MOLI literary installation
Immerse yourself in a
The Museum of Literature Ireland (MOLI)’ traces the country’s literary heritage from early storytelling traditions to modern-day writers.
Located in UCD Newman House, a beautiful Georgian building on Dublin’s famous St Stephen’s Green. MOLI features permanent and temporary exhibitions that celebrate a wide range of literary styles and talent.
A number of immersive multimedia exhibitions and priceless artefacts, including ‘Copy No. 1’ of Ulysses, a letter from Joyce to W B Yeats and Joyce’s handwritten Ulysses notebooks, make up the permanent content and new temporary exhibitions and installations are regularly staged.
Currently they include The Holy Hour: A Requiem for Brendan Behan, which reframes the long-caricatured Dublin writer and goes in search of a truer picture of Behan as a man and as an artist. Created by author Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto, Poguemahone), the exhibition celebrates the centenary of Behan’s birth, and mourns the essential tragedy of his short life.
In this captivating audio-visual installation, McCabe brings visitors on a profound, often hilarious – and at times almost psychedelic – voyage through glimpses of Behan’s life and work. Through the prism of the Roman Catholic liturgy, McCabe’s Holy Hour blends archive footage, heavy lashings of music, and Behan’s own words to cast the Dublin writer in a more nuanced light.
The exhibition runs until October while another immersive new installation created by the internationally acclaimed author of Pond and Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett, runs to November. Part noir-tinged memory palace, part luscious fever dream, Nightflowers is performed movingly and intimately by the writer herself.
Visitors are invited to take a seat in the darkened exhibition space and let the words flow around them. Nightflowers is buzzing with vivid, unforgettable images, colours and aromas: baroque tableaux of oranges rotting in the street or candlelit tables filled with resplendent dishes. There are also more mundane flashes of daily life: an irritatingly flimsy shower screen, or cardboard boxes overflowing with unwanted travel brochures.
After enjoying the exhibitions, visitors can relax in one of Dublin’s most tranquil gardens, the landscaped Courtyard and Readers Gardens. The gardens contain two protected trees, most notably the ash tree where James Joyce had his graduation photograph taken.
The Museum of Literature Ireland is the home of Irish storytelling across the ages and its changing exhibitions provide a reason to return again and again.