Keogh; the Cube is home to a trio of artworks, light, sound and video installations by Janice Kerbel (CA/UK), Zbynek Baladrán (CZ) and the 2010 Turner Prize winning artist Susan Philipsz (UK); and in the gallery the final piece of the exhibitionis a collection of sculptures as the works of Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel (FR), Angela Fulcher (UK/IE) and Ruth E. Lyons (IE) play out side by side.
Endings at Dublin Theatre Festival 2017
Poised in the delicate space between concert and theatre, Endings is a meditation on cycles and the ending of things. Using portable turntables, reel-to-reel tape players and live performance, Endings finds form for experiences both ordinary and extraordinary that cluster around death, dying and afterlife.
Presented at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2017.
Runs 12 - 14 October 2017.
Tickets on sale
Empireland exhibition at Project Arts Centre
Project Arts Centre presents
Empireland
Mark O'Kelly
1 Apr - 28 May 2016
Free admission
A newly commissioned painting of monumental scale, Empireland grapples with Ireland’s history as a state.
With images, icons, symbols and figures relating to Ireland’s religious, medicinal, corporeal and cultural histories, Mark O’Kelly’s ambitious history painting is interwoven with elements of conceptual and renaissance art history.
Produced on the structure of a motorway gantry sign, the depicted engines of culture and democracy churn up a complex and layered image – an abstract roadmap of Ireland’s evolution born of rebellion.
Read more:
Video by Caroline Doolin
Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously - Exhibition at project Arts Centre
Project Arts Centre presents an international group exhibition that delves into the story how twenty four Orthodox icons came to be housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
British diplomat, WED Allen, purchased these icons in the early 1920s in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul during the fallout of the Greco-Turkish war, a time of huge population and cultural displacement which followed on the heels of the Russian Revolution, Civil War and World War One. For several years the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul was full of the debris of those times including many icons. Purchased in 1968 from WED Allen by the National Gallery of Ireland these icons remained in storage until in 2011. Five of them underwent conservation work and became part of the Masterpieces of the Collection exhibition.
This exhibition looks at ideas emanating from this story, the impossibility of the icons ever returning to their place of origin or resuming their original function. Their country of origin, Byzantium, having ceased to exist in 1451, and their communities being dispersed in the early 1920’s, yet still often being referred to in literature as a symbol of a place out of time, such as WB Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.
The exhibition will bring together five contemporary art practices Erik Bulatov, Ida Lennartsson, gerlach en koop, Raqs Media Collective, and Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin. It stems from and seeks to open ideas of dissolution and dispossession, loss, of cultures in crisis and futures altered, of cataclysm – but more so the what happens after?
The title Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. An intentionally and egregiously meaningless sentence in this context alludes to the rise of the “post truth” political landscape spurred on by the 24 hour a day opportunistic and populist media and politicians.
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously runs at Project Arts Centre, Dublin until 17 June 2017.
Find out more at
Curated by David Upton
Commissioned by Tessa Giblin
Lay Me Down Softly by Billy Roche at Project Arts Centre
Roll up, roll up and enter the shady world of Delaney's Travelling Roadshow.
Step inside the boxing ring - smell it, sense it, feel it and somewhere between the fights and the fortune tellers, the bookies and the bloodshed rub shoulders with its wayward wards.
Set in rural Ireland in the early 60s Lay Me Down Softly is a dangerous story told with a darkly comic wit. A mythic tale of love, loss and pain that proves that life on the road is tough.
When young runaway Emer arrives in search of her long lost father and a challenge from a professional boxer is thrown in to the ring everything in this run down side show is about to change forever.
First seen in the Abbey Peacock Theatre in 2008 this brand new production of the stage play Lay Me Down Softly had a sell out successful run at the Wexford Art Centre during Wexford Opera Festival in October 2010 and this tour is kindly supported by Arts Council.
Mr. Roche is a gifted storyteller, ... a writer often grouped with Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh among Ireland's top playwrights...The strength of Mr. Roche's writing is in his poetic use of detail to evoke the joy of a bygone time and the disillusion that inevitably follows.
(New York Times)
Of epic significance... (The Irish Times)
Read the Irish Theatre Magazine and Wexford Echo reviews for the Wexford Arts Centre's production of Lay Me Down Softly.
Suitable ages 14+, contains strong language and some scenes of a violent nature
A Breathcrystal floor talk - Project Arts Centre
Floor talk by guest curator Mihnea Mircan
A Breathcrystal - visual arts exhibition at Project Arts Centre
24 April - 30 May 2015
Video by Caroline Doolin
Mikala Dwyer talks about her latest exhibition Panto Collapsar at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Visual Artist Mikala Dwyer talks about her latest exhibition Panto Collapsar at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.
Curated by Tessa Giblin, Panto Collapsar will run in the Gallery at Project Arts Centre until 31 March and admission is free.
For more information about the artist and exhibition visit
PANNED | Project Arts Centre | 12-17 November
Presented by Hooked in association with We Get High Collective and Theatre Upstairs
“And we’re real fucking intelligent aren’t we? All mad smart after all of our M.Phils, M.Sci, M.A, M.Soc Sci, PHD bullshit. Jaeger bombs and fart jokes, the future of Ireland. Future of Ireland stuck in a pub making shit jokes…”
This fast paced, comic and unsettling one-man adventure sees our Lost Boy pulled apart by the voices inside his head. As Seán goes through the motions of a night out in town, what he says and what he thinks are in constant friction. Afraid to drop the facade, he fractures… with destructive consequences.
Irish Times Irish Theatre Award nominated writer Caitríona Daly makes her Project Arts Centre debut with PANNED following a sell-out run at Dublin’s Theatre Upstairs.
Performed with astonishing virtuosity by Ste Murray, directed with verve by Eoghan Carrick, PANNED is a play for our city’s lost boys and girls, speaking to our society’s unrealistic expectations and our battle for a place in a world smaller than our dreams.
Book now at projectartscentre.ie
A MacGuffin and Some Other Things - exhibition at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Alice Rekab gives her take on a MacGuffin.
A MacGuffin and Some Other Things
Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin
Running: 12 April 2012 to 16 June 2012 ( Opening hours 11am-8pm Monday to Saturday)
PARTICIPANTS: Lucy Andrews, Isil Egrikavuk , David Hall, Alice Rekab, and Judith Scott.
CURATOR: Vaari Claffey
More info and photos @
Our next exhibition the group show A MacGuffin and Some Other Things uses a mix of video, sculptural installations and performance to investigate the role of the object, and its function, or consequence, in relation to a script.
The gallery will be split horizontally to create two viewing levels, a forced division between the films, performed work and sculptural objects. Like a 'MacGuffin', in our story the physical divide becomes the object around which the show orbits but whose intrinsic role is not at its core.
In addition to events within the gallery, the IFI is delighted to present in collaboration with Project Arts Centre five special screenings of Claffey's curatorial film-work This is Going to Take More Than One Night. Directed by Neasa Hardiman, the film features work by Isabel Nolan, Bea MacMahon, Alice Rekab and Sarah Pierce. The work also addresses the place of the object within the script or performance. One of the starting devices was a form of 'exquisite corpse' - each artist 'left' something for the next to incorporate into their section of the production.
Ruth E. Lyons Sculpture on Project Arts - The Forgotten Works - Culture Night 2012
This short piece looks at the sculpture of Ruth E. Lyons ( called The Forgotten Works, which sits atop the Project Arts Centre ( in Dublin's Temple Bar. A video insert used as part of Culture Night TV. A 3 hour live event broadcast on DCTV, Culture Night 2012.
The Queen still falls to you - Hadley+Maxwell - Project Arts Centre
Canadian artists Hadley+Maxwell examine Ireland’s powerful and complex relationship with public monuments in a new exhibition for Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2014.
A tale of imperialism and an exploration into the destruction, decommissioning and burial of public statues and sculptures, The Queen still falls to you traces the history of a 1908 monument of Queen Victoria by Irish sculptor John Hughes. Unceremoniously dethroned from her seat at the front of Leinster House in 1948, she was retired into storage at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Sections of the monument’s carved stone base were discarded in Bully’s Acre Cemetery at the gates of the hospital, and to this day the three symbolic cherubs who once sat protectively at her feet remain on display in the formal gardens. The Monarch was later abandoned in an Offaly reformatory school before finally finding a new home in Sydney, as a gift to the city and centrepiece for its newly refurbished Queen Victoria Building.
Hadley+Maxwell will visit Victoria’s Cherubs in Bully’s Acre Cemetery, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and a host of other Dublin statues. Taking direct impressions of their forms using sheets of Cinefoil - a black wrap material used in theatre lighting design which moulds around shapes and holds its form – they will fragment, recompose and re-organise Victoria and friends into a symphony of shapes and shadows in the Gallery at Project Arts Centre.
The Queen still falls to you is an exhibition informed by the dual contexts of theatre and imperial history, theatrically reacquainting Her Majesty with her three stone cherubs and colourful Irish heritage.
The Queen still falls to you will open at Project Arts Centre on at 5.00pm on Thursday 25 September and runs until Saturday 11 October 2014.
Developed from a work commissioned by the Sydney Biennale in 2014, with special thanks to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, for their Production Residency support.
Curated by Tessa Giblin
Project Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council
Video by Caroline Doolin
Dublin Dance Festival 2015 trailer - Project Arts Centre
Dublin Dance Festival at Project Arts Centre 20 - 30 May 2015
BOOK NOW:
Peter Pans in Project Arts Centre 2011
Peter Pans by 50% Male Experimental Theatre.
Project Arts Centre, Dublin.
19-21 April 2011.
Our Facebook page:
50% Male Experimental Theatre is a multicultural group of performers from Poland, Ireland and, Uzbekistan. Peter Pans is an amazing spectacle and a story that is funny, touching, raw and, ultimately, true.
Their debut show, tells its story through the universal body language of physical theatre.
50% Male Experimental Theatre is sponsored by:
Medicus Medical Centre
Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dublin
Video Credits: Justyna Seniuta