Ireland's Eye 2025 — Mata Irlandia 2025 at WTC 2: Exhibition of new art from Ireland

Developed by ISA Art and Design in Jakarta, this exhibition is a collaborative effort supported by the Embassy of Ireland for Indonesia and PT Jakarta Land.  It is the fourth iteration of the Mata Irlandia / Ireland’s Eye series of exhibitions of contemporary art, held since 2022 in Jakarta, Jogjakarta, Bandung and Surabaya.

The Irish artist and lecturer Mark Joyce has selected a group of exciting artists to represent the diversity and range of contemporary art in Ireland today. He brings the cultural nuances of modern Ireland to an Indonesian audience.

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 interrogate the tensions 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 globalisation. 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.

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 scrutinises, 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.

How do landscapes hold memory? How do communities persist and transform? And how does art serve as both witness and agent of change?