MIGUEL AMADO REVIEWS THE LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2025. 

The spectre of empire haunts Liverpool. Everywhere across the city, British colonialism’s exploitation of people and lands near and far, and the corresponding wealth extraction for the benefit of the British aristocracy, is summoned. The theme of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, BEDROCK, draws directly from the city’s geology, but a complementary understanding of the concept, anchored in a social perspective, makes the articulation between the city and its history more thoughtful, and helps explicate the intellectual edifice formulated by curator Marie-Anne McQuay. In BEDROCK, the sandstone that spans Liverpool is more than a geological quotation; it is a metaphorical lens by which a wound in today’s society might be reclaimed, even if the fractured relationship between Liverpool and its past is too profound to ever be entirely repaired.

Alice Rekab is one of the 30 artists featured in BEDROCK, and their contribution encapsulates the curatorial premise. Like Rekab, around half of them operate from European cities – from Amsterdam to Vienna, Oslo, and Dublin – yet have roots in diaspora, with the majority exploring topics of identity and representation informed by their lived experience. In advancing a selection that pays particular attention to demographics and politically driven content, McQuay points to cultural hybridity as the quintessential characteristic of the twenty-first century, suggesting that contemporary Liverpool, independently of its complex foundational principle, synthetises such attribute. In this regard, BEDROCK aligns with a myriad of recent European biennials, placing a globalist interpretation of art at the core of their reason for existence. Similarly to those other biennials, BEDROCK struggles with Liverpool’s ambiguous historical condition as a centre of power, as well as the mere fact that its curatorial vision necessarily departs from a position of privilege – whether financial, ethnic or other – granted by its European institutional and ideological apparatus.

At The Bluecoat, Rekab presents an expansive, refined mix of works, both new and from recent years, that epitomise the questions posed in BEDROCK. The display consists of fragmented clay pieces that resemble body parts, African statuettes, miniature replicas of animals associated with wildness laying on found mirrors, and a salvaged cabinet holding archival items, from heirlooms to books. Furthermore, a wallpaper digitally blends old portraits of Rekab’s paternal grandmother and father, architectural details of The Bluecoat and other buildings where Rekab exhibited before, impressions of Rekab’s sculptures shown elsewhere, and fluid lines depicting transatlantic ship routes linking Liverpool, West Africa and the Caribbean, known as the ‘Blundell family’s slaving voyages’. Appropriately, the display is titled Bunchlann/Buncharraig (2019-25), linguistically relating ‘bedrock’ to notions of origin and family. 

Rekab’s display speaks to their Irish and Sierra Leonean heritage. It combines the Irish language and elements of the white monoculture in which they grew up, with aspects of a multifaceted Black culture acquired via interactions with their Sierra Leonean progenitors. At stake here are issues of racial memory, generational trauma in marginalised communities, and senses of displacement and belonging, all entangled with inherited and chosen lineage. The same theoretical framework guides another artist showcased at The Bluecoat, Amber Akaunu, whose film, Dear Othermother (2025), takes Black Liverpudlians as a subject in a fitting crossover of fact and self-reflection, typical of the regional stories the artist documents. The work is an emotional chronicle of kinship, pride, and resilience among single mothers from Toxteth, illuminating a matriarchal care network derived from need and solidarity.

Another interesting pairing of artists is that of DARCH (composed of Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) and Linda Lamignan at FACT. Lamignan’s three-channel video, We Are Touched by the Trees in a Forest of Eyes (2025), is a grandiose description of Liverpool’s commercial ties with the Nigerian state of Delta, predicated on palm oil and petroleum. In a captivating sequence of scenes, it demonstrates the antagonistic interests of Western corporations and the earth-oriented belief system of the region’s inhabitants. To create their installation, Heaven in the Ground (2025), DARCH collaborated with residents of Sefton, a village in Merseyside, to compile accounts of their worldview – which integrates humanity, nature, and spirituality in equal terms – focusing on death and grief. DARCH render them in audio, accompanied by four interconnected soil mounds, above and within which are animals, fabricated in ceramic.

A rich layering of narratives with the exhibition’s theme appears outdoors and in unconventional locations. Along Barry Street is Kara Chin’s installation Mapping the Wasteland (2025), a group of tiles inserted into the concrete paving stone that poignantly address the impact of overconsumption. At a warehouse in Jordan Street, Imayna Caceres’s installation, Underground Flourishings (2025), comprises countless intricate clay pieces uniting the artist’s Peruvian ancestry with matter and water sourced from the Mersey and Danube Rivers to elegantly consider primeval ways of life. 

Also of note is Isabel Nolan’s sculpture Where You Are, What We Are, with Others (2025), set against the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. The work is inspired by interior design plans for the Lutyens Crypt, part of this site, and the demolished St Nicholas Pro-Cathedral. The forms are infused with ecclesiastical sensibility, smartly resonating with the construction: Arched window frames unfold in a concertina motif, whether in colourful and delicate or austere and brutalist lines. They are barely held together, conveying a state of imminent collapse. The work examines the role of religion – including sectarianism and inter-faith encounter – in defining Liverpool’s civic mindset, and expands Nolan’s enduring interest in the intersections of architecture, myth, iconography, and abstraction.

Arguably, BEDROCK’s highlight is at Walker Art Gallery. In dialogue with a collection developed during Liverpool’s economic heyday – and still a symbol of the city’s engagement with art – Antonio José Guzmán and Iva Janković present Concrete Roots/Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic (2025), a potent iteration in their series of large-scale modular structures that serve as backdrops for textile banners and soundscapes, as well as scenarios for performances. In all works by the duo, the textile banners are dyed in the unique indigo of a workshop in India that employs artisanal methods. This substance, once known as ‘blue gold’, was a highly prized commodity in Europe, and rapidly acquired the status of cash crop across the colonised world, from India to South Carolina, mostly relying on slave labour. 

The textile banners bear abstract patterns influenced by DNA sequences that evoke the forced resettlement of enslaved West Africans in the Americas. The music is affiliated with dub, a style that emerged in Jamaica. In conjunction, they express a wider, distinctive Black culture formed through the exchange, and later fusion, of artefacts and knowledge from West Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and England – what has been designated the Black Atlantic. Here, a more contextual output is illustrated by allusions to urban unrest using printed textual graphics – a nod to Liverpool’s so-called race riot in Toxteth in 1981 (which actually involved members of the working class from diverse backgrounds), which is explicitly referenced in the soundtrack.

It is precisely this commitment to the locale that upholds the ideas and materials amalgamated in BEDROCK, so eloquently elucidated in Guzmán and Janković’s work by addressing legacies of dissidence in Liverpool. In addition, because Guzmán and Janković are surrounded by the paintings and sculptures of the Walker Art Gallery – assembled in the context of the institution’s embedment with Liverpool’s mercantile elite of British colonialism – they are able to establish a parallel between the titular Black Atlantic and processes of capital accumulation that provoked, and continue to shape, inequality and segregation, whether dividing the West from the rest of the world or, within the West, the working versus the ruling classes.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and Director of Sirius Arts Centre.

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MAEVE MULRENNAN REVIEWS THE HELSINKI BIENNIAL.

The third edition of the Helsinki Biennial (8 June – 21 September), entitled ‘SHELTER: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging’, vibrantly continues the ecological discourse of the previous two editions. Founded in 2021, this focused biennial has so far been largely concerned with the climate crisis and the place of art in conversations on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. An enduring enquiry into the relationships between the maritime city, nature, and art is the conceptual foundation of the biennial. In its third iteration, this relevant and pressing thematic is still fresh and far from exhausted. 

Curated by Blanca de la Torre, Director of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), and Kati Kivinen, Director of the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), this iteration offers somewhat hopeful perspectives on the climate crisis. None of the 57 artworks feature humans as the main subject, although the environmental destruction caused by humans is all too present. De la Torre and Kivinen’s curation harnesses innovative approaches, genuinely rooted in an ecological ethos, with ‘SHELTER’ seeking to address the imbalances between humankind and nature, offering a multi-species and holistic alternative future. 

The work of 37 artists and collectives is presented across three venues: HAM and Esplanade Park – a long, narrow greenway – are in the city centre, while Vallisaari Island, a now-uninhabited nature reserve, is a short ferry ride from Helsinki. A military site until the 1990s, many of the empty military buildings on Vallisaari Island make perfect, if somewhat dystopian, settings in which to encounter artworks. Disembarking visitors are greeted with the visual spectacle of Pia Sirén’s Under Cover (2025) – a gateway installation of a mountainous landscape, made from tarpaulins and plastics, which camouflages a large, derelict building. Under Cover creates space for viewers to contemplate this artwork and prepare for the others they will encounter on the island. 

Located on the trek around the island perimeter is Hans Rosenström’s Tidal Tears (2025). The work comprises a circle of petrified wooden columns, a pool of water, and an ethereal audio piece that sounds like a primordial opera, borne from the earth. As with many of the works presented on Vallisaari, the audience is cast into the role of witness. Islands lend themselves to interstices, and this setting is the perfect curatorial device for works exploring alternate realities and non-anthropocentric models.  

The Helsinki Biennial has a practice of commissioning permanent artworks, which includes a number of new commissions this year for ‘SHELTER’. Sara Bjarland’s sculptures, entitled Stranding (2025), are bronze casts of semi-deflated, dolphin-shaped, plastic swimming floats, beached on the rocky shore. These emotive works are forever trapped in the liminality of half-inflation, underlining the permanence of plastic waste and the fragility of marine ecosystems. 

Irish artist Katie Holten’s work, Learning To Be Better Lovers (Forest School) (2025), straddles two separate sites: an indoor ‘classroom’ set-up on Vallisaari, and an installation of flags along the Esplanade. The classroom offers a communal, participatory experience, which gently asks viewers for their time and contemplation. Holten presents a reimagined alphabet, which includes letters from the Finnish alphabet as well as drawings of trees, plants, fungi, and birds from the island. An accompanying guide includes walks, instructions, conversations, breathing exercises, and a considered text, written by the artist. The alphabet and guide are available to download from the biennial website (helsinkibiennaali.fi). 

As with many of the other works, Learning To Be Better Lovers is concerned with the climate crisis without inciting feelings of helplessness or hopelessness. There is a direct dialogue between art and landscape, with plenty of space to meaningfully connect with this proposition. However, the busy Esplanade promenade in Helsinki city centre is a tough site to present work. Holten’s work is exhibited as a set of flags, which manage to both stand apart from the busy site while appearing to integrate into the fabric of the city. The flags contain ‘letters’ of the Forest Alphabet. Even if a viewer does not read the accompanying explanatory text, there is still the feeling that the flags are communicating something. Esplanade Park has a colonial appearance, with manicured lawns and trees planted in rows, casting dappled shadows on bronze monuments. Holten’s work reminds us that there are alternatives to prevailing systems, with re-foresting and re-wilding conceptualised as acts of love. 

HAM contains works that benefit from a gallery space rather than an outdoor environment. Ofrenda (Offering) (2024), an installation by Regina de Miguel, comprises paintings, engravings, and a mural, which read as a visual encyclopaedia of a multi-species, harmonious universe. Engravings on metal plates are reminiscent of the Voyager Golden Records –  phonograph records, launched aboard the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, containing sounds and images, selected to portray the diversity and beauty of life on Earth to extraterrestrials.

Artist/activist Jenni Laiti and photographer/reindeer herder Carl-Johan Utsi, both Sámi, present the beautiful video work, Teardrops of Our Grandmother (2023). It is a poetic meditation on the precarity of Sámi life and culture, due to shifting arctic weather conditions and other persistent threats to Indigenous communities. The piece explores the relationship between intergenerational trauma, the land, and the animals bonded to it. Like Holten’s work, the piece invites the viewer to slow down, nurture their relationship with the natural world, and participate in nature’s healing.

The curators describe ‘SHELTER’ as a “caring space where all lifeforms can thrive” (sttinfo.fi). The focus on non-human nature and indigenous narratives creates perspectives not traditionally prioritised within the Western art canon. However, across a former military site, manicured park, and white cube museum space, we are reminded of the negative impacts of colonialism and capitalism on our world, which cannot be disregarded.

Maeve Mulrennan is Assistant Arts Officer in Cork County Council.

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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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BRIAN CURTIN DISCUSSES HIS ROLE AS ONE OF THE CURATORS OF THE BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024 WHICH INCLUDES THE WORK OF FOUR IRISH ARTISTS.

The fourth Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) opened to the public on 24 October 2024 amidst a glitzy week of events, launches, and after-parties. It will run for nearly four months, closing on 25 February. This edition of BAB presents over 70 artists from around the world and is staged across 11 venues. These include the conventional Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), ancient temples, and a new development, titled One Bangkok – a residential and commercial district in the centre of the city. The digital facade of an enormous shopping centre was also put to use for artists’ films.

Ambitious, if not dizzying, in its scope and ambition, BAB speaks to many currencies. These include the artists themselves, the curatorial theme, countless numbers of public and private funders, accelerated interest in (and platforms for) contemporary art within Southeast Asia in recent years, and, ultimately, questions of ‘soft power,’ internationalism, city-branding, and the very function of global biennials across these critical interests.

My own involvement was indicative of the tensions these currencies can generate. As someone who more typically writes about art (and has reviewed past iterations for other publications), I was hesitant to accept an invitation to co-curate this year’s biennale. To do so might be to feel co-opted and therefore complicit in trying to resolve these tensions, rather than critically expose them in writing. 

Since opening, the PR for BAB regularly trumpets the thousands who’ve visited, while the opening festivities were awash with an ‘international’ crowd. The biennale has also received widespread attention in the global art press. Titled Nurture Gaia after the Gaia Hypothesis – a theory that the natural world is interrelated as a self-sustaining system – the curatorial theme emphasised the terrible damage us humans are doing. This is a fashionable lament, and because of the multiple interests at stake, it is easy to question the effective politics of such a proposition. 

But the diversity that informed or underlined the organisation of BAB was notably evident in the fact of a wide variety of art and the sharp turns in curatorial practice between, say, the integration of art with antiquities in the National Museum and the goddess-heavy presentations at the National Gallery. To wonder about the biennial format as an ideal form, one must think of something succinct, timeless, somewhat didactic and clean, and less provocatively changeable and inclusive. 

The latter is a productive means to think through the various group exhibitions and the theme itself. How else might we make connections between Kira O’Reilly’s Menopausal Gym (2021), a durational performance in which the artist puts herself through gruelling, outdoor exercises, and a nearby installation of mannequins, by a local artist, dressed in recycled plastic garb? O’Reilly’s physical contortions, with the aid of a skeletal copper structure and a variety of straps and objects, were highly expressive. Expressiveness was reinforced in view of the staid neoclassical environment of the National Gallery and because the artist sweated profusely in Bangkok’s tropical heat. Here the theme of the biennale became tangible and, perhaps oddly, was upbeat: material change, struggle, and pain in dialogue with rigour and control. The nearby commentary on eco-fashion certainly had its place but seemed benignly instructive due to being haunted by a sense of telling us what we already know.

Susan Collins and George Bolster are two artists I worked with directly, juxtaposing their engagements with landscape at the BACC. One of Collins’ projects, titled LAND (2017), comprised three large prints, digitally derived from a continuous filming of the West Bank over many months. Against Bolster’s panoramic tapestry, The Impermanence of Protection: Big Bend National Park (2023), which depicts the rural border of the US and Mexico, both stage the awe-inspiring qualities of nature, while hinting at the pernicious impact of humans. Collins’s use of pixilation spoke to the presence of surveillance, while Bolster included a video that narrates Trump’s rescinding of environmental protections. However, Bolster is proving more popular with audiences because the scale and haptic quality are seemingly delightful, offering an upbeat edge to the sinister implications. The works of both artists were surprisingly ‘activated’ in this respect, when a loud bleed from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (1785) could be heard from the entrance, as Amanda Coogan momentarily led a signing performance with a hearing-impaired community. 

O’Reilly, Bolster, and Coogan are Irish, as is Aideen Barry who was also included – an unprecedented representation for BAB. Bolster is based in New York and O’Reilly in Finland; yet funding for their participation came from Ireland. While Barry’s dark, gothic, installation, Oblivion (2021), partly addresses Ireland’s colonial history, the work of the other three artists does not directly relate to the Irish context. Each artwork was woven into a fabric of differences that affirmed a need to make connections: between human bodies and landscapes; emotion, language, and understanding; and across the literal and affective – a binary that afflicts critical discussion of contemporary art. This insight is not to distract from very real conflicts of interest or contradictory values, but, rather, to recognise that BAB – and the biennial model more broadly – is inherently flawed. How else might we confront the messy realities of our current world and imagine different futures?

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic based in Bangkok since 2000. 

brianacurtin.com

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EL PUTNAM REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS.

This year’s TULCA Festival, curated by Michele Horrigan and titled The Salvage Agency, meets us in our current moment of global instability and uncertainty, mistrust and disillusion, extreme automation and military acceleration, when it can feel nearly impossible to claim any sense of agency. However, the festival assembles a selection of artists who collectively demonstrate a sense of purpose by salvaging the multiplicity of entangled crises and digging into the thickness of time.

A Salvage Agency

The festival title can be read in multiple ways, attesting to the nuance of its meaning. At first, The Salvage Agency sounds like some kind of service that rummages through scrap, in order to determine what can be kept, reused, or restored. One imagines the Baudelairean figure of the ragpicker, tasked with creating order from the hoarded debris of the industrial age.¹ In a way, that is what each of the exhibiting artists is trying to do, as they take and make use of linguistic, cultural, or material fragments.

For example, Seanie Barron’s wood carvings present haptic and tacit knowledge of the materials he collects and transforms. Exhibited in the Printworks Gallery and installed among the displays at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop, Barron’s carvings demonstrate a salvaging of spirit, which conjures surrealist visions from wood. Also at the Printworks, Áine Phillips’s sculptural installation and video work, The Secret (2013), depicts a road adjacent to the IKEA superstore in Dublin. Broken bits of furniture, packaging, and other rubbish are strewn along this secluded thoroughfare. There is nothing, it seems, to be salvaged within this detritus; it conceptually underscores both the empty promise of consumerism and the brevity of our material lives. 

However, the act of salvaging is not just about recovering physical materials, but a salvaging of humanity, within this milieu. In the University Gallery, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo’s video work, Tierra (2013), presents the artist standing nude in a green field, as an earthmoving excavator digs the land around her. She maintains her posture of stillness, as she is eventually left on a small island of earth, in the midst of a decimated landscape. Sometimes, when overwhelmed by external forces – understood, in this instance, as patriarchal and colonial regimes – what is salvaged comes from within our bodies, as one is grounded to the Earth. 

Léann Herlihy’s performance-based bus tour, Beyond Survival School Bus (2022), similarly engages interconnections between the body and the landscape. In contrast to Galindo, Herlihy is playful in their evaluation of the power of human relations with nature, delivering a script informed by queer ecology, feminist and abolitionist theory. However, both artists challenge notions of apocalypse as a future event; rather, they suggest, such moments have previously happened and are currently occurring, requiring urgent systematic and structural change.

The Agency of Salvage

While the festival title alludes to the agency that arises from acts of salvage, the capacity to recover is becoming less feasible amid the extractive practices of late capitalism. Bogland, for example, is a repository of time – both an ancient landscape and an organic, living archive. The industrial strip-mining of bogs for the mass cultivation of fuel during the twentieth century has left stretches of exhausted wasteland in the Irish midlands. In the Printworks Gallery, Catriona Leahy’s Bog Syntax: The (Dis)Order of Things* presents fragmented digital images of bogland, laid out as specimens in an irregular grid. There is a breaking down of visual forms, evocative of peat harvesting – whereby the earth is conceived in terms of its capacity to be exploited – to create a pixelated visual landscape. While salvage within a state of ruin may seem futile, anthropologist Anna Tsing states: “Our first step is to bring back curiousity.”² Artistic interventions within the festival prompt the curiosity that is necessary to instigate liveliness. In Leahy’s Bog Thing*: Assembly* for Symbiocene, a 3D scan of an eviscerated landscape becomes an ampitheatre that actively invites such speculations.

To Salvage Agency

Much like bogland, myths are tales that are carried through time, with the salvaging of these narratives opening new imaginary possibilities. David Beattie’s Remnants (2024) presents a 3D-scan of the Grange Stone Circle, a Bronze Age site in Limerick. The audio track, an AI-generated mythological narrative, is glitched and disrupted, and further manipulated through interactions with the screen. A subtle twist of the 3D object enables the voice to become more distinct, only to be swallowed by noise. The viewer assumes a god-like position, controlling the simulation and its broken algorithmic recounting of oral history across technological epochs. 

In Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell’s Irish language short film, Super Gairdín (2022), screened at Palás Cinema, a middle-aged man inadvertently awakens a vengeful cailleach (divine hag) who has taken the form of a large rock within a garden centre. Mythology in this film does not function as a means of trying to capture a lost history, but the absurd scenario shows the cailleach encountering the limits of a past that cannot be translated into the present. These linguistic limitations do not hinder the capacity of the story to emerge, but resonate with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s reflections on mythology as a “catalyst of disruption and difference, a joker in the pack inviting us to free variations of meaning” in order to “challenge and transform the status quo.”³

Most striking about this year’s festival is Horrigan’s assemblage of artists, whose interrogations of landscape, nature, and folklore, as well as colonial and industrial histories, offer a range of aesthetic encounters. Moreover, this iteration of TULCA can also be understood as the ‘salvaging of agency’ in recovering, through artistic provocations and improvisations, our capacity to imagine and actively build alternative futures. The act of producing art itself, then, becomes a means of reclaiming agency, as we learn to exist through and with the wreckage that accumulates.

EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher based in Westmeath.

¹ See for example Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels, 1860), trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996).

² Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021) p 6.

³ Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p 98.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EIMEAR WALSHE AND SARA GREAVU ABOUT THE FORTHCOMING REPRESENTATION OF IRELAND AT THE 60TH VENICE BIENNALE. 

Joanne Laws: Can you briefly discuss the new work you have been developing for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year? 

Eimear Walshe: The exhibition is called ‘ROMANTIC IRELAND’ and comprises a sculptural work, which in turn contains a video installation, that is then soundtracked by an opera work. These three elements have a complex temporal relationship with each other, almost as a past, present and future format. The video depicts a chaotic and socially fraught building site, in which seven characters have somehow time travelled from different moments in history to work side by side on an earth build. There are two characters from a late nineteenth-century tenant-farmer class; an early twentieth-century politician or businessman and his housewife; a late twentieth-century barrister and her stay-at-home farmer husband; and me as a twenty-first-century single landlord. A soap operatic drama unfolds in the building site, with moments of conflict, and moments of harmony and collaboration, as they work towards the same goal.

The opera is next in the temporal sequence. Cork-based composer Amanda Feery invited me to write a libretto in response to Éamon de Valera’s speech, The Ireland That We Dreamed Of (or On Language & the Irish Nation), which he delivered as Taoiseach on St Patrick’s Day in 1943. In Venice, we are presenting just one act of this much larger opera. There are many contentious images in de Valera’s speech, but one line describes “a countryside filled with bright and cosy homesteads” and a “reverence, respect and care for the elderly.” The libretto very much responds to these themes through the story of an old man, who is listening to this speech on his deathbed and wakes up to the sound of being evicted. The libretto chronicles the man’s relationship with the building and its symbiotic relationship with the environment. As an optimistic, speculative gesture, building anticipates structures and environments that will be used by people in the future. The libretto connects with post-revolutionary periods in colonised lands, foregrounding notions of betrayal, and the failure of the promise of building. 

JL: Perhaps you could outline your research and writing processes for the libretto?

EW: Amanda is a classically accomplished composer but is also deeply experimental as a musician. So, you rarely get a better scenario than that, in terms of scope for writing. One of my first decisions was for most of the libretto to rhyme rather conventionally, which was quite fun as a writing parameter. In addition, Amanda and I were very interested in non-textual ‘mouth sounds’, so there is an emphasis on vowel sounds throughout. An important historical source was Irish folk ballads, which allowed me to access the emotional impact of a story as the characters bear witness to both the quotidian and the tragic. Key songs included Tumbling Through the Hay – which I first heard on Ian Lynch’s podcast, Fire Draw Near, and which chronicles the orgiastic romp of workers at harvest time; The Limerick Rake, which is rowdy and full of inuendo, describing a womaniser who has aspirations to create a homestead with all of his lovers; and the ballad, Dónal Óg, which I find quite devastating, in terms of its rhyming systems and turn of phrase, and its depiction of rejection and betrayal. 

Another important influence on the writing was working with Dr Lisa Godson, who advised on the historical accuracy of the scenarios I was describing. I was also inspired by Jonny Dillon’s Blúiríní Béaloidis podcast from The National Folklore Collection at UCD, particularly one about mythology surrounding the house, which describes the burial of horse’s heads and coins, and different building traditions. It helped me to think about this man’s relationship with his house as something far beyond property to consider his intrinsic connection with the building materials – from the fixing of thatch and lime rendering to knowing the person who laid the first stones. This sits in contrast to contemporary alienation from our built environment – the result of outsourcing materials to underpaid workers in the Global South. Nowadays, we are not only disadvantaged by not understanding how our buildings work, but we are also creating terrible conditions elsewhere, through cheaper materials that are deeply inefficient in a wider ecological sense. 

JL: How does the sculptural artefact resonate with your ongoing research inquiries relating to housing, habitation, and shelter? 

EW: In the system of the work, the sculpture exists as a kind of aftermath. It laments the Sisyphean labour of making a building that will never amount to anything other than a ruin. Even though the sculptural object itself is potentially quite stark, I do find earth building an incredibly exciting and inspiring process. I learned about cob building, among other skills, when I did a course with Harrison Gardner at Common Knowledge – a skills sharing social enterprise for sustainable living located in County Clare, where the ‘ROMANTIC IRELAND’ set-building and filming later took place. There is something empowering about remembering that communities once came together to undertake this incredibly labour-intensive, slow process of building with materials that were cheap, free, or available on site. This is exciting on the level of community because you need to extend your kith and kin to include a wider network of co-builders. It’s fascinating to watch the process, which is very sensory, visceral, and physical, and it’s also mystifying that such simple structures using compressed earth have survived so long. One example is the ancient communal settlement, Tell es-Sultan, located northwest of Jericho in Palestine, which dates from 10,000 BC – a moment in human history when people began to settle and come together to create not only domestic buildings, but much larger collective spaces for gathering. Cob building can be perceived as a local tradition in Ireland, while also being a global tradition that goes back centuries with regional variations. These social, environmental, and historic elements are what led to this material becoming such a central part of the exhibition. 

JL: As stated in the press material, your work “speaks of and from a precarious generation” and “emerges from the context of a nation in escalating crisis.” Can you elaborate on this? 

EW: The reason I did a building course and learned about cob was because I felt that if I was ever going to own a house, I would probably need to have the skills to build one myself. At the time I was converting a van, so a lot of these skills were applicable. What led me to the cob material was housing precarity, and it opened a portal into the past. When you live in a crisis as acute, illogical, enraging, needlessly violent, and destructive as this one, you end up looking to history for guidance. In researching the history of housing and land activism, I learnt about the demands people were making in the late-nineteenth century, as well as the political promises that were being made and broken.

JL: How are you getting to grips with the vast logistics of Venice – from shipping and install limitations, to language considerations? 

Sara Greavu: We are relying heavily on partners and collaborators with knowledge and experience. I guess we are learning how to think about a project at a different scale and trusting these partners to carry elements of the work with their own expertise. We are so lucky to work with such brilliant installation, technical, and communications partners, who are helping us to navigate these waters. 

JL: Have some of the previous Ireland at Venice curators, commissioners, and artists reached out to share their experience and advice?  

SG: Everyone has been so generous! I would particularly note Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, whose advice and experience have been so essential to us as we jumped into the planning and work. Michael Hill made a public offer to anyone applying to the open call last year that he would be happy to speak to them about the process, and he has continued in this spirit of generosity and care. I think it makes sense to establish a more robust way to hand over knowledge gained in this process, and we will feed back some of our experiences. We’ll also try to be as generous as our predecessors in sharing information with future teams. 

JL: In pragmatic terms, has it been challenging to conceptualise such a large-scale international solo exhibition? 

EW: I haven’t had time to think about it! I found out in May 2023 and the work had to be finished by December, so there hasn’t been time to have doubts. I had to be extremely decisive from the start and developed the work by expanding my existing research, and choosing where to venture out into new, ambitious terrain. For example, I’ve never worked with such a big film crew or cast before. I’m lucky to have an amazing critical community around me, in the form of my friends who are practicing artists. As Assistant Director, Niamh Moriarty kept the whole project on track, while Aoife Hammond liaised with the performers to make sure they were happy with the conditions; they were performing, filming, directing each other, wearing uncomfortable masks, and not wearing shoes. So, when you’re scaling up the production ambition, you also need to have someone looking after the project and the people involved. Getting to work with all these experts and incredible performers has been a massive career highlight for me. 

JL: How has the Irish pavilion (building and site) informed the exhibition you intend to present in the space, especially with regard to access and the circulation of visitors?

SG: We talked a lot from the very beginning about the audience encounter with the work, and the depleted attention-economy of Venice. People arrive to the Irish pavilion having already seen so much, feeling tired, overwhelmed, or even jaded. I think Eimear has been very smart about imagining this moment and considering how to induce people into the space and hold their attention, by offering different points of connection and engagement with the work. 

JL: What are your thoughts on the Venice Biennale – or global biennials more broadly – as platforms for the practices and urgencies of contemporary art? 

SG: Yes, this is a huge question that deserves more attention and sustained critical discussion. I have mixed feelings about biennales generally, while at the same time recognising what an incredible opportunity it is to be able to participate in this important international space for the sharing of ideas and practices. Of course, only certain types of work can thrive there. And the snapshot of the practices and urgencies of contemporary art that we see there is so conditioned by economic and political power and privilege. There are so many nations who can’t afford to set up a pavilion and send an artist, or who don’t have the political recognition to do so.

JL: What does this mean for you, to represent Ireland in Venice, at this stage of your career?

EW: I felt very ready to make a work of this scale, and it has been thrilling to have the opportunity to do so. In terms of ambition, what I want to get from this project is to continue developing shows, performances, projects, and collaborations in Ireland. I have an ongoing project called ‘TRADE SCHOOL’ that, if I work fast, will probably take 45 years to complete. It involves making a film work in every county of Ireland. Occasionally getting to work in other countries is equally exciting, inspiring, generative, and important for me. 

JL: Can you discuss the Ireland at Venice national tour? 

SG: Our plan for the Irish tour builds on Eimear’s established methodology of travelling to and drawing from rural and peripheral locations to make and share the work. We have talked about it in terms of acting within the bardic tradition of carrying stories from one place to another, and they will return to present this project in some of the specific places that inspired the work. Materially, the exhibition is thinking about and through ideas of malleability, so you can expect to see the work taking different forms in different spaces. 

The 60th International Art Exhibition runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024 (preview 17-19 April).

labiennale.org

Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council, with Principal Sponsorship from Dublin City Council.

irelandatvenice2024.ie

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LUCY ELVIS REFLECTS ON THE LEARNING OF THE TULCA FESTIVAL BOARD IN TERMS OF ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSION.

A 2017 study revealed that artworks capture an average ten seconds of gallery visitors’ attention before the next work, the next room, the next venue, or the world at large beckons. In thinking about accessibility, I’m struck by the ways in which not only the time signature of individual works or a wider festival might unfold, but also the temporality of bodies, and how they might interact with the often-conflicting impersonal timeframes of policy. TULCA Festival of Visual Arts takes place in Galway each year as Samhain spirits linger. Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, the generosity of TULCA Festival 2023 ‘honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise’ (3 – 19 November 2023) helped to create a marked contrast between the microcosm of the festival and the city outside. 

Hidden Time

The TULCA team devoted an undercurrent of hidden time to making the latest edition of the festival accessible. This involved drafting online and printed information to include access statements; undertaking staff training in audio description; developing and administering accessibility riders for all artists; and setting up live captioning technology before each event. Professional captioning, whereby a person live-transcribes an event as it unfolds, was used at the opening and for several artist talks but came at a steep financial cost.

In the main TULCA Gallery, a patch on Jamilla Prowse’s Crip Quilt (2023) read: “Who would I be if I could just turn up, a glass of wine in hand?” It stressed the importance of ‘time unfettered’. Clearly, bodies that give and receive care – silently disciplined by the heaviness of infants, by battling the pressing fatigue of masking neurodiversity, or by navigating inhospitable thresholds – must exist in dual time signatures. 

The use of audio descriptions for film works across the festival also stressed this double-time. Holly Márie Parnell’s Cabbage (2022) – a documentary film about her family’s move away and return to Ireland, instigated by a lack of support for her brother David – required viewers to wait for the version of the film they wanted to engage with. Likewise, Jenny Brady’s Music for Solo Performer (2022) at the University of Galway Gallery played on a loop that alternated between described and non-described versions. Viewers responded diversely to these interventions, and admittedly, it was challenging for those on short visits to venues; however, many appreciated the extra layer the description added to their engagement with the work. In the case of physical works, such as Prowse’s Crip Quilt (2023), the audio description made engaging with the work a deeper and more luxurious affair.

Policy, Practice & Support

TULCA has taken time to fully articulate an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policy. Perhaps echoing our history as a practice-led organisation, we’ve chosen to implement and test feasible interventions first, rather than simply articulate best intentions. In this iteration of the festival – which closely interrogated the relationship between health institutions and those whose lives are defined by them – it was wonderful that diverse and differently-abled audiences were facilitated, and we look forward to continuing this support in future festivals. 

The financial support received from Arts and Disability Ireland (ADI) for this year’s festival was invaluable. It covered the high cost of professional live captioners and also enabled TULCA to hire a support worker for artist Bridget O’Gorman, whose art practice has been irrecoverably changed due to the deterioration of a permanent spinal injury. We co-commissioned Bridget to make Support/Work (2023) – a large-scale sculptural installation of fragile ‘mobiles’, made from jesmonite and supported by pulleys and hoists, which occupied the front of the TULCA Gallery. In addition, The Birthday Party by Áine O’Hara – a celebratory event for the sick, differently abled, D/deaf, chronically ill, and neurodiverse people of rural Ireland, hosted at the University of Galway on 9 November 2023 – was made possible by a grant from Creative Europe. 

Partnerships with Helium Arts and Saolta Arts facilitated bringing work to marginalised communities. Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s podcast, Ridgewood Sick Centre (2023) was brought to wider audiences through a partnership with FLIRT FM, while a showcase of works by young artists suffering long-term illnesses was delivered on the second and final weekend of the festival. Working with Galway County libraries allowed us to screen Edward Lawrenson and Pia Borg’s documentary, Abandoned Goods (2014) – chronicling the Adamson Collection of British ‘asylum art’ – in Netherne psychiatric patient J.J. Beegan’s (presumed) native Ballinasloe, alongside a talk from Professor Clair Wills.

Hospitality  

One of the unique things about TULCA’s model as a platform for Irish curatorship is the chance to learn from a new curator each year. Iarlaith’s practice not only showed the importance of careful research, but also of the conceptualisation of curatorship, and festival curatorship in particular, as a kind of hospitality. Welcoming audiences to critically engage with the theme and be aware of the modes of delivery, mattered here. Each time Iarlaith gave a public talk, her effortless descriptions for the low vision and blind, or her encouragement for audiences to notice and engage with different supports, showed the power of the personal touch.

Creating spaces for rest across venues is something TULCA will certainly maintain for all visitors going forward. At the opening, extra seating meant people gathered in clusters and spent longer in the gallery spaces. Choosing to buy bench seating, rather than following advice to hire them, means that TULCA can use this furniture in future festivals. Likewise, production innovations – such as the lower hanging height of Paul Roy’s monoprint series in the main gallery space – facilitated comfortable viewing by children, wheelchair users, or those simply choosing to sit for a while.

Restfulness was further invoked in Bog Cottage’s faery fort (2023) – a mixed-media installation featuring ceramics, fabric hangings, rugs, seating, and a soundscape – which created a space for respite and reflection in Outset Gallery. Complimentary carer seats were provided at the premier of Leila Hekmat’s riotous and delirious film, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels (2022) at Pálás cinema, and a safe, quiet opening was provided for visitors challenged by crowded spaces.

Actioning all of this for a two-week festival made us consider the longer time needed to facilitate audiences, for whom time is not their own. Returning to Prowse’s provocation, one wonders what TULCA might become as an institution, if we were able to invest in longer, iterative practices, different opening hours, and the hidden and sometimes costly support systems needed to transform time into space for marginalised audiences. However, TULCA is reliant on support from funders, partners, increasingly stretched local infrastructure, and the herculean work of a contracted but precarious team. Finding ways to intersect conversations about access with sustainability – while reaching beyond success measures that hinge on audience numbers, towards depth of engagement – is long overdue.

Dr Lucy Elvis is a curator, writer, philosopher, and lecturer, who currently serves on the TULCA Board of Directors.

tulca.ie 

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FRANK WASSER INTERVIEWS SEBASTIAN CICHOCKI ABOUT HIS GUEST PROGRAMME FOR EVA INTERNATIONAL. 

Continuing until 29 October, the 40th edition of EVA International centres around the theme of citizenship, and comprises the EVA Platform Commissions, Partnership Project initiatives, and a special Guest Programme, ‘The Gleaners Society’, curated by Sebastian Cichocki. 

Frank Wasser: Sebastian, it’s an incredibly busy time for you, so thanks for agreeing to talk with me. I wanted to start by asking you about your own practice. Can you tell me about your research methodologies, and how you arrived at the curatorial framework for the EVA Guest Programme? 

Sebastian Cichocki: Where to start? I’m very much into assemblies, summer camps, and gatherings. I’m interested in people, and so I work with movements and organisations who are eager to apply artistic strategies in their daily work. My background is in sociology, and I’ve always been fascinated by the social potential of art. I like to think of art as an apparatus that can bring people together and change things, to open our eyes to new possibilities. 

FW: Where or how do these possibilities unfold? What are the contexts that your practice operates within?

SC: I work in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, a public institution which is under construction, and it is just about to open in its final configuration. I’ve been working with different formats. For me, curating is a lot about usefulness, agency, and doing things with art. This is much more interesting than defining something as art or not art. My natural environment is to be among people who represent different skills, competences, and backgrounds. They are chefs, gardeners, therapists, climate activists, social workers, or biologists, but what is characteristic is that most of them graduated from art academies. Climate and anti-fascist activism, feminist movements, these are all close to my heart. I’m part of the Sunflower community, an anti-imperialist think-tank and emergency centre, working mainly with the large Ukrainian diaspora and its queer community in Poland. Environmental struggle is something I’ve been working with a lot recently, which evolved from a fascination with land art practices as a possible way of escaping the traditional configuration of the museum. Needless to say, the museum might be an outmoded apparatus, but it is undergoing radical changes.  

FW: You have previously spoken and published widely on the invisible histories and ideological frameworks of museums. How does the context of the art biennial differ from that of the museum? 

SC: It’s fascinating how we can do things in a different way. I love museums and global biennials, but I do feel that they are operating in separate galaxies. It’s quite unusual how they are restricted by very specific ways of doing things; the singularity of an artwork, the cult of the authorship, all these obsessive ways of separating art from not-art. Many regulations, which were kind of petrified in the nineteenth century, are still determining what art is. The biennial model follows these protocols; it is mostly novelty that is fuelling this system. The expectation is that you have to present something which is new and unusual, the unknown, the forgotten, the overlooked. In a way, a contemporary focus on ‘the marginalised’ has replaced the dominance of dead white men in the western art canon. This is quite an insatiable and exploitative system. But actually, this novelty is the last thing I am interested in. 

FW: So, does this refusal of ‘novelty’ underpin the thematic framework of ‘The Gleaners Society’, your Guest Programme for EVA? Gleaning was originally a farming term, denoting the act of collecting or gathering that which already exists. 

SC: Yes, exactly, gleaning is about picking up stuff, the leftovers; it has specific legal and ethical connotations in different languages. The act of gleaning is the opposite of over-production and extractivism, because as you know, we do generate a lot of objects and ideas. The standard biennial is like a potlatch ritual, with the necessity to constantly commission and produce – it’s quite a monstrosity. It’s hard to believe how time-consuming and exhausting the model is, and I seriously question its sustainability. So, I was thinking about this unique opportunity in Limerick, working with such an open and generous organisation. I was told “you don’t even have to do an exhibition!” This was so liberating. Paradoxically, in the end we might end up with a quite conventional exhibition. EVA has such a rich history, albeit hardly visible in the city, but there are small traces of previous editions. It’s like a myth, something immaterial and fleeting, that is also treated as a piece of public property. For example, the person who works in the local flower shop will tell you what should be done for an exhibition!

FW: I guess the idea of gleaning also implies crisis. Is this something you’re considering? 

SC: Yes, the planetary crisis; ecocide, fossil fuel wars, loss of biodiversity. In this sense, it is all about saving the resources that exist. There are so many contemporary versions of gleaning; for example, foraging, free shops, dumpster diving. For me, gleaning is not only a metaphor – it is a methodology. Let’s look at the leftovers of the past. There have been 39 editions of EVA. What are those stories, invisible traces, or unfinished businesses? One of the unwritten rules of the biennial format is that you are obliged to invite mostly new names, but what if you work with what is already established in this unique environment of collaboration and trust? One of the first things I did was scan through the incredible artists who had already contributed, such as Orla Barry and Deirdre O’Mahony, with a view to working with them again. What would it mean to bring back Janet Mullarney’s sculptures, which were exhibited in Limerick in the 1990s? There are artists who know the local context deeply, so why not engage with them and continue these conversations, in spite of  expectations and fetishisation of the new? 

FW: Your approach is reminding me of conversations I had with the curators of documenta fifteen last year. They had this idea of harvesting ideas over the course of the event. Is there a connection here? 

SC: Yes, this is interesting because I just came back from Korea, where I worked with local collectives, including ikkibawiKrrr, who will participate in EVA. They were also one of the core members of documenta fifteen. While drinking rice wine, and spending a lot of time with each other, we spoke about the particularities of what gleaning meant in European history and what might be the Asian parallels, like the lumbung concept. Our conversations are ongoing and will grow over the following months. In this sense, gleaning is also about my resources, recent projects, existing collaborations, and network of friends in the Baltic States, South Asia, Ireland, Ukraine and Poland. As the hero of my teenage years, Robert Smithson, once wrote: “Nothing is new, neither is anything old”. 

Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer based in London.

frankwasser.info

Sebastian Cichocki lives and works in Warsaw, where he is the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

artmuseum.pl/en

The 40th edition of EVA International opened on 31 August and continues until 29 October, spanning various locations in Limerick city and beyond. 

eva.ie

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“Photography, photographers and artists who use the medium are there to remind us of what we want to neither hear, nor see.” – Christoph Wiesner, Director of the Rencontres d’Arles.

I am walking along a seemingly endless stretch of dusty road on the outskirts of Arles, an ancient Roman capital of Provence, France, and home to the 53rd edition of Rencontres d’Arles – an annual festival for photography and lens-based art that attracts thousands of visitors every year, which is recognised as one of the most respected platforms for contemporary photographic art (rencontres-arles.com). The midday heat is rising above the asphalt, merciless to the soles of my shoes, my body and my soul, melting all three components into a medley of dust and sweat. 

In the first instance, it seems entirely mad to have chosen this small provincial town in the South of France as the site where the latest trends in contemporary photography and lens-based art are presented to the public. Whose capricious desire drove this choice of location – and even more strangely – why does it charm me so completely and immediately, encouraging me to continue my pilgrimage undeterred? Spanning the city’s historic building heritage, exhibition venues range from the ruined Roman amphitheatre and gracefully elegant but mostly unused medieval churches to the cutting-edge contemporary art foundations and museums, alongside dilapidated industrial sheds and semi-abandoned nineteenth-century factory sites. 

I find myself in the pitch-black darkness, engulfed in the sights and sounds of Live Evil (2022), a total installation that includes a range of recent and new works by African American artist, Arthur Jafa. This installation was not actually part of the Rencontres d’Arles programmes but coincided with the festival, having been created by Jafa specifically for the two vast exhibition spaces at LUMA Arles, located in the post-industrial halls of La Mécanique Générale and La Grande Halle (luma.org).

The painful contrast that the viewer experiences, when moving from the blistering heat and piercing light of the outdoors to the vast cavernous space of La Grande Halle, is clearly a desired effect that Jafa wants us to feel with every fibre of our sensory bodies, engaging simultaneously our hearing, vision, smell and touch. The perfectly staged multimedia installation is an Anthropocenic reflection on the human condition, presented through the reimagined visual and sound sequences that portray blackness in many powerful iterations. For me, the strongest effect was achieved in AGHDRA (2021), an entirely digital work that constitutes a unique thesis: the unfathomable loss and ineffable pain at the end of civilization as we know it. The work is presented as an 85-minute-long giant projection of a constantly moving seascape of black rocks, forming waves that intensify and recede against the menacing deep-red light of sunset. 

Obvious parallels come to mind, whilst experiencing Jafa’s Gesamtkunstwerk, relating to photographic processes, which hinge on the juxtaposition of the opposing, co-dependent forces of light and dark, black and white. Jafa masterfully brings us to the experience of blackness as a testimony to the centuries-long colonial extraction and cultural exploitation of black populations. This is presented both as a powerful symbol of the end of nature, portrayed as blackened, burnt, charred inhospitable rocks, in contrast to historic notions of fertile, abundant, always giving Earth – the planet as we still know it, but that has been put into grave danger due to climate catastrophe caused by humankind. 

Located at Parc des Atelier, now part of the LUMA Foundation’s multitude of exhibition spaces, ‘A Feminist Avant-Garde: Photographs and Performances of the 1970s from the Verbund Collection, Vienna’, offered a very different view on photography as documentation, presenting archival material that records performance as protest (verbund.com). Perfectly balanced in its presentation and meticulously curated in terms of content, this international touring exhibition represents the lens-based oeuvres of important figures of feminist art. It covers the period between 1968-1980, when feminist protests and performance joined forces in the battle for women’s rights, fearlessly challenging male authority by displaying outright heroism in the face of centuries-long sexism and oppression. 

The collection includes over 200 works by 71 female artists, with the iteration at Rencontres d’Arles featuring works by iconic feminist activists, photographers, and performance artists such as ORLAN, Lynda Benglis, Karin Mack, VALIE EXPORT, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Howardena Pindell, and Francesca Woodman, to name but a few. My attention was captivated by many remarkable works by incredibly brave female artists, many of whom are my contemporaries, living and working around the world today. This includes Scottish artist, Elaine Shemilt, who lived and worked in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, where she staged and documented her multimedia artworks. Today, Shemilt has a diverse and impressively agile career as an academic (she is a professor of printmaking at the University of Dundee), a printmaker, photographer, and climate activist (elaineshemilt.co.uk). A series of six black and white photographs by Shemilt (dating from around 1976) show the artist standing against a brick wall, naked, and bound. Her head, wrists and feet are marked on the wall to denote the outline of her body, recalling the chalk outlines drawn by the police at crime scenes. In some of the photographs, Shemilt is holding a sheet of glass, looking through it, as if through a shield that may be used in defence. 

Recordings of live performances, many series of photographs, and multiple video works by female artists represented in the Verbund collection are remarkably versatile in terms of their approaches, yet are also coherently united in their determination to reflect on an ongoing oppression that manifests itself in the subjugation of women in general, and female artists in particular, into fetishised roles of domestic goddesses, childbearing vessels, endless fodder for the male gaze and capitalist consumption. Pointing at endemic, structural, and domestic violence against women, the artists in the exhibition frequently portray themselves as muted, gagged, restrained, bound, vulnerable, and naked. They are often placed in prison-like environments and claustrophobic spaces, dominated by solid structures and enclosed with brick walls. 

This exhibition had particularly strong resonances for me, as the work in the Verbund collection is covering the period from 1968, the year I was born. This was also the year when the American war in Vietnam reached its apogee; and when Soviet troops invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, thus signifying a strategic shift of power within the Cold War context. The works represented in the collection continue up to and including 1980, a year which saw the Soviet Army’s invasion of Afghanistan, and the peak of the conflict escalation between America and the Communist Block. These historic events resonate with the violent armed conflicts that we witness unfolding in front of our eyes today, alongside environmental disasters, food shortages, and the continuous rise of far-right ideologies, which are reintroducing reproductive crime, in an attempt to claw back the fundamental and most basic human rights of women over their bodies.  

I first came across the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival in 2010, in a location thousands of miles away from the South of France, at Caochangdi PhotoSpring, Arles in Beijing. This sister festival was initiated through curatorial collaborations between Bérénice Angremy of Thinking Hands, and RongRong and inri – a Sino-Japanese photographic duo that founded the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, designed by Ai Weiwei, and located near the 798 Art District in the north of Beijing. Two years later, I visited the actual Rencontres d’Arles for the first time, and in 2013 returned to the Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre to take part in ‘The New Irish Landscape’, the first exhibition of contemporary Irish photography in Beijing, curated by Tanya Kiang (exhibitions curator of Photo Museum Ireland) which included photographic works by Anthony Haughey, David Farrell and Patrick Hogan. 

Originally launched in 1970, under the title of ‘Rencontres Photographiques’ by photographer Lucien Clergue, curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette, and writer Michel Tournier, Rencontres d’Arles is a city-wide, local festival of global importance. Recognised and frequented by both photography professionals and amateurs alike, the annual festival aims to represent the latest trends and currents that flow within photography and lens-based art, whilst presenting cutting-edge contemporary photographic art within the context of its history. 

“Initially the festival largely focused on Magnum photo documentary, and not critical fine art practice”, notes Kiang, who over the past 30 years has conducted many portfolio reviews and nominated young photographic artists for the annual Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award. She adds that the focus of the festival and its programming has significantly shifted over the past 50 years, steadily moving away from a typical French festival – in which photography was often seen as an excuse to present exploitative, misogynistic and sexist images of women, taken by men – to address themes and preoccupations that are visible within the broader global discourse in contemporary art. 

In that sense, this year’s edition is phenomenally post-feminist in its themes, deliverables and messages. And unlike other key events in the global art calendar – for example, the Venice Biennale, Art Basel or Frieze art fairs, with their global branding and commercial imperatives – Rencontres d’Arles is a refreshingly original, stand-alone event that offers a novel format, somewhere between a film festival and a local town fair. Over the past 50 years, artists featured in the festival included Robert Doisneau, William Eggleston, Frank Horvat, Mary Ellen Mark, Frank Capa and Robert Mapplethorpe. As photography was becoming more closely associated with contemporary art, exhibitions of iconic artists including David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Sophie Calle, and Taryn Simon have been staged at Arles, with guest curators invited to the festival from 2004, including Martin Parr, Raymond Depardon, and Nan Goldin, among others.

Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist, curator, educator and researcher. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art. Born in the USSR, she lives and works between London, Dublin, and Berlin. Shavrova will present her research at the IMMA international research conference, ‘100 Years of Self Determination’ (10-12 November).  

varvarashavrova.com

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The colloquialism ‘quiet as it’s kept’ suggests a state of secrecy and collusion. It implicates others in a shared pact, an agreement to stay silent when in the presence of the uninitiated. As a curatorial proposition, and a phrase alluding to various works by artist David Hammons, writer Toni Morrison, and jazz drummer Max Roach, it allows for a certain ambiguity, encapsulating a diverse range of practices while inferring that, even if not immediately apparent, there’s an underlying logic at play. In adopting this idiom, the 2022 Whitney Biennial (6 April – 5 September) thus seeks to foreground sensitivity and seriousness, even if, in the process, it veers unnervingly close towards vague generalities and the familiar comforts of abstraction.

In certain respects, this is to be expected; the biennial has, after all, weathered controversy in its last two iterations. Several artists withdrew their work from the 2019 edition in opposition to Whitney board member Warren B. Kanders, whose company Safariland produced tear gas canisters used on the Mexico-USA border; while in 2017, the white painter Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), depicting the brutalised body of African-American teenager, Emmett Till, raised protests calling for the work’s removal. No wonder then that this biennial takes a cautious view, largely sidestepping overt attempts at polemics and provocation. With the works mainly occupying two levels of the Whitney Museum of American Art, alternately spread across an open, light-filled space, and cloistered within a labyrinth of darkened enclaves, the design of the exhibition is the most contentious issue here. 

In the airy atrium of the fifth-floor galleries, disparate works are jammed together, diminishing any sense of intimacy, and cluttering one’s peripheral vision. Eric Wesley’s comically oversized plastic sculpture of a drinking bird, North American Buff Tit (2022), teeters next to Andrew Roberts’s eight-screen CGI portraits of zombified employees reciting poetry, their shirts emblazoned with the logos of Walmart, Netflix and Amazon. Modular structures are positioned throughout the space, serving as supports for Ellen Gallagher’s densely layered collages of oil, pigment and palladium leaf, with embossed wave-like patterns, snaking conduits, and repeated silhouetted profiles of totemic figures floating across the surface, and for Dyani White Hawk’s Wopila / Lineage (2021) – a vast composition of shimmering loomed strips of glass beads and multi-coloured triangles, converging against parallel backdrops of black and white, which deftly employs traditional Lakota techniques of beadwork and embroidery. An arrangement of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal works, presented through photography, text, and film, are sequestered within a tent-like enclosure. There is a fittingly sepulchral quality to the installation (Cha was murdered in 1981 at the age of 31), and the documentation of performances such as A BLE W AIL (1975), in which the white-robed artist moves through a curtained, candlelit, and mirrored environment, evoke the displacement that Cha felt as a Korean immigrant to America. 

There are glimpses here of what the curators intended, of abstraction as a political tactic, as a means of insinuating underrepresented histories. However, the overwhelming glut of objects and obstacles hinders any consideration of their inherent qualities. The upper floor, by comparison, recalls nothing so much as a series of black box screening rooms. Such a dramatic juxtaposition of spaces feels starkly at odds with the nuanced, unforced approach described by curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, in which assertions are supplanted by ‘hunches’ and national boundaries give way to external, outside viewpoints (the biennial pointedly includes artists from outside the United States). This layout, however, does allow for more measured encounters with specific works, such as Coco Fusco’s disquieting Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021), in which the artist navigates the waters around Hart Island by rowboat. The site contains the mass graves of New York’s anonymous dead, buried by prison labour since 1869, and comprising victims of Covid, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other epidemics: “A mountain of unclaimed souls, perhaps a million, perhaps more, or perhaps less. No one actually knows.” Fusco tosses flowers overboard, honouring these unnamed individuals, as she ceaselessly drifts along the coast; a neat reversal of quarantine’s historical roots in keeping potentially infected ships at anchor for 40 days.

This lateral perspective is also found in Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s What About China? (2021), a filmed portrayal of rural life and the jarring transition to urbanism captured through instances of traditional village architecture. An indoor fire, burning from beneath the floorboards of a spartan home, heats an overhanging iron pot. Wooden beams intersect with crossbars. A bridge is “built with no nails and no rivets.” Chicken coops sit next to piles of firewood. A male voiceover describes the scene – “the drum tower, a cultural symbol and an indispensable space of public gathering” – as if pitching the official party line, while female commentators offer more personal, philosophical and introspective outlooks: “One can grasp the flux and reflux of time by observing forms. One can detect the true and the false by looking at beings in their concrete manifestations.” The cumulative effect reveals how change transpires in its smallest, most prosaic, details. Beneath the formal rhetoric, these developments trigger a cavalcade of miniature – yet individually seismic – ruptures. The transformations recorded here, despite never setting foot in America, may have greater ramifications for the United States and its global presence than any number of national concerns. Approached obliquely, from the side, the film takes on an issue that, addressed directly, might only elicit well-worn agreement or headstrong opposition. Instead, it comes in by stealth, without warning, and leaves the viewer unmistakably altered. 

Chris Clarke is a critic and senior curator at the Glucksman, Cork.

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