EVA International - Ireland's Biennial of Contemporary Art

EVA International - Ireland's Biennial of Contemporary Art EVA International – Ireland's biennial of contemporary art. EVA International is Ireland's Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Every two years EVA International works with guest curators and artists to create a 12-week programme of exhibitions and events that engage with the people and city of Limerick, Ireland. Since its foundation in 1977, EVA International has worked with some of the world's leading artists and curators, bringing outstanding exhibitions to audiences on the west coast of Ireland. EVA International has p

reviously been curated by: Merve Elveren (2020/2021), Koyo Kouoh (2016), Bassam El Baroni (2014), Annie Fletcher (2012), Elizabeth Hatz (2010), Angelika Nollert & Yilmaz Dziewior (2009), Hou Hanru (2008), Klaus Ottmann (2007), Katerina Gregos (2006), Dan Cameron (2005), Zdenka Badovinac (2004), Virginia Pérez Ratton (2003), Apinan Poshyananda (2002), Salah M. Hassan (2001), Rosa Martínez (2000), Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (1999), Paul M. O'Reilly (1998), Guy Tortosa (1996), María de Corral (1995), Jan Hoet (1994), Gloria Moure (1993), Lars Nittve (1992), Germano Celant (1991), Saskia Bos (1990), Florent Bex & Alexander Roshin (1988), Ida Panicelli (1987), Nabuo Nakamura (1986), Rudi Fuchs (1985), Peter Fuller (1984), Liesbeth Brandt Corstius (1982), Pierre Restany (1981), Brian O'Doherty (1980), Sandy Nairne (1979), Adrian Hall, Charles Harper, Theo Mcnab, Cóilín Murray (1978) Barrie Cooke, John Kelly, Brian King (1977). EVA International is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City and County Council, LIT, Limerick School of Art & Design and works in close partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art. EVA International Community Guidelines:

We encourage you to join in the conversation on our page and welcome your comments and reactions. The following guidelines are designed to help provide a quality environment for our community. Please keep them in mind whenever you participate:

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- We encourage and welcome debate and dissent and do not operate a policy of removing comments we might not like or agree with, but we do reserve the right to remove comments and/or block fans if they include any of the following;

• Personal attacks (on artists, staff, members of the community or any other individual). This includes comments that are abusive, harassing, stalking, threatening or attacking to any person, organisation or company.
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• Links to files that contain viruses or programs that could damage the operation of other people’s computers. This page is ours but the conversation belongs to all of us involved with the page. We hope it will be a place for conversation and debate around the artists and themes associated with each edition of EVA but we expect our community to take responsibility for the maturity of their own comments, and to be aware of the comments of others. If you spot something that contravenes any of the guidelines above please report it to [email protected]

We are now welcoming Platform Commission proposals for the 2027 EVA International programme. Selected proposals will rec...
10/03/2026

We are now welcoming Platform Commission proposals for the 2027 EVA International programme. Selected proposals will receive funding and support for the development and presentation of new work as part of the upcoming 2027 biennial programme (August - October 2027), taking place across multiple venues in Limerick City.

The 2027 Platform Commissions coincide with EVA’s 50th anniversary edition, which will critically reflect on key artistic moments and broader political changes that have taken place in Ireland over the past five decades.

The selection panel for the 2027 Platform Commissions will consist of acclaimed artists Bridget O’Gorman, Phillip McCrilly, and Eimear Walshe, alongside members of the EVA team. All three artists were awarded Platform Commissions in previous editions, 2020 - 2025.

Visit the link below to access the application and thematic guidelines, and the application form.

** Deadline for submissions, 17:00 GMT, Monday 13 April, 2026.



Image: "Untitled" (America), 1994. Light strings installed across O’Connell Street at O’Connell Mall, Limerick, as part of EV+A 96, 1996. Cur. Guy Tortosa. Photographer: Pierre Leguillon. Image courtesy of Limerick City Gallery of Art.

Web link: https://www.eva.ie/platform-commissions-eva-2027/

EVA information notice:As 2025 wraps up, we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who helped make the 41st EVA Interna...
19/12/2025

EVA information notice:

As 2025 wraps up, we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who helped make the 41st EVA International an unforgettable edition.

The EVA Office is now closed for the winter holidays and will reopen in January. We'll also be taking a little break from posting on social media.

ROMANTIC IRELAND, 2024 by Eimear Walshe was presented at Studio Saol as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Program...
19/12/2025

ROMANTIC IRELAND, 2024 by Eimear Walshe was presented at Studio Saol as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme.

The installation comprised a multi-channel video in an immersive sculpture. Filmed at Common Knowledge, Co Clare in the first week of October 2023, and set on the site of an unfinished earth build, the video stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from the 19th–21st centuries. The figures occupy an abstracted ruin, a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. The installation was soundtracked by an opera describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe.

ROMANTIC IRELAND, 2024 was presented as part of ROMANTIC IRELAND: A National tour in Fragments. The National Tour is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon as part of its commitment to promote the visual arts to Irish audiences. Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. ROMANTIC IRELAND was originally curated by Sara Greavu and Project Arts Centre for the Pavilion of Ireland in the Venice Biennale 2024.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND, 2024, 41st EVA International, 2025. Photo 1 by Jed Niezgoda. Photo 2 by EVA International. Photos courtesy of the artist and EVA International.

Untitled, A selection of works (2008-2018), by Anikó Loránt was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of Art as part of...
16/12/2025

Untitled, A selection of works (2008-2018), by Anikó Loránt was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of Art as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

Anikó Loránt’s drawing practice was based on repetition, reuse, and the merging of various styles and mediums. Her poetic drawings and paintings were usually everyday observations with the aim of interpreting the world, often with attributes of transcendentalism. Loránt’s work was fundamentally shaped — both thematically and practically — by the experience of motherhood, and she worked on multiple projects at once focusing on issues of extended care and sustainability, subsistence skills, the history of farming, foraging, slow living and the inseparable bonds between the human and non-human realms. While Loránt’s works have mostly been presented in the framework of the ‘ex-artists’ collective she established with her partner, artist Tamás Kaszás, the presentation as part of ‘It Takes a Village’ was developed through a conversation with Tamás Kaszás, Krisztián Kristóf and curator Lívia Páldi, who have worked together to establish Loránt as a significant individual artist in her own right.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Anikó Loránt, Send-Off, 2008–2010, and Three Rabbits (Triptych), 2009, 41st EVA International 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and EVA International.

Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot, 2022, by Marwa Arsanios was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of A...
15/12/2025

Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot, 2022, by Marwa Arsanios was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of Art as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

It was the fourth part of the artist’s ongoing collaborative film series Who is Afraid of Ideology? (since 2017) about mostly women-led communities fighting economic exploitation and colonial violence. The film work staged a geological, historical, legal, and agricultural discussion as well as an experiment carried out by Arsanios and her collaborators to shift the status of a private land in the north of Lebanon to a common or a social waqf. The film followed the process of advancing the right of land usership over ownership, reflecting on the way land, as a living object, can inherently resist the definitions of ‘property’. Arsanios also presented ten banners in Arabic and English that were grounded in a protocol of usership of the land, based on research Arsanios conducted on the history of collective land tenure (the practice of ‘Musha’).

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Photo courtesy of the artist and EVA International.


Bíodh Orm Anocht, featuring Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole was developed by Or...
11/12/2025

Bíodh Orm Anocht, featuring Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole was developed by Ormston House in collaboration with EVA International as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme.

Bíodh Orm Anocht (Be with me tonight) was a group exhibition that had been developed collaboratively between Ormston House and EVA over the past 18 months. The exhibition featured new and existing artworks, presented at Ormston House and off-site locations. While the contributors worked across media and processes, they were unified by a preoccupation with customs and practices that can broadly be described as folk knowledge.

The artists were concerned with the metaphorical qualities of objects and materials and drew from disciplines outside the visual arts (including mythology, zoology and cartography) and infused them with personal meaning. Inherent in the artworks in this exhibition was the possibility that atavistic wisdom may be sourced from the natural world.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

An installation view of Bíodh Orm Anocht. Photo by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of Ormston House.

Carceral Jigs, 2025 by Eoghan Ryan was presented at STARLING as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Ta...
10/12/2025

Carceral Jigs, 2025 by Eoghan Ryan was presented at STARLING as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

The video installation used children’s television tropes, scenes of musical rehearsal, 3D puppetry, and linguistic tongue twisters which were traced across documentary interviews, archival footage, and recent protest recordings to expose mutations, contradictions, and shifting rhythms within Irish nationalism today. Employing filmed material from operational holiday camps, the video excavates how the re-use of architectures of containment—for example, those outsourced by the Irish state to facilitate direct provision—often complicates and confuses nationalist identification.

Carceral Jigs invited viewers to consider how control is choreographed and performed— through culture, policy, media, and the built environment—and how this spectacle of belonging is often maintained and malformed by denying it to others.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Image courtesy of the artist and EVA International.

Mi Ke Sa / I Want To Know, 2025 by Family Connection (Glenda Martinus, Rudsel Martinus, Jörgen Gario, and Quinsy Gario) ...
03/12/2025

Mi Ke Sa / I Want To Know, 2025 by Family Connection (Glenda Martinus, Rudsel Martinus, Jörgen Gario, and Quinsy Gario) was presented at One Opera Square as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

Mi Ke Sa / I Want To Know was a multi-part installation of newly commissioned works, inspired by the prophetic 1980 song of the same name, by the iconic Curaçaoan folk singer Rudy Plaate. Just as the lyrics of the original song speculates on the state of the Dutch Caribbean islands in the year 2000, the family collective produced a series of works speculating about the year 2050.

Through scale models and textiles, Glenda Martinus proposed the return of what were called ‘High Flying Parks’, outdoor gathering places that the youth on Curaçao built with support by the government. Paintings by Rudsel Martinus reflected on reuse and improvisation as survival strategies during scarcity and resource depletion. Through audio Jörgen Gario presented a Caribbean-futuristic tale of a steampunk past that has produced a future in which the Caribbean has its own non-extractivist space exploration programme. With repurposed educational slides about the Dutch Caribbean and Ireland, Quinsy Gario’s work focused on island collaboration across time and location.

Photos by EVA International and Jed Niezgoda.

If we remain silent, 2023 by Ana Bravo-Pérez was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of Art as part of the 41st EVA I...
03/12/2025

If we remain silent, 2023 by Ana Bravo-Pérez was presented at the Limerick City Gallery of Art as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

The installation was a proposal for a feminist decolonial anti-monument commemorating women social leaders on the frontlines of the climate crisis in Abya Yala. The 16mm projections featured footage of performances by a diasporic community filmed at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, while the film looped onto a gallery wall forming a graph about the loss of biodiversity, social leaders, and tropical rainforest. The projection screens were weaved with toquilla straw and the embroidered textiles were collectively made by hand to honour the vital work of many Indigenous, Afro-Colombian women social leaders and environmentalists who opposed ecological destruction and protected their communities, territories, and life support systems. Crafted with artists and diasporas in the Netherlands and traditional weaving cooperatives in Colombia, it formed a living document of communal work and collective memories.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Photo by Jed Niezgoda.

A Disentailing Deed, 2025 by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty was presented at both One Opera Square and the Limerick Cit...
02/12/2025

A Disentailing Deed, 2025 by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty was presented at both One Opera Square and the Limerick City Museum as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

indirect fire was a video installation that formed part of A Distentailing Deed, a body of work that traced a particular line of reference – from the land disputes and defunct barytes mines of the Dartry Mountains in Co. Sligo, to the historic use of mineral barium in photographic paper, medical imaging, and as a combustion agent in green fireworks. Through a playful layering of historical references and the adoption of Edward Said’s idea of a ‘third nature’— an alternative to nostalgic ethnonationalism— this experimental film and installation work sought to present dramatic shows of patriotism as a mirror image of the state violence they commemorate.

Táimse im’ chodladh is ná dúistear mé was a newly composed ‘aisling’, or vision poem, that used narrative devices typical to this traditional genre of Irish poetry, to consider recurrent themes of private property and resistance in North Sligo. Central to the text was ‘an briathar saor’, an autonomous verb form used in the Irish language to avoid naming the subject of an action, intentionally or otherwise. This omission was employed to explore various registers: authoritative, subversive and ghostly, harnessing the inherent ambiguity that exists within the Irish language to simultaneously critique power and recognise protest.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Photos courtesy of the artist and EVA International.

But what are we harvesting, 2025 by damdam was presented at St. John’s Pavilion as part of the 41st EVA International Gu...
28/11/2025

But what are we harvesting, 2025 by damdam was presented at St. John’s Pavilion as part of the 41st EVA International Guest Programme It Takes a Village, curated by Eszter Szakács in collaboration with the EVA team.

The one-off event explored the practical tool of artistic harvesting through a public game of ‘Lotería’. Understanding the practice of harvesting as a form of diffuse memory, somewhere between archive and artwork, the Lotería game was reimagined by damdam as a form of harvesting itself.

41st EVA International 29 August - 26 October 2025.

Photos by Oliwia Szafran.

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