JOANNE LAWS REPORTS ON A PILOT INITIATIVE TO ENHANCE THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSURE OF IRELAND-BASED ARTISTS.  

When attending the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial in June 2023, I was perplexed to find that no Ireland-based artists had been selected to participate in the programme. Notwithstanding the creative synergy that had been cultivated with the Irish visual arts community in recent years, Liverpool has always held robust historical connections to the Irish diaspora. An accessible port of entry during the Great Famine and beyond, the city’s demographics and cultural landscape have been significantly shaped by Irish immigrants. 

Curated by Cape Town-based independent curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and titled ‘uMoya: The sacred Return of Lost Things’, the 12th edition aimed to “address the history and temperament of Liverpool” – a city deeply intertwined with the colonial era, when it served as a major port for the exchange of goods and enslaved people between the West Indies, Africa, and the Americas. Indeed, the city even has an International Slavery Museum to mediate this dark history, and several key exhibitions were staged for the biennial in a former tobacco warehouse in Stanley Dock.

If ‘uMoya’ was a “call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing” I could think of more than a dozen Ireland-based artists who would have been ideally positioned to contribute to this critical conversation, not least Alice Rekab, whose work emerges from their mixed-race Irish Sierra Leonean identity, and whose astonishing exhibition, ‘Family Lines’, had been presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery the previous summer. 

What were the possible explanations for such an omission? I briefly considered whether this could be partly due to the increasingly complex customs and shipping bureaucracy caused by Brexit. Perhaps deficits within Irish infrastructure or policy-making were somehow failing to equip artists with the funding or commercial leverage to prominently showcase their work abroad? Gradually, it seemed most likely that there were simply tangible gaps in the knowledge of international curators about the vibrancy and tenacity of the Irish visual arts. 

Around the same time, Culture Ireland launched Ireland Invites, a new initiative in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the Hugh Lane Gallery, aimed at enhancing the international exposure of Irish-based visual artists by hosting biennial curators. As the three-year pilot project reaches is conclusion, an impact report has recently been compiled to relay the findings, including some optimistic participation statistics.

According to the report, 52 Ireland-based artists hosted studio visits with invited curators, which resulted in 14 artists being chosen to participate across seven different international biennials. 

The first curator to participate in the initiative was Inti Guerrero, Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney, who visited in May 2023. Having curated the 38th edition of EVA International in Limerick in 2018, Inti was well-placed as the first invitee. During his visit, Inti gave a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery, and subsequently selected Breda Lynch to present her Cyanotype print, Cake Bomb (2016) – part of a long-running series focusing on identity, hidden histories, and queer culture – at the 24th Biennale of Sydney.

Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López, co-curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024, visited Ireland in August 2023 whereupon a public conversation was held with Annie Fletcher at IMMA. Artist Léann Herlihy was subsequently invited to install their photographic work, to be nowhere (2022–ongoing), in downtown Toronto as an enormous, iconic billboard. Speaking of their participation in Ireland Invites, artist Léann Herlihy said: “Meeting the curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024 […] was a pivotal point in my practice, opening up space for a plethora of disparate narratives to crossover. Subsequently participating in the Toronto Biennial, I witnessed the transformative potential of reciprocated care within curatorial practices and how this care and attention drew out the joyous rage within artists’ practices. One of the highlights of this opportunity was meeting the other participating artists and learning about their work and life worlds – an accumulation of knowledge I hold dear to me.”

Binna Choi, one of three curators of the Hawai’i Triennial 2025, visited Ireland in February 2024, undertaking several studio visits and delivering a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery. Binna’s visit resulted in four artists (Vivienne Dick, Kian Benson Bailes, Isabel Nolan and Belinda Quirke) being invited to contribute to a bespoke triennial programme, called Kīpuka Ireland, in April 2025, comprising sonic performance, film screenings, and workshops. Speaking of her experience, Bina said: “Ireland Invites opened up new, unexpected lines of resonance, connection and friendship between Ireland and Hawaii. My visit to Ireland allowed me to meet a number of artists in Dublin as well as other areas whose practice and concerns resonate with artists of Hawaii so much in terms of its geographic positionality, colonial experience and the politics of decolonization, value of culture, land, tradition, and critical practice of indigenization. This led me into conceiving the visiting program Kīpuka Ireland within the context of Hawai‘i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NÕ. This could not be realized without inspiring encounters in Ireland as well as the relationship forged with new colleagues and institutions in Ireland.” 

Blanca de la Torre, Head Curator of the Helsinki Biennial, visited Ireland in July 2024 and subsequently selected Katie Holten to participate in the third edition of the biennial, which launched in June of this year (see pp. 38–39). Speaking of her visit to Ireland, Blanca said: “I had the privilege of engaging with a remarkable community of Irish artists whose practices closely align with my curatorial research interests. The programme offered the opportunity to deliver a lecture at IMMA and collaborate with its exceptional team of women professionals. This experience provided valuable insights into the contemporary art landscape in Ireland and facilitated meaningful dialogues that will continue to inform my curatorial practice.”

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and Basil Al-Rawi were selected by John Tain for the Lahore Biennale 2024 through his participation in Ireland Invites, while Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan, George Bolster, and Kira O’Reilly were selected by Apinan Poshyananda for the Bangkok Biennale 2024.

Returning to my opening lines about the Liverpool Biennial, I was thrilled to see the inclusion of Alice Rekab this summer in the 13th edition, as a direct result of Ireland Invites. Isabel Nolan was also invited to participate, and both artists created ambitious, site-responsive works for gallery settings and the public realm. ‘BEDROCK’ continues across Liverpool until 14 September (see pp. 34–35).

Commenting on her visit to Ireland, Liverpool Biennial Director, Dr Samantha Lackey stated: “In 2024 Ireland Invites extended the opportunity to join a group of international curators and directors, visiting the brilliant EVA International. My time in Limerick and subsequently Dublin enabled me to further explore the deep connections between Liverpool and Ireland and convinced me of the importance of bringing in a curator who had existing connections with Irish artists to curate our 2025 festival.” Curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2025, Marie-Anne McQuay, added that: “Working with Isabel Nolan and Alice Rekab has been a joy and a privilege. The work exhibited by both artists has a special resonance with the city – Isabel responding to the city’s historic art collections and lost architecture, while Alice engages with stories of migration and belonging, narratives shared between Dublin and Liverpool. I can’t thank them enough for their outstanding contributions.” 

Overall, the documented successes of Ireland Invites attest not only to the effectiveness of the initiative in the short-term – insofar as the collegiate gestures of invitation and hosting clearly result in the more prominent showcasing of Ireland-based artists on the international biennial circuit – but to its less tangible and longer-term influence on international curatorial knowledge. One hopes that this can be consolidated and progressively expanded upon in the future, with each new round of curatorial invitation. 

Joanne Laws is Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

visualartists.ie

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Thomas Pool: How does your work responded to the ideological, administrative, and social implications of citizenship, outlined in the EVA Platform Commission brief?

Amna Walayat: This theme is an extension of my previous work, based on my personal experiences of living as a dual citizen of Pakistan and Ireland, in which my own position as a migrant activist and artist is constantly evolving. Like many other displaced people – and as a migrant, mother, and Muslim woman – I try to find ways to accommodate the dual ideological poles that have existed for centuries. These dualities are constricted by nationalism, culture, and religion, and are often in conflict with one another. Uprooting from one soil and re-rooting in another offers a sense of something left behind: loss and grief on one hand, and stigma, otherness, estrangement, loneliness, adaptation, integration, survival, and a profound sense of being what Edward Said described as ‘spiritually orphaned’.

Cliodhna Timoney: In recent years I have been researching and creating work that explores subjects like enclosures, edges, and wildness. I have simultaneously contextualised these ideas using specific sites, such as backroads, crossroads, and farmyards in the Northwest of Ireland. What interested me in the Platform Commission brief was not only the opportunity to continue this line of research, but to build a body of new work which considers the relationship between boundaries, access, and connection in response to citizenship.

The work aims to highlight moments where gatherings of people challenged the defined limitations of landscape through acts of journeying, dance, and music. Through the Platform Commission, I will map culturally significant dancefloors that existed on the island of Ireland, particularly in rural and peripheral areas, and will outline the power of the dancefloor as a shelter for kinship, a space for resistance, and a site for re-imagining new forms of existence.

Frank Sweeney: My project proposes to examine the legacy of Irish and British state censorship of The Troubles. The work attempts to address the absence left in state archives by censorship of the Northern Ireland conflict and political movements during this era. In Ireland, censorship under Section 31 was extended far beyond its stated aims, preventing journalists from carrying out interviews with various community and activist groups during the time period.

In response to the themes of EVA 2023, I was particularly interested in views of citizenship and democracy popularised by Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1922). Ministers responsible for censorship refer to views “appropriate for citizens to hold” and to matters which “would tend to confuse citizens”, reflecting paternalistic and authoritarian ideas developed in Lippman’s work, most notably what is referred to as the necessary “manufacture of consent” in democratic societies.

Phillip McCrilly: Broadly speaking, I’m interested in the transgressive and interdisciplinary possibilities of food, hospitality, and education. My research is centred around collective acts of land and property reclamation, often considering cruising and foraging as likeminded deviant practices, and exploring the potential for queer desire within a rural Irish context. My work navigates between fixed research, stories of individual biography, and collective memory. The work is grounded and informed by growing up in the North in an area known as the Murder Triangle.

Sarah Durcan: My film project, The Invisibles (2022), takes a ‘spectro-feminist’ approach to the story of Ella Young (1876-1956), a lesser-known Irish writer and revolutionary activist. Young was both a member of Cumann na mBan and a theosophist who believed in the agency of trees, mountains, and fairies – the original invisible entities. Disillusioned after the formation of the Irish Free State, Young emigrated to California in 1925. There, she had a ‘second act’, forging her own spiritual citizenship as a ‘druidess’ and independent lesbian woman who became part of the liberated West Coast artistic scene. The Invisibles speculates on Young’s identity, and an ‘otherworld’ of subjects excluded from the nascent Irish nation state and the heteronormative orthodoxy enshrined in the Irish constitution. The film deploys the aesthetic register of spectral visibility/invisibility to express the intertwined struggles of Irish women suffragists and nationalists for equality and national identity. These women maximised their lowly semi-invisible status as women to engage in subversive activities and inventive forms of protest.

Sharon Phelan: Citizenship is conditioned by constantly evolving protocols. These protocols are (re)articulated based on historically conceptualised modes of collective belonging and being-together. What constitutes this sense of community is the exchange of speech, action, sound, and agency. At the same time, to cite political theorist Jodi Dean, we live in an era of ‘communicative capitalism’, where language has been co-opted for capitalist modes of production, and speech has become distinct from the individual. In my work, I’m responding to, or following, the ‘prosody of citizenship’ – a concept proposed by poet Lisa Robertson as “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.”

TP: What research methods are you using to develop the commission and what artistic or theoretical sources are you drawing on?

AW: My work is informed by Michael Foucault’s ideas on power and Edward Said’s views on orientalism that I studied during my MA in UCC; my final dissertation was based on these ideas. My work seeks to devise a survey of power and control relationships between various cultures, genders, races, economies, and nations. Citizenship is a highly charged term in its own right. I try to convey these complex ideas in my painting through simple storytelling using symbols and iconography. Currently, I am working in the Indo-Persian miniature style and reading a lot of books on the Indo-Persian painting tradition, contemporary miniature paintings, Celtic motifs, medieval art, and the designs and illustrations of Harry Clark. I get inspiration from these eastern and western sources to create new symbols. I have also purchased new and expensive organic materials, mostly imported, to experiment with techniques and to make my own colours and materials.

CT: This work will primarily draw influence from The Showband Era and how the central cultural motifs of this era, such as the star and magic, shaped collective imagining. Throughout 2022, I made several research visits to sites of disused dance halls and ballrooms in the Northwest, as well as to archives like The National Folklore Collection at UCD, The Donegal County Archives, and The Derry City and Strabane Archives. By undertaking this kind of research, I had the opportunity to view photographs, audio recordings, written documents, and material culture which relates to dance, music, and architecture.

FS: I will be carrying out several interviews with people censored during The Troubles era. The Oral History Centre at Mary Immaculate College Limerick will be archiving the full unedited recordings and making them available for public access to coincide with the 40th EVA International later this year. A core text in the development of this work has been Betty Purcell’s memoir, Inside RTÉ (New Island Books, 2014). I will be discussing censorship with Betty and several people who worked for state broadcasters in Ireland and Britain during this period.

PMC: There’s a disparate list of sources I’ll be drawing from within my research, including: the tradition of road bowling, the early productions of Ulster Television at Havelock House, the remains of a garrison fort on the Tyrone-Armagh border, the ‘room’ installations of William McKeown, and an Anglo-French gentry sauce, as well as a history of alternative and queer social spaces in the North. I’m working across informal and formal archives in my research, as well as out-sourcing some elements to local Limerick-based expertise in the development of the commission.

SD: I’m drawing on Young’s writings, her beliefs in theosophy, the occult and Celtic mythology. Young was involved in the staging of tableaux vivants, a theatre practice developed by the activist women of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and wrote several collections of Celtic myths. This led me to a collaboration with Sue Mythen, a movement director, and two actors to devise a contemporary tableau vivant for camera. Young and her associates were well aware of the power of images and myths to inspire and create identity, focusing on strong female characters, a practice that continues in activism and silent protests today. We also devised a warmup sequence based on eurythmy – Rudolf Steiner’s movement practice that aims to connect the body with the spiritual world. Eurythmy is one of several esoteric dance movements originating amid the bohemian circles and societies that Young aligned herself with.

SP: There is a gendered and marginal aspect to my research, guided by filmmaker and feminist thinker, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of ‘listening to intervals’. For Trinh, rhythm opens a dynamic to expand on “[r]elationships between one word, one sentence, one idea and another; between one’s voice and other women’s voices; in short, between oneself and the other.” Language, of course, is never neutral, and since capital has entered both civus and domus, sociologist Saskia Sassen’s writings on predatory formations help give shape, as amorphous as it is, to the artificial entities that circulate in much the same way. This has led me to questions of personhood, listening, and speech in relation to corporate power, and how we give bodily form to citizenship today. 

TP: How do you envisage the manifestation of your work in the context of the 40th EVA International programme?

AW: This project is a huge commitment for me and a very important development in my career. Most of my paintings are performative self-portraits that are conceived for an indoor gallery setting, along with some sculptural elements. Some of my paintings will be single pieces and others will form part of a series. Instead of presenting paintings in a traditional way, options have been discussed with the EVA team to experiment with the exhibition space in a more unconventional manner and I am producing work accordingly. So, I’m excited to see how it unfolds.

CT: By using the framework of a dancefloor and the archetypal forms and ideas found within nightclubs – such as the star, magic, and glamour – I plan to create sculptural forms using materials such as mirrors, ceramics, and textiles. Alongside this, I am developing a video piece that charts a sense of journey and envisions new ways of togetherness and gatherings through soundscapes and imagery.

FS: The project aims to make an intervention in the canonical archive by recreating a television programme that never existed under state censorship. The resulting film will be screened in some form at EVA, and I hope to organise some related public events and discussions between people involved in the research stages of the project. 

PMC: I purposefully kept my original proposal extremely open with a number of possible outcomes to the commission. At the moment, I imagine the work will be performative and event-based, oscillating between active and dormant stages over the run of the biennial. I’m hoping to successfully embed the project within Limerick itself and to allow it to exist without me in the centre.

SD: I’ll be working with the EVA production team to show The Invisibles as part of the 40th EVA International programme. Foregrounding the sound mix and spectral quality of the work is going to be key to the installation.

SP: I’ve been engaging in field recording, particularly by exploring the relationship between two forms of recording: words and sounds. Language, as a recording medium, isn’t as fixed as institutions would have us believe. Similarly, I haven’t wanted to impose a predetermined form on the recorded material. I tend to begin a new piece of work with a gathering of intensities on the page. These often develop into text scores, which I later attempt to shake off the page, either through performance or installation. Working with EVA, I’m excited to set out in some unanticipated direction, finding ways for the work to co-exist with the wider programme. 

Amna Walayat is a Pakistani born visual artist based in Cork.

@amna.walayat

Cliodhna Timoney is a visual artist from Donegal currently based in Dublin. She holds a BA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT, and an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art. 

cliodhnatimoney.com

Frank Sweeney is an artist with a research-based practice, using found material to approach questions of collective memory, experience and identity through film and sound.

franksweeney.art

Phillip McCrilly is a Belfast-based artist and chef. He is a former co-director of Catalyst Arts, and a co-founder of the artist-run café, FRUIT SHOP.

@phillipmccrilly

Sarah Durcan is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

@durcansarah

Sharon Phelan is an artist whose work spans performance, installation, writing, and composition, with specific attention to sound, voice, resonance, and the poetics of place.

soundsweep.info

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THEO HYNAN-RATCLIFFE CONSIDERS PHASE ONE OF The 39th EVA INTERNATIONAL.

‘Little Did They Know’ – the title of EVA International’s Guest Programme – holds apt and ominous meaning for us all now. It is an almost uncanny prediction of what the biennale would encounter in the months preceding the launch of its 39th edition in early September. Developed by Istanbul-based curator, Merve Elveren, this year’s Guest Programme seeks to assemble “strategies of collective action and gestures of survival.” We stand at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, past and present, across national and international documentations of land.

Notably, this is the first manifestation of the reconfigured biennale programme, now delivered across three phases and comprising four key strands: Platform Commissions, Partnership Projects, Guest Programme and Better Words, all overseen by EVA Director, Matt Packer. Occupying various sites across Limerick city, the presented artworks explore the thematic premise of the ‘Golden Vein’, a nineteenth-century term for the fertile landscape of County Limerick. Drawing attention to the land as a powerful force, artists examine political, economic and symbolic relations, as well as impacts on labour, personal experience and collective memory, with ‘contested space’ at the core of this biennale.

In the context of the pandemic, anxieties around occupying public space have accelerated the retreat into digital realms. Over the last six months, art institutions have had to position themselves, regarding how they occupy space – with exhibitions either waiting behind closed doors or being adapted for the virtual realm, their physical sites abandoned. This has forced radical new understandings of how we communicate and consume contemporary art, and how we facilitate its making, during one of the most tumultuous global experiences in our time. Tenaciously launching a physical exhibition, during a time of widespread virtual showcases, EVA consciously acknowledges that artworks, and the conversations unfolding around them, need physical space and bodily proximity.

The top floor of the EVA Offices and Archive plays host to a video work by Eimear Walshe – one of four artists selected to develop new work for the Platform Commissions. Visitors find the artist waiting for them onscreen, with arms outstretched, for a sermon of sorts. Walshe’s piece places power onto the viewer to activate the context of the scene.  The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, is a 38-minute video piece, a self-proclaimed ‘artist talk’, which draws attention to the contested occupation of land in Irish history. It acts both as a personal monologue on how land should be used, and as a form of political questioning as to how we have allowed land to be appropriated – economically and personally, internally and externally, particularly with regard to safety and intimacy. In an earlier interview with the artist, they expressed the urgency of their intention to “rethink (and materially alter) how land is valuated, shared, distributed, and inherited.” The use of personal monologue runs throughout the biennale, as a beautiful narrative rhythm, tying individual and political perceptions together.

Speculative fiction is used both as a material and structural device in Bora Baboci’s audio work, which is located on the river walk at Merchant Quay. Viewers access the piece via a QR code and listen whilst watching the Curragower Falls. Predictions (2020) constructs a fictive weather report, using tidal charts to forecast the Shannon River running dry, Limerick’s heart laid barren. As we observe the sheer force of the water, Baboci’s forecast toes a beautiful line between probability and impossibility.

In the Sailors Home, the curator’s principal interest in creative archival research is apparent. First encountered is the archive of the Women Artists Action Group’s (WAAG). A slide projection shows artworks by Irish female artists, giving them space and recognition within the context of their first exhibition in the late 1980s. In Michele Horrigan’s installation, titled Stigma Damages, a large-scale photograph appears to depict raw geology, perhaps a close-up of rocks or layered earth. However, details of a human landscape appear; it is simply and elegantly, a screenshot from Google Earth, depicting the site of an aluminium refinery, situated on Aughinish Island, just 20 miles downstream from Limerick city. Display tables also contain archival material relating to the site, collected by the artist.

This extraction of resources from the landscape is mirrored in Driant Zeneli’s films, installed at the back of Sailors Home. Two parts of a film trilogy are currently on display, with the third to be exhibited in one of EVA’s subsequent phases. Beneath the surface there is just another surface deals with the border of fact and fiction, functioning in the associative visual language of science fiction. The films records chromium extraction in Bulqizë, which is used as an alloy for steel, eroding and rewriting the landscape and power structures of Albania. Multiple perspectives on engagement with the landscape – including various forms of value, extraction and occupation – enhance understandings of the destruction of land, both nationally and internationally.

Áine McBride’s and/or land is a sculptural intervention in the form of an active and functional object – a new wheelchair ramp to improve accessibility. It appears at the entry point, as the reshaping of the site on the microscale of the building itself. McBride has also expanded into everyday spaces around the city, presenting a series of photographic works. Along with Eimear Walshe’s billboard work, How Much No Thanks (2020), the Platform Commissions demonstrate an ethos of purposeful interaction with Limerick’s urban centre.

Stacked on the floor of the Sailors Home – and available in locations all around the city – are free copies of the publication, The Inextinguishable by Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie. The illustrations draw you in, visualising and analysing the potent, political power of milk and our human connection with it, based on associations with nurture, sexualisation and biotechnical advancements in its production. Our associative and emotive intersections with the materiality of milk are beautifully constructed by the artists, specifically in relation to the Golden Vein, the country’s most prosperous land for dairy farming.

Along the walls of the atrium in Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is Eirene Efstathiou’s series, A Jagged Line Through Space, which transports us to the Exarcheia district of Athens. Shrouded by frame and glass, lie delicate lines and place-making imprints. Razzle Dazzle, a series of mixed media works on paper, documents the parameters of the Exarcheia neighbourhood, mapped by six constituents, which are intercepted and translated by the artist’s hand to form pseudo-cartographic images. In a similar vein, Emily McFarland’s documentary video, Curraghinalt, tracks the changing ecology of the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone with imposition and intervention presented as acts of protection.

Yane Calovski’s sculptural intervention, Personal Object (2017), reworks, activates and responds to the gallery, expanding to fill the space. This installation catches the attention of the body, coming across as some kind of self-reflexive archive. The past and present are bridged, as new and old works merge together. Drawings, photographs, collages and text hang on false walls. As one moves around the space, hidden relationships to the architecture are revealed. Wooden blocks hug the skirting board, and a false room opens out, displaying a mattress resting on the floor. These elements are delicately formed sculptural scenes, but it is hard to pinpoint exactly where these belong within the artist’s personal archives.   

Walking through LCGA on 6 October – just before new COVID-19 restrictions come into effect, closing venues to the public once again – the rhythm of Laura Fitzgerald’s  installation, Fantasy Farming, finds me, or I find it, as I move between the two hayshed shed spaces, following, tracing, listening to the back and forth of the speakers in each space, as they alternate in conversation with one another. We are standing in one hayshed, listening to the sound of its own making and the constellation of objects and drawings that fill the room, all bound by this voice of the artist as she narrates the experience – ours and her own. It is the clicking and the whirring; the presence of the wires coiled on the ground, highlighting the interconnections of the speakers; a network around the room. It is the sheer openness in her voice as she tells us exactly how she made the pieces we are standing inside, grounding the work in the site and in the land, as it is now: her seeing the welder on sale in Lidl or dashing to Easons to get markers on offer. This is how things work, daily in the spaces we occupy. They are important and are part of the work’s materiality.

This first phase of the 39th EVA International marks an incredibly exciting beginning which is testament to the creative curatorial decisions, the strength and honesty of the voices, and the adaptability of the artists and the whole EVA team. The individual artworks and research-based projects presented encapsulate actions and dialogue aimed at reorientating, reacting and responding, while creating new knowledge of landscape and our collective relationships with it. The framing of these works is a poignant reminder of the kind of questions we should be asking about the spaces we occupy.

Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is a sculptor, critical/creative writer and founding member of MisCreating Sculpture Studios, Limerick.
@materialbodies

The second and third phases of the 39th EVA International will be launched in 2021. A dedicated website has been developed for the Guest Programme of the 39th EVA International, assembling content and resources that expand upon individual artworks and projects presented in the exhibition.
eva.ie/littledidtheyknow

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MATT PACKER INTERVIEWS MERVE ELVEREN, CURATOR OF THE GUEST PROGRAMME FOR THE 39TH EVA INTERNATIONAL, TITLED ‘LITTLE DID THEY KNOW’.

Matt Packer: The artist list for the Guest Programme of the 39th EVA International has recently been released. Could you give further details on what visitors can expect from the programme?

Merve Elveren: The Guest Programme of 39th EVA International, titled Little did they know, will aim to explore the strategies of collective action and gestures of survival from the recent past and to test these attempts in the present. Rather than delivering a historical survey, I see this as an opportunity to look at small – and usually fragmented – stories of individuals or groups across different geographies that challenged political histories in ways that don’t usually resonate in the larger narrative. To open this a little bit, I can talk about four research projects invited to the Guest Programme. Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW) is a collective established in 1984 in Derry, which was active until the early 1990s. It was formed around the urgency of documenting the discussions on gender, class, self-representation and resistance. A newly digitised archive of DFVW will be curated for the Guest Programme by Sara Greavu in collaboration with artist Ciara Phillips. In addition, Sexuality of A Nation: Lionel Soukaz and Liberation Politics will be centered on consciousness-raising sessions programmed by Paul Clinton. It will look at experimental films from the 1970s and 1980s by French gay liberation pioneer, Lionel Soukaz. Researcher Erëmirë Krasniqi will curate The Reconciliation of the Blood Feuds Campaign, 1990-1991, an oral history project from Kosovo, reflecting the memories of families who forgave and people who initiated the campaign. And lastly, Asia Art Archive’s archive on Keepers of the Waters, a community-based water activism initiative, founded by Betsy Damon, will focus on the initiative’s 1995 and 1996 events that took place in Chengdu and Lhasa. Alongside these research projects, there will be 21 artistic responses, including new commissions and a number of ongoing works, opening up the questions raised by these projects and unfolding different dialogues.

MP: COVID-19 arrived in the midst of the development of the programme and it has since changed some of our plans. We decided to take an approach of delivering the biennial across three phases, which could allow us to be sensitive and responsive to public health protocol, changed public behaviours and international travel restrictions. These pragmatics have also created a new set of challenges and opportunities at a curatorial level. Could you explain how the three-phase revision of the 39th EVA International has affected your approach to the Guest Programme?

ME: The pandemic definitely made visible – and aggravated – the challenges and concerns in artistic circulation. Time-based events were greatly impacted by this situation. Given the uncertainty for the coming months, which could possibly extend into 2021 as well, the phased approach was a necessary compromise for all of us. At a curatorial level, I’m sure we will face quite a lot of difficulties along the way and I don’t have ready-made solutions to all of them. However, as you mentioned, delivering the biennial with all of its components across three phases will allow us to be more realistic and sensitive to the circumstances we all find ourselves in. Rather than ignoring the existence and the consequences of the crises, or suspending the programmes to an unknown future, we can be responsive to the current needs and expectations of the participants, the team behind the organisation, and also of EVA’s audiences. I believe it is important to build intimate relationships and to realign the exhibition accordingly. The current circumstances made this conversation possible.

Also, the artists and curators invited to the Guest Programme all work in research or archive-based projects that require a certain criticality on how to visualise the research; and they all have interest in rethinking the exhibition formats in general. So, the programme can be easily scattered across different platforms and phases – as easily as it was going to initially come together under one roof. As I said, we will face day-to-day challenges, but we’ll rethink and adapt as we go. The first phase of Little did they know will be between 18 September and 15 November 2020, including works from Yane Calovski, Eirene Efstathiou, Michele Horrigan, Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, Driant Zeneli, and the representation of Women Artists Action Group’s 1987 Slide Exhibition. The second phase will follow in Spring 2021, while the third and final phase will happen in Autumn 2021. We’ll also be working on a website dedicated to the Guest Programme that will help bring some coherence to the overall programme.

MP: The history of EVA has been a history of connecting international curators to the local and national context of Limerick, and in situating this context within broader cultural and political discourse. I’m interested in your sense of doing that in the development of the Guest Programme, and how those kinds of local-international relationships might change in the near future?

ME: During the research process, we think, we negotiate, and we act together with the artists and the collaborators from different contexts. It is a long process but ultimately, it is a mutual one. My role as the curator is to bring this experience into a temporary space, and hope that it can stimulate long-term discussions with the audience as well. The reality of the past few months showed us that there is still a possibility to focus on small-scale, independent initiatives, to build a stronger relationship with the local scene and, at the same time, to be globally connected.

MP: Based on what you’ve encountered during your research in Ireland, what do you think the arts sector here can learn from the Turkish context? And vice versa?

ME: I had a great introduction to the art scene in Ireland. Apart from Limerick, I’ve visited several cities and a range of institutions in those places. What I find exciting and inspiring is that the art scene in Ireland is decentralised. In my opinion, this model may offer a variety of opportunities for local actors and outside visitors. It not only makes possible various modes of collaboration, through the sharing of knowledge and resources, but it also supports small-scale initiatives and independent spaces. The model in Turkey is quite the opposite. These are two different realities, of course, so it’s hard to compare, but EVA is a unique opportunity for me to experience this model and to learn from it. On the curatorial level, the impact and the results of this exchange are yet to be seen.

Merve Elveren is a curator based in Istanbul. Matt Packer is director of EVA International.

The first phase of the 39th EVA International will open in venues across Limerick city from 18 September 2020.
eva.ie

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JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO THE SOME OF THE ARTISTS DEVELOPING NEW WORK FOR THE 39TH EVA INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM COMMISSIONS.

Joanne Laws: What was the rationale behind your original project proposal, particularly with reference to the ‘Golden Vein’ thematic, outlined in the commission brief?  

Áine McBride: My motivation to respond to the thematic was the potential it offered for an abstracted response. The strip of land of the Golden Vein approaches an ideal(ised) state, offering a framework for conceptual projections around broader notions of land and landscape, place and site. The perceived perfection of this area allows it to be considered in a way akin to a fictional space. How could this space of thought be manifested physically?

Laura Fitzgerald: My project will explore ideas relating to land use, inheritance, capital and survival, amongst members of the farming community in the Golden Vein area. I will be conducting interviews with farmers and using stones collected from the area, in order to discuss these issues. These themes will be further explored by antropomorphising the rocks I’ve collected and situating them within a variety of domestic, office and studio scenarios. I have long wanted to compare administrative aspects of the art world (such as funding applications) to those of the farming community, and the mentality that accompanies this quest for survival, both in practical terms but also in physiological terms, reimagining this as the stones’ ‘personal weather’.

Emily McFarland: At the start of 2018 I began collecting material documenting a series of actions taken by members of a small rural community living in the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, close to where I grew up, in response to plans submitted by a Canadian mining and prospecting company, called Dalradian Gold Ltd, to the Department for Infrastructure in 2017. Particular conversations taking place within the community at that time and research I was doing overlapped with the starting point for the 39th EVA International – thinking through ideas of land and its contested values within the context of Ireland today.  

Eimear Walshe: The Golden Vein, as a historic term used to describe a fertile area of land in Munster, kind of romanticises the yield and value of the land in agricultural terms. Of course, it is a very urgent time to rethink (and materially alter) how land is valuated, shared, distributed and inherited, and Irish history provides us with a lot of illuminating precedents for this. Colonialism, migration, famine, economic vacillation and cultural trauma all play their part in where we find ourselves today. However, I’m specifically interested in how the libidinal economy impacts our relationship with land and housing; how our desire for intimacy, privacy and sexuality informs (and possibly restricts) our vision for how to live together. 

JL: Can you discuss some of your ongoing research inquiries and methods? 

ÁMcB: My ongoing considerations are relatively broad and concern ideas of architecture, our relationship to space and place, and how these concerns may be communicated. Identifying a suitable site for the artwork is also ongoing. This search is being done in tandem with the gathering of visual research. I’ve began collecting a set of digital and analogue images from direct and indirect observation, which are serving to drive the work in a formal capacity and may be a potential form of output in themselves.

LF: I just bought a Ladybird ‘Learning to Read’ book called The Farm, which I’m planning on weaving into my new film. I also recently attended the Teagasc National Dairy Conference on 3 December 2019, to gain insights into the contemporary concerns of farmers working in the industry. I completed a project in September 2019 for Cashel Arts Festival, called ‘Rock Stars’ (curated by Emma-Lucy O’Brien), which has played a pivotal role in consolidating my thinking about the tone of the project. I made two postcard images, called Meeting of Rock Uprising I and II, that depict scenes of a group of rocks discussing how they could ‘take back’ ownership of the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary – the seat of the Golden Vein. So, the premise of the project is very much within the ‘hands’ of the rocks, imagining things from their perspective and trying to understand how they would reorganise the use of land in the contemporary age. Preliminary research and production methods will build the actual content of the film itself, which for me is embedded within procrastination and the fear of making new work – in particular, new video work. Some of the self-reflexivity referenced in the film will include a fear of failure – channeling the disappointment of farmers, of the stones, and of the curator, Matt Packer – and using an overarching theme of ‘imposter syndrome’.

EM: As part of my ongoing research, I have been looking at ways in which shared collective memories, cultural narratives and material histories are produced and what gets preserved or lost at a specific historical conjuncture. Bearing witness to the ecology of a particular landscape, preserving embodied memory by recording it, forming a contingency archive of a place in time, is something I’ve been thinking about as a method for resistance and transformation. I have been collecting moments of testimony from rural activists currently occupying land acquired by the mining company, forming the Greencastle People’s Office – a collection of caravans high in the mountains overlooking a valley of farmland, and utilising documentary forms to note particular details in the topography, non-human life, voice and song from the camp and surrounding mountains of West Tyrone. The dialogue shifts between shared experiences and personal accounts, converging with wider notions of solidarity, sovereignty, circulation of capital, ideologies of capitalism and particular legacies of historical colonialism, intersecting the global and the local.

EW: I’ve been learning about the history of the Irish Land Wars and the life of Land League co-founder, Michael Davitt. I believe the Land Wars are an under-discussed aspect of Irish history that feels very pertinent today. I’ve also been filming in sites related to these histories and sites along my own trajectories of movement across the country. To try and gain better emotional understanding of the subject, I’ve been learning to sing traditional and country songs that deal specifically with romance, sexuality, class mobility and housing. Another aspect of the research has been in the gaining of knowledge about the social, political and affective consequences of having sex in different sites in Ireland: public, private, rural, urban, humble, monumental. 

JL: How do you envisage the public manifestation(s) of this work, in the context of EVA 2020? 

ÁMcB: The work is conceived of as an outdoor work. The material and form of the work will be suited to, and informed by, the site. I think there is an option here to engage with the prospect of change. Could the work be manipulated to weather/develop/have a non-static form that could evolve over the course of the biennial’s two-month run? The work’s manifestation is likely to focus on creating a landscape onto which other works might be sited. A constructed ground might gather on its surface, in reference to construction foundations. How might the creation of a surface draw together various strands of past, present and future? And ultimately how can elements of these be juxtaposed to produce or provide space for poetic thought?

LF: I am hoping that the video will be shown on an analog television set that people used to have in their homes – now more or less defunct, having been widely replaced by HD flat screen TVs. It might take the form of a series of separate videos relating to each season – so four videos in total. These pieces may end up chaptered on one TV or screened on four separate TVs. I’d like to install the work in the kinds of places where members of the farming community might make pilgrimage to when visiting the city. Potential sites could include the main branch of a bank, the dairy aisle of a supermarket, a hardware store, or even a ‘Cafe Kylemore’-style restaurant within Limerick City – any of these places might be appropriate.

EM: Right now, I am in the process of producing a sequence of short films and a longer single-channel video, which I see as fragments in a series. The films will be shown alongside ephemera and artefacts from informal archives compiled by individual community members since the beginning of their actions and establishment of Greencastle People’s Office.

EW: I’m making videos and drawings at the minute. I’m also writing about the affective relationship between modes of housing and sexuality from a more personal perspective, which I’ll publish in some capacity. I’m especially excited about EVA’s immersive and adaptive approach to sites within this iteration of the biennale, especially considering how the location and thematic are so intertwined. I’m hoping I can respond appropriately to that context in the installation of the work.

The 39th EVA International will run from 4 September to 15 November, across venues in Limerick city and beyond.

Feature Image: Eimear Walshe, video still (research image), 2019; courtesy of the artist.

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JOANNE LAWS PROFILES SOUND ART AT THE 58TH VENICE ART BIENNALE.

The 58th Venice Art Biennale 2019 makes great strides in averting criticism of previous editions by delivering a roughly equal gender balance, while featuring only living artists. This significant gesture is further augmented by a strong representation of younger artists, manifesting slick new media and interdisciplinary practices. Deviating from past iterations, curator Ralph Rugoff has assembled dual exhibitions across the two main spaces – an effective presentation strategy that allows each of the 79 artists to reveal multiple strands of their practice, while creating more memorable dialogue between the two traditionally autonomous venues.

Several press reviews have lamented the inclusion of many works previously shown elsewhere; however, I did not find this problematic. It was rewarding to revisit standout pieces previously encountered in other contexts – like Suki Seokyeong Kang’s enigmatic textile sculptures, shown at last year’s Liverpool Biennale, or Shilpa Gupta’s haunting sound installation, originally commissioned by Edinburgh Arts Festival. Substantial new audio-visual commissions from The Store X The Vinyl Factory are premiered, including Data Verse 1 (2019), a multi-sensory installation with a minimalist soundtrack based on white noise, by Japanese electronic composer and artist, Ryoji Ikeda, who also installed spectra III – a Kubrick-style, fluorescent light corridor, embodying a ‘blizzard of data’ at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. In addition, Hito Steryl’s epic new multi-screen installation, This is the Future (2019), mines the psychedelic mythologies of ancient and futuristic civilisations, in search of answers to current global anxieties (like hate speech, austerity propaganda and social media addiction), noting that “entering the future is a massive health hazard”.

Further responding to current geopolitical instability, many artists present timely works exploring borders, prisons and other forms of enclosure. A fractured concrete wall, topped with razor wire, is one of the first barriers encountered by viewers, when entering the cluttered frenzy of the Central Pavilion. Titled Muro Ciudad Juárez (2010), by Teresa Margolles, this wall previously provided a backdrop to the drug war in Ciudad Juárez – a Mexican town bordering the USA. Perhaps using the physicality of walls as a provocation, the biennale includes an unprecedented array of sound art, creating acoustic environments that reverberate fluidly throughout the vast exhibition spaces. 

As noted by Lebanese artist and composer, Tarek Atoui – whose interactive sound work, The GROUND (2018), is installed in the Giardini – the ‘abstraction of sound’ is pulling us away from the ‘weight of the image’, thus liberating us from a visually-saturated world. Drawing on the legacy of 1960s composers like John Cage, Atoui seeks to expand notions of listening, through spatially responsive and durational sound performances. Within Atoui’s tactile and aural environment, handcrafted musical instruments produce sound autonomously, based on field recordings made by the artist along the River Delta in China. Audiences, musicians, instrument-makers and other improvisors come and go, yet the performance holds momentum, as a collaborative interface and as a sonic forum for active research. 

Among national participations, the more successful sonic works include Panos Charalambous’s installation for Greece’s National Pavilion, which comprises 20,000 drinking glasses, configured to form a floor-based, transparent stage. As visitors walk across the platform, they generate layers of tintinnabulation, which echo throughout the pavilion like a vortex. Sculptural elements, such as megaphones and a taxidermy eagle, function as remnants of Charalambous’s previous sound performance, described as an ‘ecstatic ultrasonic dance’, aimed at playfully recomposing forgotten histories, silenced by hegemonic power structures. In the Japanese Pavilion, black and white video projections by Motoyuki Shitamichi depict ‘tsunami boulders’ washed up on shorelines, while a series of wall texts convey anthropological allegories, based on folklore linked to the tsunami. These elements are unified by a score, reminiscent of birdsong, performed on automated recorder flutes to imagine a sonic ecology in which humans and non-humans can coexist. 

Rumbling throughout the Giardini are periodic crashes from Shilpa Gupta’s mechanised residential gate, which cause the supporting wall to crumble and crack. Gupta frequently explores the physical and ideological function of borders, as well as the structures of surveillance permeating these sites. Gupta’s second sound installation, located in the Arsenale, consists of 100 hanging microphones. Rather than acting as recording devices, they function as speakers, transmitting an immersive and layered soundscape of whispers, static and clapping. Giving voice to 100 poets who have been imprisoned or executed for their political alignments, the haunting recital includes readings in different languages, while fragmented verses, inscribed on pages, are violently pierced by metal spikes. Among the gentler soundscapes is an enchanting vocal, emanating from an installation by South African artist, Kemang Wa Lehulere. This tribal song forms part of a male initiation ceremony, traditionally performed by the Xhosa people, who were oppressed by colonial and Apartheid governments. Speakers are embedded within a school chair, while birdhouses, fabricated in wood from salvaged school desks, channel current critical debate in South Africa, regarding the decolonisation of school curricula. 

Less successful sound works included Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc for the New Zealand Pavilion, in which an inventory of vanished, extinct or invisible phenomena is electronically broadcast in frustratingly muffled tones, via tree cell towers located around Venice. This list is printed concurrently in the otherwise empty Palazzina library, highlighting the vacuity of this underwhelming sonic encounter. Grating sounds emanate from Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s equally vexatious robotic artworks in the Giardini and Arsenale, while horrendous automatons resurface in the Belgium Pavilion – fashioned as a 1940s heritage museum and flanked by prison cells – as traditional harpsicord players generate music to ‘soothe the condemned’.

Also addressing the ‘acoustics of incarceration’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s compelling video installation, Walled, Unwalled (2018) was a standout work that helped me consolidate my thinking regarding the biennale thematic. Set within the Funkhaus sound studios in East Berlin – from which East German State Radio was once broadcast – the film features Abu Hamdan’s lecture-performance on the ‘politics of listening’. He chronicles the Cold War and the Regan-Thatcher era as precursors to current global border fortification, before outlining legal cases in which evidence took the form of sound heard through walls. He relays the experiences of prisoners, who train their ears to surpass the walls of their cells. With the prison complex operating as an echo chamber, sounds of interrogations and torture happening in other rooms are amplified exponentially, generating an ‘architectonic form of torture’. 

As described by Salomé Voegelin, in her book, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2018), “a geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events; invisible trajectories and configurations between people and things”. Porous and immaterial, sound has the capacity to permeate, transcend and defy inescapably solid structures. If the emerging sensibilities of sonic materialism are without social boundaries, then the convergence of so many expanded sonic practices in Venice this year generates extreme positivity and hope. This polyphony of voices, both harmonic and dissonant, offer ways to resist segregation or enclosure, by visualising and enacting a more connected world.

Joanne Laws is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. The 58th International Venice Biennale continues until 24 November.

Feature Image
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2009, MS Mobile Gate, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition; photograph by Francesco Galli, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

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ALAN PHELAN NAVIGATES GENDER IDENTITIES AT THE 2019 VENICE ART BIENNALE.

The biennale opened a week before the Eurovision. In terms of kitsch nationalism and tone-deaf politics, there could not be a better analogy. Difficult national politics can get art-washed – or tourism promotion can have a stronger grip than the art – but this year, these were outweighed by strong feminist voices or, better still, work that had opposing values to the country they were representing or the curatorial theme they were nestled into. The ‘big show’ that tackles the ‘big ideas’ of the day can easily lose out in a city littered with hundreds of shows, exhibits, projects and even performance artists baying for attention – but it does generate many starting points. 

When rumours began circulating about the €30 million cost of Christoph Büchel’s raised migrant boat, Barca Nostra, the artist had succeeded in playing the art crowd. Gossip replaced information, followed by moral outrage and indignant memes. Eventually, facts followed in a slew of articles (see theartnewspaper.com for a good overview) but spectacle was the real winner. This is part of the backstory, as it tied directly into Rugoff’s theme, despite nobody seeming to get that – this was art fake news in action.

In many ways, there are 89+ individual attempts at museum standard shows competing with the main biennale themed exhibition which, despite only having 79 artists in this edition, is still enormous. There is a lot to describe but there is already a slew of ‘top ten reviews’ which do that job very well. A simple search will yield many such lists – I can recommend artsy.net, domusweb.it, news.artnet.com, as well as vogue.co.uk (featuring a profile on female artists at the biennale, in which includes Eva Rothschild, who represented Ireland). 

What generally happens however, outside of the firm winners and favourites, are the accidental patterns that emerge outside of the great curatorial plan, like the prevalence this year of gender/queer work, science fiction and dance music across the city. I must confess, these are part of my subjectivity, informed by my interests as an artist – the results of my internal filter that tries to resist the pushy media packs of press week. 

It sometimes feels that misinterpretation is the only way to navigate the flood of art. Crowds are dense during press week and tempers and patience can be short. But as this is art, some artists deliberately misdirect – making one thing, saying another and then publishing an entirely different array of ideas. Sometimes by plan, sometimes by mistake, as press release and wall text lingo gets garbled between language translation, art theory and hyperbole. Many interpretative skills are required. Brief descriptions of all works can be found at labiennale.org however, split between the national reps and the big show, plus the collateral pay-to-be-there and special projects.

For the national shows, many will generally have taken the best part of two years to realise and are, in many instances, a culminating point or pinnacle in an artist’s career. Many will have an advanced visual vocabulary or be at the height of their popularity, which has led to that national representation and pavilion. Good examples from the Giardini’s ‘Empire Avenue’ would be France, Great Britain and Germany – Laure Prouvost, Cathy Wilkes and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, respectively. These three artists offered emotional and conceptual arrangements of displacement and loss, each charting differing courses through national identities in their signature styles and all demanding different durational commitments. Provost did fun climate change; Wilkes did sad domestic and Sadr Haghighian was someone else. 

Between spectacle and anti-spectacle, all three were extremely sophisticated and nuanced presentations of well-oiled practices and all three left me content but a little cold. I got drawn to the dance music in the Korean pavilion instead, a thumping hard techno soundtrack by Siren Eun Young Jung in a rear room, to a video showing four characters performing gender, disability and DJing. It should have been trite, but a very polished visual edit and music mix made it work. A special edition of Harper’s Bazaar Korea, like the special edition Monopl magazine at Germany, did not help any interpretative questions I had, but acted as a good reminder of a blander commodity culture underwriting so much of what is on show at Venice. 

The nearby pavilions of Switzerland and Spain, who both had collaborative groups, also played out a gender/queer fuckery with a trickster dance tone. It’s difficult to ‘present as’ counter-culture in such a bourgeois setting, but both functioned to unnerve the heteronormative bias that otherwise dominates. So, when Austria failed to make the mark of reviving a feminist genius, nearby Brazil excelled at presenting the liveliest and somehow most authentic show. Clearly in defiance of the Bolsonaro government, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca presented a proud trans-gendered ghetto war dance, ‘horizontally’ created with participants, reappropriating Beyoncé moves to push back pop culture, to own it and ‘serve’ it. 

The piece succeeded with ‘realness’ in a way that Shu Lea Cheang at Taiwan could not quite muster. Despite a huge, complex and super-camp production, the work felt like a literal rendition of curator Paul B. Preciado’s writings, channelling Foucault with a panopticon video display in a prison with gender and sexual outlaws. It was cutting yet funny, but too close to texts like Testo Junkie. A live version of the piece – with many of the performers, served with penis cake – was apparently more successful, so said a colleague who managed to attend it on San Servolo, the ‘Island of the Mad’.

If you lived between London and Berlin in the last few years, you would have seen it all, so another colleague said. As I only live in Dublin, the Arsenale and Giardini Central Pavilion are a great way to catch up on the works of Arthur Jafa, Kahil Joseph, Hito Steyrl, Teresa Margolles, Nicole Eisenman, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rosemarie Trokel and many more. These works are all too eclectic to describe or discuss here, but those dealing with aspects of social justice and gender politics were strongest. Similar themes occurred with other artists around robots, sauerkraut juice and weepy CGI, but did not work as well. 

Science Fiction operated between the AI aspirations of the main show, from the ridiculous Halil Altindere space refugee, or tedious Mars diorama by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to the sublime Larissa Sansour at Denmark. And then there was Stan Douglas; his quantum identity-swapping character fared better in an exquisitely made B-movie, successfully questioning race in space. The Mexican pavilion could be seen as a deranged time-travelling, Bible re-enactment epic, but that was not the intention of artist, Pablo Vargas Lugo. Larissa Sansour’s work has long dealt with finding parallel Sci-Fi narratives for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet her film for Denmark provoked a long online conversation with a friend, who pointed out that the the eco-disaster theme was actually anti-Semitic and not the ‘radical alterity’ proposed by the curator.   

One of the last shows I saw was Charlotte Prodger, who represented Scotland. The 39-minute video was slowly paced and the opposite of Laure Prouvost’s 20-minute film which was of a frenzy of edits. Both works share an authority of self-conviction, that kind of public self-belief unironically riddled with self-doubt and diary structures, probable humility and apparent intimacy. Both let the cameras roll around their largesse and the people and places important within their narrative. It reminded me why Lithuania won the Golden Lion, as that work had a different and decided generosity. The singing beach goers were casually directed, giving the impression they really were enjoying their day out, singing about climate change and the end of the world. Maybe it was the collaborative nature of the piece, from production to performance, that brought me back to the staged authenticity that worked so well for Brazil, offering a fresh twist on what post-truth can become.

Alan Phelan is an artist based in Dublin. His trip to Venice was self-funded with press accreditation arranged through VAI. 

Featured Image
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019; film still courtesy of the artists and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

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JONATHAN CARROLL INTERVIEWS EVA ROTHSCHILD ABOUT REPRESENTING IRELAND AT THE 58TH VENICE BIENNALE.

Jonathan Carroll: Your biography is the perfect antithesis of Brexit: you were born in Dublin; studied at University of Ulster, Belfast; live in London and have an MA from Goldsmiths; and you are being brought to Venice by Void Gallery in Derry, with a curator from Cork. Is it good timing for such a European endeavour?
Eva Rothschild: We were not alone in being anxious about getting everything transported to Venice before the initial Brexit date. The Scottish, Welsh and British pavilions were all installing early, to avoid any difficulties. There is nothing in the show that directly relates to Brexit – I don’t make work that has a narrative in that way. It is interesting to be working in Northern Ireland during this pivotal moment in UK-Irish relations. Living in the UK, it is very important for me to identify as an Irish artist.

JC: The selection process for the Venice Biennale is very competitive and involves a lot of partnering between commissioner, curator and artist. Can you give insights into how your team came together? 
ER: I have wanted to do Venice for ages but hadn’t realised you had to apply for it. As part of the open-call process, curators and commissioners nominate artists who they want to work with. Mary Cremin and I had wanted to work together for some time, and then she was appointed Director of Void in Derry. Mary is a force to be reckoned – a dynamic yet calm person who can deal with anything and has great curatorial flare. You also have to ensure that there is some sort of institutional support, to coordinate and provide structures to make the project happen. A big issue, of course, is additional funding.¹ 

JC: One of the Arts Council’s main criteria for Venice artists is the capacity to bring their practice to another level – were you asked to “think big”? 
ER: I am nearly 50 and have been working as an artist for 25 years. I suppose if you want me to do a project, you know it will probably be sculpture, though this is not the same as making a show for a small commercial space or doing an architectural project. In any instance, you take into account the context of the exhibition. Showing in Venice is like doing the most public exhibition you can imagine. There is an expectation that the work will demonstrate a scale and ambition not suitable in other contexts. As a sculptor, I feel that a lot of internationally recognised contemporary Irish art is quite narrative-based, or very much to do with time-based media. I felt it was important that my work stayed true to a sculptural core, so that is very much how I approach the pavilion, to emphasise physical sculptural engagement. It is worth noting that the Irish pavilion is situated as a continuation to the main Venice Biennale exhibition – curated this year by Ralph Rugoff – unlike the standalone national pavilions located in the Giardini. It’s the only remaining artworld show organised around national identity. The history and longevity of the Venice Biennale and the positioning of the pavilions echoes the colonial structure that is now eroded. The Irish pavilion is sort of in the ‘post-colonial’ section – it’s a good place to be. 

JC: Can we expect something of the scale of your 2009 Duveen Commission, Cold Corners, for Tate Britain? 
ER: It is within the idiom of my work, but I have considered the architecture of the space and the flow through of people. I was warned that nothing can prepare you for the crowds coming through during the first few days. The four main sculptural elements I will be showing are very demanding, in terms of their physical requirements. That is one of the great advantages of showing in the Arsenale – there are not that many floors in Venice that can take concrete blocks or heavy sculptures. The location could not be better, in terms of access. This space is also quite rough and ready, so the work needs to be robust and coherent enough to deal with those kinds of conditions and to hold its own. My work is either episodic or made up of multiple elements – although you see it arranged in one way, it allows for the possibility for it to be shown in different ways.

I am very interested in how people view a room of sculptures that is also populated by other people – they give a kinaesthetic sense of scale and possibility in relation to the objects. We all have the experience of going to these blockbuster exhibitions and peering over people’s heads, trying to catch a glimpse of the rarefied artwork. That’s not an ideal situation but I think with sculpture, you get to see how people look at things, how they comport themselves in relation to the object, and how they arrange themselves in their modes of looking. I am interested in spectatorship, especially in a spectacular situation like Venice. I am very aware that the time people give to an artwork is miniscule. Within these few seconds, there is a desperation to find the language to go with it, so a search for the panel and title ensues. To counteract the tendency for the Irish pavilion to become a corridor, I have included seating in the exhibition, to encourage people to stay a while. I’ve also added a sort of forced interaction with the work, by creating barriers which corral the visitors. You can’t just walk past the work; you have to circumnavigate it in some way. 

JC: Perhaps there will be some sort of relief for the viewer, after they’ve come through this heavily curated narrative section, to find ‘stuff in a room’?
ER: Yes. Viewers will have encountered many shows within the Arsenale, by the time they get to the Irish pavilion. And that is what it comes down to – it’s ‘stuff in a room’, stuff you are not going to find anywhere else. I think when you talk to sculptors who are very involved in making, there are lots of things that inform their work but usually they are overridden by the desire to see something exist, or to force the material to do something. So, there is a tendency to place the idea above the object, but for me, the object is key. I think there is such a divorce from materiality now, that I feel very privileged every day to be actually dealing with ‘stuff’ rather than screens. I squash something into a box, or I saw something in two, or I make a mould. That is what I would prefer to do all day – I like physicality, I like the sense of labour, the sense of work. If I wasn’t doing this, I would rather be doing something physical than something chair-bound.  

JC: Can you discuss the significance of titles within your work?
ER: I find titles are very important. Titles direct the language-functioning part of the brain towards creating meaning for the visual. People also view the title as a kind of crutch, so I think it is important that I design that support. I suppose I am continuing my authorial role through the titles of the works. I hate when works are untitled. In the process of developing this exhibition, I changed the title of an artwork, which was problematic, as the catalogue essay had already been edited. However, this amendment was important to me, as the work is settled now, whereas it felt a bit unsettled before.

JC: There is a certain pressure on artists to be relevant to the current moment, but your work maintains a certain detachment that insulates it from this need to continually comment on the present. In your press release for Venice, there is mention of allowing for “contemplation of the material legacy” of both “present and past civilisations”. Is it important for you to avoid time-specificity within your work?  
ER: One of the weird things about doing something like Venice is the level of discussion prior to the opening and the drive to fit things into a series of subjects. These things inform the work, in that they form my view of the world, but the work itself is not illustrative of these things. I would be very much of the Susan Sontag ‘Against Interpretation’ kind. I do want the work to float free of those things, but that is not to say that my own concerns are not the concern of the work. There isn’t usually the drive to sort of shoehorn the work into a narrative, in the same way as there is when doing something like the Venice Biennale. 

JC: The Irish Pavilion usually returns to Ireland after the biennale closes in late November. Where will it be shown?
ER: Having studied in Belfast, I have a strong link to Northern Ireland and was very keen to show at the Void Gallery in Derry. Then we will be showing in VISUAL Carlow and somewhere in Dublin – as yet, we have not decided on a venue. 

Jonathan Carroll is a curator and writer based in Dublin. 

Eva Rothschild is an artist who currently lives and works in London. The 58th Venice Biennale will take place from 11 May to 24 November 2019.

Notes:
¹ Eva has produced a series of prints and sculptures to help fund the final project.

Feature Image:
Eva Rothschild, ‘Kosmos’, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2018; photograph by Andrew Curtis.

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ANNE MULLEE REPORTS ON THE CONTRIBUTION OF IRISH ARTISTS AND CURATORS AT THE 57^TH VENICE BIENNALE.

Many of the reviews of curator Christine Macel’s ambitious handling of her two huge, artist-centered ‘Viva Arte Viva!’ exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia have drawn less than fulsome praise, with critics variously citing too many weak works, not enough diversity and flabby contextualisation, among other criticisms. Of course, the 57^th Biennale is far more than a sum of these parts. Perhaps reflecting the increasingly globalised art world, this year sees the inclusion of new pavilions from first-time participants Antigua and Barbuda, Kiribati and Nigeria. As more countries are invited to participate in the event, reflections on nationhood are becoming an increasingly common trope. Virtual utopian state NSK hosts Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt, who has worked with young refugees to run a live passport office, where I secured an NSK State Passport (nskstate.com). In contrast, the southern part of the globe is represented in Venice by the Antarctic Pavilion, which is not so much an imagined state as a state of enquiry. Instigated by Russian artist and biennale stalwart Alexander Pononmarev, the pavilion provides a platform to showcase artworks and projects by various invited artists who participated in the first Antarctic Biennale – a 12-day artistic research expedition undertaken in March 2017 with 100 participants aboard the research vessel Akademik Ioffe.

Irish artist Méadhbh O’Connor, who is currently UCD artist-in-residence at Parity Studios, is among the 15 international artists selected to exhibit at the Antarctic Pavilion. Working in collaboration with UCD’s science department, O’Connor devised an experiment and offered it as an open-source work. Presented as a film work, the piece explores climate change, demonstrating atmospheric reactions on a micro level by mixing milk with different densities of water. Filmed in close-up and displayed on two wall-mounted tablets, the result is magical. Climate-Simulator Phase I and II are tiny worlds evoking the gaseous clouds around the earth, swirling and eddying at the whim of their creator. The film is disseminated via YouTube and social media throughout the biennale, inviting viewers to recreate the experiment at home.

Another cross-state collateral pavilion is the exhibition from the European Cultural Centre. Presented across three venues – Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and the Giardini Marinaressa – more than 250 artists from all over the world respond to the concepts of “time, space and existence” under the title ‘PERSONAL STRUCTURES – open borders’. Irish artist Patricia McKenna has created an installation ….and the world goes on (2017) in the eaves of the Palazzo Mora, where slender trees reach towards its centuries-old rafters, met by others reaching downwards. Illuminated by a neon sign proclaiming “Goes”, this make-shift forest is mounted on neat metal stands (painted in blue, red and black) and is broken up with straight rods. Here and there, small clay human figures seem to leap from tree to tree, while fake foil leaves indicate possible signs of life. It’s oddly dystopian, with the sodium-like glare of neon casting a kind of post-apocalyptic yellowish tinge.

At the Giardini, the Swiss Pavilion is curated by Philip Kaiser, who has somewhat perplexingly given this year’s exhibition the title ‘Women of Venice’, drawing on the pavilion’s own history. Kaiser stated that he aims to “reflect on the history of the pavilion and Switzerland’s contributions to the Venice Biennale from a contemporary perspective, and to initiate new work, specific to this context.” However, one of the works is then framed through the history of the Giacometti brothers: Bruno, the architect who originally designed the pavilion, and Alberto, the acclaimed artist who repeatedly declined invitations to represent Switzerland in that pavilion.

Flora (2017) by Swiss artist Alexander Birchler and Irish artist Teresa Hubbard, is one of the most arresting works at the biennale. The pair made a synchronised, double-sided film installation about the life of Flora Mayo, a former muse of Alberto Giacometti and an artist in her own right. While it seems that every female artist working before 1980 is doomed to be ‘little-known’, ‘undiscovered’ or ‘under-recognised’, Mayo truly did fade into obscurity. This happened by her own hand, as she destroyed much of her work. Born into a wealthy US family, her first marriage ended after she bore her first child. She absconded to Paris and later became friends with Giacometti, who sculpted her. Flora was cut off from her family and forbidden from seeing her daughter ever again. In the 1930s she moved to California, working menial jobs and bringing up her son, David Mayo, born two years after Flora’s return to the USA. Flora’s story is told in the style of a drama-documentary filmed in black and white, which recounts an imagined view of her life in Paris as an artist. In the second film, now in colour, David recalls his mother’s life while we watch sequences of Flora’s lost works being reconstructed and reunited with the bust Giacometti made of her. A quietly powerful and moving work, Flora is a melancholy tribute to its namesake.

The history of national pavilions is a habitual source of inspiration for many biennale curators. The stunning Nordic Pavilion presents ‘Mirrored’, curated by Mats Stjernstedt, which includes work from Swedish artist and IADT graduate Nina Canell. Her explorations of transmission, connection and materials underpin a concrete collection of objects, including sections of transatlantic cable (famously running from Valencia in Kerry to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland) and a delicate tower of medicinal pink gum mastic. The frayed edges of the cable and the slowly oozing gum invoke the gradual erasure of the present.

The Dutch Pavilion is overseen by Irish curator Lucy Cotter. Issues of post-colonialism and modernist social utopias are explored in a site designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1953. Here, Cotter, along with Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, has created ‘Cinema Olanda’ – a series of enquiries into the Netherlands’ perceived reputation as a progressive nation. A counter-narrative offers three video works and a pair of still images to introduce a string of observations from the ‘old Dutch’, who discuss some of the country’s new nationals, which include post-colonial Surinamese and refugees from Indonesia. The language used is frequently clumsy and, to the ‘enlightened’ ear, it borders on racist. Throughout the eponymous film, Holland’s newer population are flippantly referred to as ‘Indos’, while the language of the Surinamese is described as ‘violent’, assuming connotations of aggression and physical violence.

It’s hardly a revelation that such attitudes exist, though van Oldenborgh offers counterbalance through her exploration of social experiments and redrawn narratives instigated by artists, activists and undocumented migrants. These take place in various locations including a church in Rotterdam and architect Aldo van Eyck’s Tripolis building in Amsterdam, linking these utopian urban ideals with those of the town-planner Lotte Stam-Beese, and capturing snatches of lesser-known histories. We learn about the first black member of the US Communist Party, Otto Huiswoud, a Surinamese revolutionary who organised workers around the world and lived much of his life in the Netherlands. We also gain insights into various forms of domestic activism and squatting that took place in the Netherlands from the 1960s to the present. Van Oldenborgh resists the construction of neat parallels and chronicles, instead allowing the viewer to listen in to the recollections and recounted experiences of black, white and brown Dutch citizens.

No resolutions are offered, a sensitivity that is missing in some of the other works presented at the biennale seeking to address contemporary concerns around post-colonialism and migration. An example comes from the usually pitch-perfect Olafur Eliasson, whose ‘Green Light’ project occupies the largest space at the Giardini’s central pavilion (curated by Macel). It calls on migrants in Venice to hold workshops making geometric lamps, which can be bought for €250. There is a decidedly uncomfortable ‘human zoo’ aspect to this spectacle, which recalls distinctly capitalist social entrepreneurship rather than radical collective, especially when it emerges that the workshop facilitators are unpaid.

But perhaps even this is not quite as borderline offensive as Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar/A Sacred Place at the Arsenale. Here, a vast netted tent – recently referred to as a “chill out space” – houses actual live shamans from South America. Macel seems keen on this kind of cultural appropriation, which runs through both of her exhibitions and feels excruciatingly naive. For all the vaunting of a biennale led by artists, the curator’s hand is decidedly heavy.

Berlin-based Irish artist Mariechen Danz presents her installation Womb Tomb (2017) at the Arsenale. A previous performance in the space is evidenced on-screen, while wall-mounted footprints and a thermoactive sculpture variously depict the ‘primordial theatre’ of the human body in a stage-set fabricated from locally-sourced mud. Unstinting in its physicality, Danz’s corporeal practice recalls the visceral, second-wave feminist explorations of artists like Carolee Schneemann or Rebecca Horn. At the Irish Pavilion, Jesse Jones’s mesmerisingly powerful video and performance installation Tremble, Tremble, curated by Tessa Giblin, was widely well-received. The towering multi-screen video installation invites us to look upon Olwen Fouéré’s primordial crone and quake at her power. Elsewhere, amidst the often-overwhelming volume of work on show throughout the city, it’s gratifying to see such strong contributions from fellow Irish artists and those we claim for ourselves.

Anne Mullee is a curator, researcher and art writer. She is currently curator of The Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

Images: Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Flora, 2017; synchronized double-sided film installation with sound; 30-min, loop; Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Ugo Carmen, courtesy of the artists, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin. Nina Canell, Gum Drag and Brief Syllable, 2017; Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet. Jesse Jones, Tremble Tremble installation view, 2017; film, sculpture, moving curtain, sound and light scenography; Venice Biennale.

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RAYNE BOOTH INTERVIEWS BARBARA WAGNER AND BENJAMIN DE BURCA ABOUT THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE 2016 SAO PAOLO BIENNIAL.

The 32nd São Paulo Biennial took place in Parque Ibirapuera, a rare green space in the centre of the vast and expansive city of São Paulo. The collaborative practice of Irish artist Benjamin De Búrca and Brazilian artist Bárbara Wagner featured among the biennial’s 81 participating artists. The title of the biennial, ‘Incerteza Viva’ or ‘Live Uncertainty’, echoed recent remarks by Brazil’s new president Michel Temer, who stated recently that the years of uncertainty experienced under a Socialist Party government had come to an end. The biennial strongly emphasised ecological and social issues, while a huge educational programme of school visits, tours and special events attempted to bridge the distance between the concerns of the art world and those who inhabit the city’s boundless favelas and low income suburbs.

Under Brazil’s socialist government, led by the much-loved President ‘Lula’ (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty and into the middle classes. The recent political coup – which saw Lula’s successor, the socialist president Dilma Rousseff, impeached from her position and her former vice president Michel Temer take her place – has been compared to the plot of the popular TV show House of Cards because of the intrigue and political corruption involved. Brazilians are concerned at the prospect of a return to the old days of military dictatorship where employment, education and other basic needs were beyond the reach of many families. Equally, a large proportion of the population supports the conservative Temer and believes that he can lift the country out of its current economic slump. In this context, the Sao Paulo Biennial set out its stall. The opening event was marked by protesters wearing “Fora Temer” (Temer Out) t-shirts, with the biennial as a whole seeming to offer an ideal forum for Brazilians to reflect on the social, political and ecological uncertainties of the current era.

Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca’s work Estás Vendo Coisas/You Are Seeing Things is an ebullient, noisy, colourful and poignant work – part video documentation, part sci-fi fantasy – which focuses on the ‘Brega’ scene. Brega is a style of Brazilian music, popular in the north-eastern city of Recife where the artists are based. In Brega culture, the participants are preoccupied with their own image and maintaining their appearance is paramount. I spoke with the artists just after the biennial opening in São Paulo*.

Rayne Booth: Can you give me some background to ‘Estás Vendo Coisas’? When did you come across the Brega scene and how did the project come about?

Benjamin De Búrca: In 2012 Bárbara undertook funded photographic research with the aim of documenting the social and economic shifts that were taking place under President Lula’s governance. His leftwing Workers Party (PT) had introduced a series of reform programmes to better the lives of the poorest in Brazil. These measures were largely successful and Brazil witnessed a moment of unprecedented prosperity. The middle classes ballooned and for the first time many people had access to basics such as running water, employment, technology, the internet, television, cars and further education.

Bárbara’s background in journalism and her ongoing practice in social documentary photography led us to the places where this new sense of possibility and hope was most palpable – in city centres and high streets where people shopped and ate, and in the late-night bars of downtown Recife. During the day we developed the work Edifice Recife (which was shown during EVA International 2014) and at night we were in the nightclubs. Bárbara entitled this photographic series Jogo de Classe/Class Games, but during this period we realised that photographs alone would not suffice. The need to make a film, and the potential of the burgeoning Brega music scene, seemed to offer points of convergence in addressing these enormous social shifts.

RB: Bárbara, you have worked in the Recife area for 10 years. Can you tell me more about your earlier work there and how things have changed?

Bárbara Wagner: All my life I have been observing people in the northeast, exploring the idea of progress there and looking at how they are adapting their traditions into this new form of work as spectacle. As artists, our research is around the body: we perceive this generation as having knowledge in their bodies. It is also about managing an economy of material images.

Lula’s first programme in Recife in 2005 was to vacate Boa Viagem, an area of slum housing on the beach. He replaced the beach dwellings with a kilometre-long strip of asphalt – a gesture that changed the whole dynamic of the city. People from the city’s peripheries started going to the beach at weekends and every Sunday for two years I documented what was going on there. In the end, I didn’t even photograph the new buildings or the avenue itself; I was interested in the people and how they were assuming a form of civility: living, participating, existing.

At the time, mobile phones were expensive, so people didn’t have access to cameras and were not used to digital images. I had just bought a digital camera and every picture I took could be previewed by the performers. Often they would perform again in order to look better in my photograph. My first work, Brasil Teimosa/Stubborn Brazil, became emblematic of that era of photography. This series is not too distant from the work of photographers like Rene Djikstra and Martin Parr, and touched a lot of people because they had so far been completely underrepresented. However, with the government at the time I was sensing a powerful shift. Obviously there’s kind of a regression with the current government – it’s not a bright future – but Lula managed to lift a whole section of the population to a slightly higher level of existence.

RB: How did your collaboration emerge and how has it evolved?

BDB: Our work comes from different backgrounds. I studied painting in Glasgow but my practice encompassed many disciplines including video, photography, painting and collage. I was doing a lot of collage when I met Barbara and the principles of collage permeate my work, including the films that we now make together. In 2015 we made a work called Faz Que Vai (Set to Go), which is very much a film collage. With my background in fine art and Bárbara’s in journalism and documentary photography, we essentially see the world in very different ways and create collaborative work that neither of us would produce on our own. There is some arguing of course, as we each endeavour to have our visions understood by the other; however, it is this tension that ensures mutually agreeable end results. Another influencing factor is that Bárbara is dealing with subject matter that is familiar to her, whereas I am coming from a different background and often experiencing things for the first time, which can bring a degree of objectiveness to her subjectiveness and vice versa.

RB: How does your work sit within the wider themes of the biennial?

BW: I didn’t think that my practice as a documentarist would fit with this biennial, but the assistant curator Julia Rebouças (whom I had worked with in the past) invited me, based on the recent film myself and Benjamin had developed. Julia told us that they were visiting indigenous communities in Amazonia and Africa to learn about their understanding of death and how their rituals are connected to nature, which made me realise that the themes of the biennial are quite relevant to our work. We address other forms of nature, that of image, as well as the younger generation’s constant negotiation of who you were, who you are and what you want to be.

BDB: When we were invited to take part in the biennial, we were not really given a brief or told what the biennial was ‘about’ in curatorial terms. When installation began, both Bárbara and I felt a little alienated, especially considering the prominence of ecologically-themed works across the show. However, the more I learned about the other artworks, the more I realised that our film was well-placed among works by artists such as Cecilia Bengolea and Jeremy Deller, Luiz Roque and Vivian Caccuri. Collectively the works in the biennial convey anthropological concerns linked to how we as a species choose to organise our environment, deal with the natural world and maintain spiritual harmony amidst the ‘live uncertainty’ of global climactic realities.

*This is an edited version of a conversation that took place between Rayne Booth, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca in September 2016.

Rayne Booth is a curator, arts manager and Director of Dublin Gallery Weekend. She is currently on a one year career break from her role as Programme Curator at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and is living and working in São Paulo, Brazil.

Bárbara Wagner is a Brazilian photographer and Benjamin De Búrca is a visual artist who works across several disciplines including painting, collage, video and installation. Their collaborative practice uses photographic and filmmaking processes to examine class relations in contemporary Brazil.

Image: Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca, still from Estás Vendo Coisas/You Are Seeing Things (featuring MC Porck).

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