EVA functions as a perfect marriage of the local and the global — Matt Packer
Matt Packer, EVA director/CEO It Takes a Village is the title of the Guest Programme in the latest edition of EVA, Limerick’s biennial festival of the visual arts, which opens on Friday.
'It Takes a Village' is the title of the Guest Programme in the latest edition of EVA, Limerick’s biennial festival of the visual arts, which opens on Friday.
The expression usually relates to the rearing of a child, but in this context, it could very well describe the organisation of the festival by Director/CEO Matt Packer and his small team of curators.
Packer has overseen EVA since 2017, having previously served as director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry and curator at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC.
“Eight years is a long time,” he says.
“But because of EVA’s rhythm, it still feels quite new in many ways. Each edition of the festival has different artists and venues, curators and partners. There's a limit to the kind of experience you can bring forward from one edition to the next. It almost feels like you're starting from scratch each time.”
Preparation for the 41st edition of EVA began even before the last edition got off the ground in 2023, he says: “You might already have identified a short list of curators to work with, or you might have started thinking about a certain kind of emphasis in the programme. These kinds of broader ideas bake themselves into the plans. It's a full 24-month plus operation, getting it all in place. And then, of course, a lot happens at the last minute, and we're all now running around like rats to make it happen.”
EVA 2025 has two distinct but complementary strands; the It Takes a Village guest programme, curated by Eszter Szakács, and a series of platform commissions by Irish artists, selected by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter.
“Eszter is originally from Budapest,” says Packer. “There’s a very dynamic art scene in Hungary, but the country is also going through a great deal of turmoil at the moment. We thought a lot of that could speak in an interesting way to the Irish experience.”
Szakács’ work with the prestigious Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany was largely what led to her appointment.
“Recent editions of Documenta had a very collaborative organisational approach, and we were attracted by that way of working. This current edition of EVA is exemplary in the sense that Eszter has explicitly invited the EVA team in to shape up her programme. So we've been putting forward certain artist practices and thematic inquiries that we thought were relevant to the Irish context, and that's helped her situate those Irish practices within an international framework.”
If Szakács’ selections — which include the Budapest-based Gypsy Criminals, Reza Afisina from West Java and Noor Abuarafeh from Palestine, among many others — are truly international, so too are their concerns.
“If you go through the individual artworks,” says Packer, “there's reference to the crackdown on LGTBQ communities in Hungary, there's quite a few works that reference the situation in Palestine, land contestation, colonial occupation, all these kinds of things. EVA is very much a reflection of what's going on in the world politically, but I hope it does a bit more than just report on those things.”
Ní Fheorais and Potter’s platform commissions, which include new works by Éireann and I (Joselle Ntumba and Beulah Ezeugo), Colin Keady-Tabbal, Olivia Normile, Bridget O’Gorman and Lyónn Wolf, “are focused on ideas of access,” says Packer.
“But access in a broad sense. We tend to think of access in terms of mobility access, or overcoming barriers, and that does feature. But a lot of the proposals that came to the fore in the selection were around thinking of access in terms of class or race or language, or even in one case in relation to human and non-human legibility.”
As always, EVA will exhibit work in venues all over Limerick city, as well as in dedicated spaces such as Limerick City Gallery of Art and Ormston House. Artists are often matched with venues that complement their work.
“I’m very excited by Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh’s installation at Sadlier’s fishmongers, for instance. Ciarán is from Derry. He’s done a very elaborate, expansive project that's connected to this parasitic trout in Donegal, a fish that was introduced in the early noughties and started eating up a lot of the native trout. Ciarán is interested in the way that something like a trout maps itself onto a political history of the North. You've got a kind of colonialism happening within this one lake in Donegal, and that in itself is connected to his own family's history. His family were involved in different ways in the Republican movement and the Irish language movement. It's connected as well to his dad's health. His dad had a surrogate stomach introduced during a late stage in his treatment for cancer. So, again, you have an example of a body that then becomes host to another body. It's work that crosses the personal, the political, the environmental, all of these things.”
In many ways, EVA functions as a perfect marriage of the local and the global.
“I'm aware of how accommodating the city of Limerick has been for EVA over the past 45 years,” says Packer.
“Some of the spaces EVA has used — there must have been at least 140 — have come and gone, or they no longer exist. But EVA has become so woven into the city; the high points and the low, the periods of delinquency and economic prosperity, are all somehow written into its history. But there's also an international scale to what we do that I think is unprecedented in an Irish visual arts context. And what the show reinforces overall is the need to think with compassion, to build tools for a connective response in the face of political and social adversity.”
- EVA opens on August 29 and runs to October 26
- Further information: EVA.ie
