Wednesday 8th May at 6pm
Evening at the Museum - Dublin’s Public Art:
From Ballsbridge to Dublin Castle
The Chester Beatty Library moved from Shrewsbury Road to Dublin Castle in 2000. Join art historian Orla Ryan, founder of Public Art Walking Tours, for a talk exploring the diverse range of public art on display, and often ignored, from the south side of Dublin to the former seat of British rule in Ireland.
Join us for a glass of wine or fruit juice after the talk
Talk on North Indian classical music
Sougata Roy Chowdhury & Debojyoti Sanyal represent the new generation of Indian classical musicians. Sougata, plays the sarod, an exquisite fretless instrument carved from a single block of wood with a goat-skin belly and 25 strings. Debojyoti, plays the tabla, unique hand drums famous for their delicate and rich sound.
The artists will demonstrate and explain various facets of North Indian classical music along with insights into the philosophical side to the tradition.
In association with the Indian Classical Music Society of Ireland.
Saturday 18th May at 11.30am
Film Club screening - The Gleaners and I
Our current temporary exhibition Chester Beatty: the Paintings from the National Gallery of Ireland features Jules Breton’s famous painting The Gleaners from 1854.
Agnès Varda is one of France’s most critically acclaimed film-makers. Still making films in her eighties, she initially made her name as a director in the otherwise largely male 1960s French New Wave movement. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) offers a wonderfully engaging reflection on
modern-day gleaners, both urban and rural and including artists like Varda herself who depicts the process of film-making as a kind of creative reuse of what she finds around her. The documentary weaves a sensitive portrayal of life at the margins of a consumption-driven economy, reflections on the film-maker’s craft, musings on the approach of old age, all into a depiction of contemporary French life at once idiosyncratic and true.
*** We are delighted to welcome Emer O’Beirne to introduce the film. Emer lectures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French studies at University College Dublin, publishing primarily in the area of narrative innovation since the 1950s.
Running time: 82 minutes
Language: French with English subtitles
Cert: U
Saturday 18th May at 2.30pm
Guided tour - Magic in the Chester Beatty Library
Divination cards, bark books and magic scrolls...join us for a guided tour revealing many objects associated with magic in the Chester Beatty Library collection.
Saturday 15th June at 11.30am
Film Club screening - El Gusto
In the 19th century Algeria captured the imaginations of French painters including Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet, and some of these paintings are included in our current temporary exhibition.
73 year old Algerian guitarist Mustafa Tahmi is late for a reunion. As his car winds through the intricate streets of the Algerian capital Tahmi takes us on a journey, telling the intimate story of the music class of his youth, a group of Muslim and Jewish men from the Casbah. They are musicians who studied and performed together before the political and religious turmoil of Algeria's War of Independence tore their close friendships apart. Almost 50 years later, Tahmi's old classmates are being reunited for an historic concert in Marseille. As Tahmi and his friends share with us their extraordinary memories, their personal tragedies and their never abandoned musical dreams, we learn that their love of Chaabi music has forged a bond that can never be torn apart.
Thank you to Quidam Productions and the Irish Film Board / Bord Scannán na hÉireann for their assistance with this screening.
Running time: 90 minutes
Language: Arabic and French with English subtitles
***Before El Gusto there will be a screening of Unheard, a short drama about a young musician who is losing her hearing but gaining something more. The film will be introduced by Writer and Director Carla Maria Tighe, a recent graduate from the Huston School of Film and Digital Media.
Thursday 27th June at 10.30am
The Bahá’í Faith is an independent world religion that emphasises universal peace, the elimination of prejudice, and the unity of all humans. It teaches that all religions come from one God, and that He periodically reveals His will through divine Messengers whose teachings guide, educate and help humanity to advance. These Messengers have included Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammed and their religions are, like chapters of a book, part of one religion from God.
The first known connection between the Bahá’í Faith and Ireland dates from 1848 and today the community comprises people of many different backgrounds from all around the country and from overseas.
Wednesday 3rd July at 2pm
Film Club screening - Clear the Way
In April 1861 the most destructive conflict in American History, the Civil War, began. Across the American continent, thousands of Irish men and women were caught up in the nationalistic fever that gripped both northern and southern states. Using forensic evidence, dramatic battle reconstructions and rare archival photographs, this film reveals the untold story of one of the greatest military units of the
American Civil War: The Irish Brigade. ‘Faugh a ballagh’ meaning ‘
Clear the Way’ in old Gaelic, the battle cry of the Irish Brigade, echoed across the bloody battlefields of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Here, the legend of the ‘
Fighting Irish’ was born.
***We are delighted to welcome Writer and Director, Keith Farrell and Producer, Stephen Rooke to introduce Clear the Way on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Join us for tea, coffee and homemade American cookies after the screening
Running time: 100 minutes
Saturday 13th July at 11.30am
Film Club screening - Madame Bovary (1991)
In nineteenth-century France, the romantic daughter of a country squire (Emma Rouault) marries a dull country doctor (Charles Bovary). To escape boredom, she throws herself into love affairs with a suave local landowner (Rodolphe Boulanger) and a law student (Leon Dupuis), and runs up ruinous debts.
French Writer and Director Claude Chabrol's meticulous adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's novel was filmed in Rouen and in neighbouring villages and landscapes on the lower Seine. Chabrol evokes the period (circa 1840) in the story of a woman who loved with adulterous abandon and acquired material goods on credit she didn't possess.
***We are delighted to welcome Charlotte Berkery, PhD Research Student, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité to introduce the film.
Running time: 136 minutes
Language: French with English subtitles
Cert: PG
Saturday 13th July at 3pm
Writing, in other words - Talk with award winning writer Nuruddin Farah
Somali born Nuruddin Farah’s works include three trilogies, among them Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun; plays; and a non-fiction book, Yesterday, Tomorrow. One of the most important writers in Africa, he describes his lifelong literary pursuit as an attempt "to keep my country alive by writing about it".