BIENNALS:39th EVA International (Phase 2)

The Phase 2 of the 39th EVA International features 14 presentations by Irish and international artists and collaborating curators, across venues in Limerick, remotely and online. Taking its reference from the “Golden Vein,” a 19th-century descriptor for the agricultural bounty of the Limerick region, the 39th EVA International programme seeks to address ideas of land and its contested values in the context of Ireland today.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: EVA International Archive

The 2nd phase of the 39th EVA International’s Guest Programme, “Little did they know”, extends across two venues in Limerick city (Park Point and Sailor’s Home) and via a dedicated online platform. The exhibition centres around two research projects: “Asia Art Archives’ Betsy Damon Archive: Keepers of the Waters (Chengdu and Lhasa)” and “Kosovo Oral History Initiative’s Reconciliation of Blood Feuds Campaign 1990-199”. Works by Diego Bruno, Barış Doğrusöz, Melanie Jackson & Esther Leslie, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho, Hana Miletić, Deirdre O’Mahony, Richard Proffitt, Mario Rizzi, and Aykan Safoğlu surround these archival-research presentations, allowing for broader dialogues between notions of home and uprooting, remembrance and forgetting, care and action.  Taking a 1996 uprising in the cities of Cutral Có and Plaza Huíncul in Argentine Patagonia as its point of departure, Diego Bruno’s video installation “Cut” (2021) investigates the capacity and shortcomings of the moving image to account for a popular insurrection. The work attempts to relocate the temporally and geographically distant events to the here-and-now through the combination of episodic fragments featuring archival and contemporary materials. Hana Miletić’s installation “Felt workshops” (2018-20) revisits the tradition of handwork from Miletić’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, and all the exchanges and relations that have arisen from it. The eleven textile works reflect on the public workshops organised for women of all ages and languages, with or without papers in Brussels, Leuven, and Vienna over the past two years. Aykan Safoğlu’s essay film “ziyaret, visit” (2019) is set in the non-denominational cemetery Alter Sankt-Matthäus-Kirchhof in West Berlin. Aykan Safoğlu’s work transforms an inactive place of remembering and mourning into a site of memory for future imagination  of possible alliances unimpeded by official histories. Through polaroids, middle-format photographs, and the artist’s narration, the work reflects on Safoğlu’s and Gülşen Aktaş’s—activist and Safoğlu’s long time friend—visit to the cemetery and their attempts of stitching together neglected stories of queerness, class, migration, and resilience. Bringing together Richard Proffitt’s recent paintings alongside various objects from his personal archive, “Time Fades Away” (2021) addresses the past, the present, memory, and consciousness as integrated conditions. The series of paintings and objects in the installation creates a multilayered narrative, enshrining the passage of time in daily life, from morning to light, to routines and dreams. Mario Rizzi’s “The Little Lantern” (2019), the third film in the trilogy of “Bayt” [meaning home in Arabic] narrates the untold story of Anni Kanafani, a Danish educator who has set up kindergartens in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon since the 1970s. The work centres on ideas of home and identity, care and engagement, belonging and uprooting with a specific reflection on the female identity in the Arab world. Other presentations for Phase 2 of the 39th EVA International include new video work by Eimear Walshe that considers relationships between sex, sexuality, and politics that will be available through postal subscription (please email mailto:info@eva.ie); and the ongoing presentation of Áine McBride’s sculptural work that augments the 19th century architecture of Limerick’s Sailor’s Home. EVA International also presents works at spacecraft Studios by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, under its Partnership Projects initiative developed through EVA’s participation in the Magic Carpets network. Their recent work investigates the phenomenon of man-made landscapes around the world, where the making and marking of landscape as a form of spatial modification goes hand-in-hand with heightened state violence and the over-exploitation of resources. Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan present an installation that comprises of two works by the collaborative duo installation “No Shelter From the Storm” (2015) and “Conflict Lines” (2018). “Conflict Lines” is a wall installation that charts Google’s arbitration of disputed land borders in Google Earth and Google Maps, while “No Shelter From The Storm” is a video that documents the performance of two people climbing a terrain of destroyed forests, whistling the tune of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – an anti-war protest song from the 1960s.

Photo: Eimear Walshe, Trade School (featuring Dylan Kerr and Cameron Lynch) Video Still, 2021, Courtesy the artist and EVA International

Info: Curator: Merve Elveren, 39th EVA International (Phase 2), Duration: 2/7-22/8/2021, Venues & Hours: Park Point, Dublin Rd, Castletroy, Limerick, Ireland, Thu-Sun 11:00-16:00, Spacecraft, Unit 6 Mungret Court, Mungret Street, Limerick, Ireland, Thu-Sun 11:00-16:00, The Sailor’s Home, O’Curry Street, Limerick, Ireland, Thu-Sun 11:00-16:00, www.eva.ie