EVA International, the Limerick biennial, could never be accused of being tame or shy. From often-provocative art regularly appearing on city billboards to Kian Benson Bailes’ wild Cailleach Boy creatures in St Mary’s Cathedral, in 2023, to the huge sculptural X that Luc Deleu made from shipping containers, in 1994, the exhibition makes its presence felt.
There have been smaller moments, too, such as Traces of Fire, by Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear, from 2004, in which cigarette lighters with tracking devices were left in bars around town, to be picked up by members of the public, their movements mapped to show local turf within the city. Would that be so doable now?
Founded in 1977, EVA was an antidote, or rather an alternative, to the likes of the Dublin-based Irish Exhibition of Living Art and Rosc, both long gone. Every two years a different curator takes the reins; Deleu’s work was re-created on the banks of the Shannon in 2012 when Annie Fletcher, now of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was putting it all together.
Over the years a significant network of curator alumni has been built up, including Guy Tortosa, Rudi Fuchs, Katerina Gregos, Jan Hoet and Elizabeth Hatz, and while this gives Irish artists an international platform, and brings new works to these shores, it does leave EVA with the task of reinventing itself each time.
RM Block
When Brian O’Doherty returned from his adopted New York home to do the honours in 1980, he wrote: “What did I find? A sophisticated understanding of the quarrels that start up in any city where art matters to enough people. It’s a poor city for art where you can’t start a quarrel.”
So will the 2025 edition ignite squabbles? This year the Amsterdam-based Hungarian curator Eszter Szakács has selected the artists, in partnership with the EVA team, and her exhibition title, It Takes a Village, underlines the importance of collaboration.
Szakács first came to Ireland as part of Ireland Invites, an initiative of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery and Culture Ireland, which brings international biennale curators to this country. “The biggest difference is definitely the infrastructure and the state support,” she says.
Ireland’s systems make it harder, according to Szakács, for artists to progress to the point of having (relatively) secure careers. That said, she is quick to point out how the policies of Viktor Orban’s government have affected Hungary’s cultural landscape since he took office, in 2010.
“They tried to destroy the cultural infrastructure,” she says. “Not that they have taken down buildings. They just replaced the directors with those more or less loyalist.”
In response, Szakács is part of the curatorial team for OFF-Biennale Budapest, a grassroots organisation that works without state funding. Projects at this year’s EVA by Gypsy Criminals and Gideon Horváth are commissions with OFF-Biennale.
Szakács describes the experience of seeing work evolve as both wonderful and stressful. “You’re trying to stitch together descriptions of artworks even before they exist.” Gypsy Criminals are creating paintings where they pose as superheroes. In their Hungary-based work they were “protecting” Hungarian children from liberal thinking and the like. In Ireland those protected will include “the rich from the justice of the poor”.
She links the vibe to that of Kneecap, and describes the racism of right-wing Hungary. “If a crime is committed, of course it’s by a Roma person. Gypsy Criminals are,” she continues, nonetheless “very critical towards themselves and the art world. How much social change can it make?”
This year’s EVA has fewer artists, and they’re showing larger-scale work. The Colombian artist Ana Bravo Pérez presents an installation “for a feminist decolonial anti-monument” commemorating women leaders who have lost their lives on the front lines of the climate crisis in Abya Yala, as some indigenous peoples refer to the Americas. Including film, dance and textile work, “every single element of it is a collaboration”.
This runs beautifully counter to the now-declining myth of art being made by lone white male geniuses. “My belief,” Szakács agrees, “is that essentially every artwork is part of an ecosystem. So many people contribute to it, from invisible things to institutional support.”
Once taken on board, this concept extends to encompass the things around us, reminding us of the hidden hands and lives behind the objects we use, from fast fashion to high fashion, a pen to a smartphone. From the sources of the materials to the design, the labour, the packaging and the marketing, there are layers and layers behind everything.
[ Fifty artists, 17 venues: EVA International art extravaganza takes over LimerickOpens in new window ]
There is a huge amount of work, Szakács acknowledges, in exploring a biennial exhibition such as EVA, never mind drilling down to watching all the films and performances. This is a reason for scaling back the number of artists involved.
“If you really want to engage, it’s impossible otherwise,” she says. “Hopefully, the works will speak to each other, but each artist also has a little bit of space on their own” – which raises the question of venues.
“You are really starting from scratch,” Matt Packer, EVA’s director, says, describing the process of selecting and negotiating locations. Perhaps it’s a function of running an arts organisation with no physical “home”, or evidence of a leaning towards ideas over objects, but Packer notes that EVA’s almost 50-year history means “we predate a lot of the visual-arts infrastructure that came online in Ireland from the 1990s. If you look at that infrastructure now, it’s getting old; it hasn’t really been recalibrated.”
To put this in context, the Irish Museum of Modern Art opened in 1991 and the Glucksman Gallery, in Cork, of which Packer was previously curator of exhibitions and projects, in 2004.
The needs of artists, Packer says, are changing. “The projects we’re doing don’t have the same exhibitionary imperatives.” In this year’s EVA he cites Bridget O’Gorman and Lyónn Wolf as artists who “don’t necessarily want to take up the space that perhaps we assumed”.
O’Gorman’s Deep Time is presented online, while Wolf, working with El Reid-Buckley and Dyke Nite, is creating De-Production: The Breeding Room, “a series of outputs including performance, a temporary community centre and a party”. There are also workshops with Limerick’s trans community.
O’Gorman and Wolf are part of the Platform Commissions strand, to which artists submit proposals and a longlist is selected to receive a small development budget. Six or seven are then chosen to create work for EVA. Since 2020 this has replaced the old and divisive system of Invited EVA and Open EVA, where artists used to pay to submit to the Open section.
Combining Platform Commissions with works selected by the invited curators potentially allows EVA to shape a more cohesive identity, something that is always harder to do without the continuity of bricks and mortar. Accepting that he isn’t suggesting replacing object-based art, Packer nonetheless says that “any institution with space right now has to feel the burn of accountability in terms of the housing crisis [and] the general privilege of just having any space at all”.
“I wouldn’t restrict it to object-based or process-oriented works,” Szakács says. “It is important to me how a work is done – what is the ethics and the politics behind it? It is work that has a heart: when a lot of things or emotions have been put into the work, that heart will be felt. And you don’t need to read a book to get it.”
She cites Anikó Loránt’s drawings, which will be shown at Limerick City Gallery of Art. Loránt, who died in 2020, explored ideas of slow living, farming, sustainability and the bonds between the human and non-human realms. Since her death her family have worked to establish her reputation, “so it’s a collaborative effort”, Szakács says.
But while venues continue to shape at least part of how we see art, funding streams can define the limits of creative possibilities for artists and institutions. Increasingly, artists and curators are questioning what they see as the Arts Council’s drive to prioritise the new. Some EVA legacy projects remain, such as Navine G Dossos’s large-scale murals and tableware at the Grove cafe, on Cecil Street, from 2023, but so many have disappeared into history.
Addressing this, EVA’s Never Look Back is a poster and website marking the sites of the ghosts of art past. “We deliberately designed it not to make art the priority but to look at how space becomes possible for art, how it sets the horizon for art,” Packer says.
For those who are EVA regulars it functions as part guessing game, part fun trip down memory lane. It is also a profound reminder of how art will find a way, no matter the limitations, leaving echoes of possibility as well as some sadness at what has been forgotten and lost.
As EVA looks forward to its 50th anniversary, in 2027, these are remarkable legacies indeed.
EVA International 2025, which includes an extended series of workshops, performances and talks, runs from Friday, August 29th, until Sunday, October 26th. Never Look Back is online at neverlookback.eva.ie
EVA International 2025: Where to go, what to see and what to buy
Despite an emphasis on process, collaboration and intangible outcomes, there is plenty to see at EVA.
One Opera Square Vacant retail units in one of Limerick’s newest developments host newly commissioned work by Reza Afisina, Gideon Horváth, Gypsy Criminals, Family Connection, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty.
Ormston House Home to a group show developed with EVA. Work by Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Laura Ní Fhliabhín, Seán Hannan and Kiera O’Toole is loosely connected through ideas of custom and folk knowledge. Ó Dochartaigh’s work also intriguingly features at Sadlier Fishmongers, on Roches Street.
Studio Saol The design studio hosts a version of Eimear Walshe’s Romantic Ireland, last seen at the Irish pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Starling The project space on Nicholas Street shows Eoghan Ryan’s Carceral Jigs, a video installation exploring expressions of Irish nationalism and its complications over time through the lens of children’s TV, puppetry, language and documentary interviews.
Merch Merchandise is a feature of this year’s EVA, including Yazan Khalili’s All the Languages of our Tongues, 14 limited-edition scarves, each bearing a section of the artist’s haunting prose poem exploring ideas of land, bodies and political struggle. On view as a totality at Limerick City Gallery of Art, they’re also available as single scarves for €30 each, so you can literally spread the word.
Also on in Limerick
Over the years EVA has occupied the spaces of most of Limerick’s institutions. This year, with fewer artists and a greater concentration on collective and collaborative works, what else is happening around town?
Bourne Vincent Gallery, University of Limerick Constant Quest explores the life and work of Helen Hooker O’Malley Roelofs, the American artist who, after her marriage to Ernie O’Malley, spent a large part of her life in Ireland. The exhibition includes her sculpted busts of Mary Lavin, Samuel Beckett and other Irish figures, as well as her photographs, paintings, costume and stage design. Until the end of October.
Limerick City Gallery of Art Alongside artists programmed as part of EVA, the city’s principal galley is showing works from the permanent collection acquired during the tenure of Úna McCarthy, who retires as director in September. Including works on paper by American abstract expressionists – with Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell – as well as pages from The Mushroom Book by Lois Long and John Cage. These were donated by Jim Sheehy, a former Limerick School of Art and Design teacher who previously worked at New York’s celebrated Hollander print workshop. Runs concurrently with EVA.
Hunt Museum From Dickie to Richard follows the life and work of Richard Harris, including memorabilia, photographs and insights into the actor whose huge career included The Field, The Guns of Navarone, A Man Called Horse, Gladiator and the Harry Potter films. General museum admission €10/€12.50; ends November 16th.
