Finally, Project arts centre has a visual-arts curator and, finally, he has a show going up. Grant Watson explains his plans, including Elvis Presley and putting the Belfast Agreement on stone slabs. Aidan Dunne writes

If one word sums up Grant Watson's curatorial style, it is probably "eclectic". It is a word that also applies to the line-up of Woof Woof, a group exhibition, opening at Project today, that he curated in collaboration with the Hungarian artist Beata Veszely.

Watson is the Dublin centre's curator of visual arts. Although he was appointed last July, Woof Woof is his first show there and, we are promised, the first in a continuous programme of exhibitions and events at the gallery following a contentious period of stop-start visual-arts activity.

Watson, who came here from London, spent his initial few months in Dublin familiarising himself with the cultural landscape - and, of course, thinking ahead. Then, from the end of September, he was off again to fulfil two prior commitments. One was Woof Woof in its original incarnation, in London, the other a "particularly gruelling" one at the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, which involved overseeing a project from concept via workshop development to exhibition in the space of a month.

Woof Woof: becoming-animal, to give it its full title, began in response to an invitation to curate a show at the Austrian Cultural Forum, in London. The idea was to display work from central and eastern Europe with an eye to the "politically sensitised" context of the forum's embassy-like space.

Given the combination of the rise of the right-wing Freedom Party in Austria and the 57 varieties of unrest in eastern Europe, there were more issues involved than you could shake a stick at.

This issue-rich environment, with a background of political flux and shifting identities, the example of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and, perhaps, the fact that Vaszely has a bit of a horse obsession - all of her work is about the animals in one way or another - prompted the adoption of the notion of "becoming-animal" as a guiding light for the show.

Part of Watson's approach is to insist on the undesirability - perhaps the impossibility - of articulating this concept, which comes from the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

He finds it easier to say what it is not: pictures of animals, animal issues. "There are," as he puts it, "certain kinds of complex idea which, though they are quite valid, can seem to disappear if you attempt to articulate them, so you've got to find other ways to express them."

The concept of becoming-animal, that is to say, should be actualised in the works that make up the exhibition. That said, his slant on the idea of becoming-animal seems to consist of a kind of slippage of consciousness. Something like a disengagement from habitual modes of perception and identity, to embrace what zoologists call the Umwelt - the self-world or environment - of some other creature or, more generally, some otherness.

Veszely's People's Dreams About Horses - Horses' Dreams, originally made in 1998, perhaps illustrates the process. Visitors to her installation could don plastic casts of horse heads and, a nice touch, "listen to what the horse was dreaming about". Dreams about horses are common, and Vaszely collected some of them in a book that visitors could read. She also points out something obvious but distinctly odd: "Humans do sit on another animal's back - this is a strange fact and it can sometimes also be a painful one."

Watson worked originally in design, gravitating towards art curation through connections with artists. He devised and edited an artists' project publication, Victorya Magazine, for four years. Each issue took a different form. "One was newsprint and was distributed free, another was screen-printed in a limited edition."

He gained a great deal of experience and, usefully, "got to meet lots of artists". In the space of a single issue, he could come into contact with up to 20 artists. "So I became acquainted with a great many artists, and had a familiarity with their work that I've been able to draw on since. That's been invaluable."

Having done it, he then went on to study it, in the form of fine-art administration and curatorship at Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London. "You could say that until then I'd worked in a fairly personalised way, and going to Goldsmiths was a way of formalising the experience I already had."

The curatorship MA is, he says, pretty much like a fine-art MA, in that the emphasis is on independent practice: you attend tutorials and so on but basically get on with it.

"It was sink or swim. You had to initiate and bring to completion two curatorial projects in the year, which was tough, particularly for some of the foreign students, who had additional difficulties, like coping with language differences. But Goldsmiths was a good place to be. In itself, curatorship was skill-based - about dealing with funding and organisation, all that - but I was able to sit in on art-history lectures, for example, which fed into what I was doing."

Last year, the art publishers Thames & Hudson asked him to edit WOA, the art newspaper brought out to mark the 45th anniversary of the celebrated World of Art series; the diverse, compendious nature of the publication, with its open and inclusive view of cultural activity, seems very characteristic of his curatorial approach.

With experience and an ever-widening pool of contacts has come a growing confidence in his own judgment. "Now, when I approach something, I have a pretty clear intuition about how something should be placed in relation to other work, or within the framework of an idea. But I wouldn't like it to sound too fixed. I've also gone down the path of being more spontaneous. Often, an artist will come up with great work that introduces an idea that's quite new to you, something you hadn't seen as part of the project. And I'm happy to go with that. That's one of the reasons why I like to collaborate with artists on a lot of the curating. Artists are insiders in a way that as a curator you're not."

He admits his knowledge of the Irish art scene was scant before he arrived last year. He'd previously visited the North, but not the Republic. "I decided that I would initially bring in work that I was familiar with, which includes a broad range of international practice, mostly involving younger artists who haven't shown before in Dublin."

He is attentive to Project's brief to be relatively innovative, edgy and open, and he is alert to the fact that he's operating in a city of rapidly developing cultural diversity, something addressed in a four-week workshop project to be led by Goshka Makuga, a Polish artist and curator, later in the year.

After Woof Woof, in March, Living Like A Lover With A Radar Phone is an exhibition and performance event - "it's about the role of the performative in popular culture" - curated by Patti Ellis and Andreas Schlaegel.

It will include the latter's Elvis impersonation and a karaoke piece, with participants from as far afield as Mexico. Peace Garden, in June, features the work of an Irish artist, Eva Rothschild, her first solo show in Ireland. With the Ormeau Baths Gallery, in Belfast, and a London venue, Project will also host Shane Cullen's The Agreement, which features the full text of the Belfast accord carved on stone slabs.

He winces at the suggestion that the Project gallery is little more than that opening in the wall to the left when you walk in the door. "I agree that it needs more visibility. Which is why the programme is going to be very much gallery-based for some time. I do think it's a space with great potential. It would be good to get the gallery in people's sights and then, at that stage, take them on to other places."

• Woof Woof: becoming-animal, featuring Fabienne Audeoud, Imre Ukta, David Burrows, Tiago Carniero da Cunha, Gelatin, Gilbert and George, Lola Kovacs, Oleg Kulik, Matthew Leahey, Goshka Maguga, Michael Math, John Russell, Sinisa Savic, Bob and Roberta Smith, Peter Pommerer, Beata Veszely, Ferenc Veszely and David Wilkinson, plus related short films programmed by Lucy Reynolds, is at Project, 39 East Essex Street, Dublin 2 from Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m., until February 23rd (01-6796622)