The fourth edition collaboration between The Embassy of Ireland for Indonesia and PT Jakarta Land, and ISA Art and Design presents the return of Mata Irlandia / Ireland’s Eye, the highly anticipated contemporary art exhibition series. This celebrated showcase has brought cutting-edge Irish artistry from six emerging Irish artists to Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya since 2022. The exhibition is officiated by H.E Padraig Francis, Ambassador of Ireland to Indonesia, and Deborah Iskandar, the owner and President Director of ISA Art and Design, which will run from 17 March to 11 April 2025 at the Lobby of World Trade Centre 2 in Central Jakarta. The exhibition showcases the diversity and evolution of contemporary Irish art. This year, acclaimed Irish artist and lecturer Mark Joyce leads as curator, handpicking a dynamic group of artists to showcase the diversity and evolution of contemporary Irish art. His curation offers Indonesian audiences a vivid glimpse into the cultural landscape of modern Ireland.
Ireland’s Eye 2025 casts its gaze over contemporary Ireland and the fluid intersecting identities that shape its social and cultural topography. This exhibition brings together six Irish artists—Isobel McCarthy, Olivia Normile, Mary Sullivan, Aaron Sunderland Carey, and Electronic Sheep (Brenda Aherne and Helen Delany). Each of their practices interrogates the tension between tradition and modernity and the lived experience in Ireland today. Whether urban or rural, personal or collective from the windswept peripheries of Ireland’s Atlantic islands to the pulsating energy of Dublin City. There are narratives of migration, ancestral legacies, and the complex reality of globalization. The exhibition considers Ireland not as a fixed place but as a living entity that is evolving and being shaped by changing human and environmental forces.
Throughout history, Ireland has long been a land of porous boundaries, political, geographical, and psychological. As a nation that emerged from the shadow of colonialism, it has navigated cycles of upheaval, resilience, and reinvention. The scars of forced emigration, economic hardship, and political turmoil remain inscribed on its landscape, yet so too does a deeply rooted culture of storytelling, community, and artistic expression. These six artists in Mata Irlandia/Ireland’s Eye 2025 engage with these layered histories through various media, from textiles and printmaking to film, installation, and drawing. Their works interrogate how Ireland’s past informs its present, examining the interconnection between memory, materiality, and transformation in an era of rapid change.
The title Mata Irlandia/Ireland’s Eye offers dual ways of seeing—through the lens of the insider and the outsider, the native and the observer. It invokes Ireland’s Eye, the uninhabited island off the coast of north Dublin, a site of historical refuge and quiet observation, as well as the metaphorical ‘eye’ that scrutinizes, records, and interprets. In a world increasingly fractured by political divisions, environmental crises, and the accelerated pace of digital life, this exhibition asks what it means to see Ireland today.
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