Making a mark on the city
EVA is Ireland’s longest running international art event. Located in Limerick city, it has been an annual art festival since 1977. This year it is titled After the Future and is the first show in the new biennial format.
Annie Fletcher is the invited curator and she also works in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in the Netherlands as curator of exhibitions. “I always say I’m this interesting mongrel,” says Fletcher. “I’ve been living in the Netherlands for 15 years, but I started my career in visual arts in Ireland. I did History of Art in Trinity, then worked in the Douglas Hyde Gallery as an assistant curator. I’m from Carlow and I went to the Netherlands in 1995/96 and most of career has been there, but I’ve worked frequently in Ireland.”
Woodrow Kernohan was appointed director of EVA this year on a three-year term. Fletcher says they’ve worked with a new designer and really revamped the image of the event. “We’ve put the whole thing online, which meant that we had a much bigger international reach. We had 76 countries, people applied from all over the world.”
Fletcher selected from over 2,000 submissions, which she managed alongside her full-time post in the Van Abbemuseum.
“It became really interesting to try and pull this thing together in some way,” she says. “I tried to think up what was interesting about Ireland right now. Obviously there’s this economic downturn, but there’s this real confidence about culture and visual culture. Artists are organised, I think there is really good third-level education around Ireland.
“There were always fantastic artists, but the dialogue now seems to be more sophisticated. Those kinds of things really made me think: I bet those artists are able to talk about what’s going on right now; reading the world and understanding these huge changes that have happened all over Europe with the economic crash.”
Certain submissions made an instant impression with Fletcher. “Barbara Knezevic’s Contingency Structure, which is on the fourth floor in 103-4 O’Connell Street, was one of those things I picked immediately. It’s actually quite a little subtle work, but there’s something about when an artist knows how to manage space, even if it’s a tiny thing, it’s clear.
“Also, Anibal Catalan’s Morphological Zone, which is this wonderful floating sculpture which you’ll see in Limerick City Gallery; again, no brainer, it was defiantly straight away.”
EVA is known for hosting more modern art disciplines over traditional painting and sculpture, but Fletcher says there is no directive.
“There’s absolutely no brief. I think it’s just that things are changing, there’s less painting in submission perhaps. Twenty years ago probably most of it was painting because that’s what artists were doing. I think artists are really creative and work in whatever medium is to hand. We are in a highly mediatised world. Television, video, YouTube, people curate themselves with their iPhone every day. They manage their information. So I think a lot of artists work with digital media and you see that in the show. There’s an awful lot of digital work.
“One of the things I thought really exciting is there’s a younger generation of artists who’ve just come out of NCAD who are really rejuvenating sculpture and really not interested in media work. People like Sam Keogh and Doireann Ní Ghrioghair are making bonkers, amazing objects again. These things come around.
“One of the people I am really excited to have in the show is Mark O’Kelly who is an extraordinary painter, and we’ve really tried to showcase his work because I think it’s really interesting and important work and far more than just painting.”
Fletcher, when considering how to plan the festival in Limerick, thought back to how the event’s former incarnation as EV+A made an impression on her in her formative years.
“I felt there is some real energy in the city. I wanted to consolidate and use two major buildings. In the end we used three, whereas traditionally it has woven its way through many venues. I wanted to create an exhibition where you think about these works against each other. I was interested in taking over commercial space in the city that was empty. Not in terms as a lament but to expose it — actually to use it, to fill it with extraordinary work. I chose to work with 103-4 O’Connell Street, which had never been used yet; it was built in the boom times.
“The River Tower is the third venue. The view of the city and the idea the people can see their own city in a different way is really powerful.
“I wanted to select spaces to be in the centre and also to be conscious of how does a city organise itself as a metropolis?”
The River Tower penthouse apartment, still in a raw state of unfinished build, houses one of the highlights of EVA. It’s a sculpture made up of Irish buildings of note collaged together sit in a room that has beautiful panoramic views of Limerick. Vandalized Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 by José Carlos Martinat was pure white the afternoon of EVA’s opening reception. Tying in with Limerick’s hip-hop scene, the public are invited to spray graffiti on the sculpture every day until the end of the festival.
The most ambitious move on Fletcher’s part was resurrecting an art work which was the star of the 1994 show. Construction X by Luc Deleu is an enormous X-shaped sculpture made up of 9 shipping containers.
“I wanted to pay a homage to the legacy of EV+A,” says Fletcher. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the X. This was such an iconic piece and for some reason with such simple materials, proportionately, the way it sits in Arthurs Quay, it’s a beautiful sculpture. Maybe people don’t even make those sculptures any more, you don’t see much public work like that.
“For me it was such an iconic thing and I thought why not resurrect something that the city owned? It also marks the passing of time, all the changes but also the timelessness of really excellent art. It’s as relevant today as it was then.”
* EVA runs until Aug 12. www.eva.ie
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