Things To Do: Hear some early music, solve a riddle, use fiction as a verb

Our Picks

Our recommendations – no sponsored content, or adverts, just stuff we like.

This Land Bears Our Name

Today, the community archive Éireann and I launches its new show, This Land Bears Our Name in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Commissioned for the Bealtaine Festival, This Land Bears Our Name continues Éireann and I’s work of chronicling the stories of Black life in Ireland by exhibiting a photo series that comprises the personal archives of its participants with newly produced images made during a sound walking workshop, in order to explore older migrants’ relationships with the city.

This Land Bears Our Name asks who are the most visible people in the city, and for whom were particular spaces designed?

The exhibition opened at 11am today, and is free to view until 6pm daily until Saturday evening.

For more information, visit the event page here.

Art Riddler 2026

This evening, Dublin’s anonymous patron of the arts, the Art Riddler, is back for his latest group exhibition.

Opening at One Charlemont Square today at 6pm, this year’s exhibition (and the second since 2024’s “final riddle” at which no true identities were revealed) is set to feature work from artists including Sean O’Rourke, Emma Scully, David Hedderman, Nathan Lowry, Diane Magee, Sophie Gough, Laura Cronin, Helen Cody, Hollie Gilson and Jordan Cassidy among many, many more.

The exhibition will run until Sunday evening. But the opening night is usually the best time to go as the room waits to see which artist will win a cash prize of €10,000.

Fictioning and the Posthuman Imaginary

On Friday evening, Pallas Projects will be presenting a screening programme which brings together works by the artists David Burrows and Maggie Roberts.

Curated by Katherine Waugh, Fictioning and the Posthuman Imaginary explores art practices that operate within the field of “fictioning”. “Fictioning” is a word used by Burrows and artist Simon O’Sullivan in the book Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy to describe the way in which making, writing and thinking intersect to reframe questions of intelligence, subjectivity and non-human agency.

No, I don’t think I fully understood that either. But, really, that should motivate us all to go along.

Beginning at 6pm, the evening will open with a trio of film screenings, which represent the practices of speculative narrative, philosophy and moving image.

Burrows’ film Black Hole Ontology is narrated from the perspective of a black hole that was produced by the Large Hadron Collider when it was opened in 2010. Roberts’ work Miasma is a response to texts by Reza Negarestani and Mark Fisher.

Finally, Orphan Drift’s film If AI Were Cephalopod reimagines AI through the model of octopus consciousness, and their second piece Green Skeen rather promisingly unfolds “as a ritualised fiction in which techno-animals summon and pursue a speculative entity through urban space”.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion between the artists and the curator.

Admission is free. Education is priceless. Tickets are here.

Jaipur Literature Festival

The Jaipur Literature Festival, once dubbed the “greatest literary show on earth” by former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, is arriving in town this week.

Ongoing since 22 May, the festival has staged events in Belfast, Armagh and Dundalk so far, with the Dublin run set to bring together a line-up of writers and intellectuals including historian William Dalrymple, The Heat Will Kill You First author Jeff Goodell, politician Shashi Tharoor, and poet and journalist Tishani Doshi.

The Dublin leg of the festival will begin on Friday evening at 6pm in Trinity College’s Examination Hall where historian Roy Foster will be speaking with Gopalkrishna Gandhi, scholar, former diplomat, and the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.

In conversation with publisher and former editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House India Manasi Subramaniam, the two will be looking at the lives of poet Rabindranath Tagore, one of his great admirers W.B. Yeats, and Mahatma Gandhi, and reflecting on how their work shaped the Irish and Indian cultural landscapes.

Among the highlights on Saturday, acclaimed pianist Utsav Lal will be performing Ragas to Reels, a creative dialogue between Indian classical and Irish traditional music. Writer Jan Carson will be in conversation with poet and novelist Jeet Thayil, and Gopalkrishna Gandhi will be speaking with journalist Fintan O’Toole about India’s journey from independence to the present.

Finally, on Sunday, Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride will be performing their 2025 book For and Against A United Ireland live in its entirety, and authors Ruchir Joshi and Sineád Gleeson will be discussing the alchemy of writing.

For more information, and to view the full programme, visit the Jaipur Literature Festival 2026’s website here.

F(AI)ct or F(AI)ction

If you’re down in Temple Bar at lunchtime tomorrow, Project Arts will be hosting a talk on artificial intelligence and literature.

Part of this year’s Bealtaine Festival (because you can’t spell Bealtaine without AI), the panel titled F(AI)ct or F(AI)ction will explore the use of science fiction in literature, and how influential sci-fi or speculative fiction books have informed real life. The conversation is also set to look at the increasing ubiquity of AI in our daily lives, and what that means for writers and readers.

Historian and author Conor Kostick will be chairing the panel which includes writers Jan Carson, Joanna Walsh and Derek O’Connor.

F(AI)ct or F(AI)ction starts at 1pm tomorrow, Friday 29 May, in Project Arts Centre’s Cube.

Tickets are available here.

Two films from the Bodyverses series

Cinemagoers romanticise the midnight double feature. But, this Saturday, it’s time to one-up them with a midday double bill in the Irish Film Institute.

The IFI in partnership with the Bealtaine Festival and experimental film platform Aemi will be presenting two films from the Kilkenny-based artist-filmmaker Juana Robles’s Bodyverses series.

Bodyverses is Robles’s ongoing series of filmic works, which she has been creating since 2024, and which primarily uses 16mm and Super 8mm film. Featuring both established and emerging performance artists, the films reflect on the significance of performance art itself and explore themes of overcoming both collective and personal trauma.

This weekend’s double bill will be followed by a discussion with director Robles, and performance artists Frances Mezzetti and Alastair MacLennan.

Book your tickets here.

Kaleidoscope Night

On Wednesday night, the genre-blending music series Kaleidoscope Night is returning to the Bello Bar below Portobello, with its June edition promising “high-octane hard bop jazz” and some early music.

Appearing at this month’s gathering is the newly formed jazz quintet Emergent Ensemble, followed by Ceol Ársa Cláirsí (Music of the Harpers). Featuring Eamon Sweeney on the lute, Ceol Ársa Cláirsí is an ensemble that honours the legacy of 17th- and 18th-century Irish harpists like Turlough O’Carolan.

Then, there is Gregory Walkers, an early music collective that “navigates the playful, rhythmic frictions between Renaissance melodies and contemporary percussion”, and also features Eamon Sweeney on the lute.

Finally, the main event, billed as a major milestone for the Irish early music scene, will be the launch of multi-instrumentalist Eamon Sweeney’s album, Plucked from History, which breathes new life into forgotten melodies on the lute and early guitars.

Doors open at 8pm, with the music starting at 8:30pm.

Secure your tickets here.

Come join us!

In seven sessions, members of our team will teach skills and knowledge that could be used in journalism, but also just by people who are involved in their communities and trying to make them better places.

Saturday 27 June and Sunday 28 June, mostly at 10-13 Thomas Street, in the Digital Hub, in Dublin 8. Tickets are €50 per session – pick as many or as many or as few as you like.

Learn more

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Cruinniú na Cleasaithe

Dublin's newest Irish-language theatre company, Na Cleasaithe, will be meeting at 7pm in Fringelab, Temple Bar on 3 June to workshop and develop new Irish-language plays.

All levels are welcome. Please contact nacleasaithe@protonmail.com if you want to know more.

Follow Na Cleasaithe on Instagram here.

Irishtown Sports and Fitness Centre public consultation

Dublin City Council is currently taking submissions and observations in relation to its proposed redevelopment of the Irishtown Sports and Fitness Centre.

The deadline for written submissions is 4:30pm on 4 June, while those made online must be in for 11:59pm on 4 June.

For more information, and to make an observation, visit the council’s consultation page here.

Land meets Sky – Mellow Tonics summer concert

Join Mellow Tonics choir for a joyful celebration of colourful feathered friends and four-legged companions in St Bartholomew's Church on Saturday 6th June 2026, at 7.30pm.

Allow the melodic sounds wash over you as we shower you with sugar lumps and soothe your broken wings …

Tickets are available here.