Múscailt celebrates arts and science

The annual Múscailt Festival returns to NUIG from March 6-10 with a free programme of drama, comedy, music, song, spectacle, film, dance, visual arts and talks.

Highlights include a musical performance and lecture, entitled Portrait of the Nation, celebrating 100 years since the publication of James Joyce’s autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Performed by Darina Gallagher and Sinéad Murphy, it will take place in the 100-year-old Anatomy Lecture Theatre.

Múscailt’s programme was launched on Monday by comedian Áine Gallagher. The event will open on March 6 with a multimedia exhibition at the School of Education in the city’s Nuns’ Island, which includes works by students from NUIG and from secondary schools, The Jes and The Bish.

This year’s festival puts an emphasis on the university’s historic Anatomy and Physiology Departments which date from the mid-1800s.

Artist-in-Residence Aideen Monaghan will project drawings onto the side of the Anatomy Building, while photographer and video-artist Alan-James Burns was given free rein to document Physiology.

Their work will be shown in Victorian Echoes, a combination of photography and drawings in NUIG’s Arts Millennium Building.

Art and installations will feature strongly during the week. These will include Ananya Gupta’s paper cut-out Silhouettes of Life, which will hang in glass cubes outside the James Hardiman Library.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.