View overlooking three turbines during the construction of the power house at Ardnacrusha Power Station. PG.SS.PH.325.27. Š ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
06 Foreword Mike Fitzpatrick 08 Preface Matt Packer 14 Curator’s Essay The Thirty-Eighth and the Eighth Inti Guerrero
20 ON DAMS 24 At the Dam Joan Didion 30 A Short History of Dams 42 You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone: Infrastructure, National Identity, Technology, and Modernity Sorcha O’Brien
51 PADDY & MR PUNCH 66 ON POWER AND THE BODY 68 A Timeline: From the Magdalene Laundries to the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment 90 I Wish Ann Lovett Were Out Buying a Swimsuit for Lanzarote Emer O’Toole
96 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS 98 Peju Alatise 102 Malala Andrialavidrazana 106 Alexander Apóstol 110 Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment 114 Jaime Ávila 118 Akiq AW 122 Patricia Belli 126 Colin Booth 130 Lee Bul 134 José Castrellón 138 Viriya Chotpanyavisut 142 Steven Cohen 146 Bruce Conner 150 Juan Dávila 154 Patrizio di Massimo 158 Roy Dib 162 Rita Duff y 166 Adrian Duncan and Feargal Ward 170 John Duncan 174 Juan Pablo Echeverri 178 Inji Efflatoun 182 Gonzalo Fuenmayor 186 John Gerrard 190 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
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206 Claire Halpin 210 Sanja Iveković 214 Uchechukwu James-Iroha 218 Mainie Jellett 222 Seán Keating 226 Sam Keogh 230 Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien 234 Napoles Marty 238 Francis Matthews 242 Julie Merriman 246 Kevin Mooney 250 Locky Morris 254 Isabel Nolan 258 Masahito Ono 262 David Pérez Karmadavis 266 John Rainey 270 Dan Rees 274 Marlon T. Riggs 278 Beto Shwafaty 282 Sutthirat Supaparinya 286 Mina Talaee 290 Jenna Tas 294 Darn Thorn 298 Top lista nadrealista 302 Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez
198 Laurent Grasso
306 Ian Wieczorek 310 Liu Xiaodong
202 Eileen Gray
314 Trevor Yeung
194 Alejandro González Iñárritu
321 322 324 325 326 327
Curator Biography Funders and Partners Board and Team Previous EVA International Curators Thanks Colophon
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EVA International was established just over forty years ago and is Ireland’s largest art event. The biennial is part of the international fabric of contemporary art, while also being grounded in the context of Limerick city, situated in the west of Ireland. Artists gather from around the world in Limerick, connecting their work with the city and its people. That connection is the vital component of EVA: that engagement, that moment of communication, understanding, and perception is the essence of the project. Our curator for 2018, Inti Guerrero, has focused this edition on a pivotal moment in the history of both Ireland and the Shannon region. In 1925, Ireland, a fledgling independent state of just three years, embarked on a massively ambitious project — the construction of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme — that was destined to change the economic and social life of the country. Through the work of Siemens-Schuckert of Germany and almost five thousand workers, the River Shannon was harnessed to generate electrical energy for the people, a hugely symbolic act for a young state after hundreds of years of colonisation. Aware of the ever-changing circumstances of our city and the art world, the organisers of EVA continue to consider how best to construct an exhibition of contemporary art in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In the past year, we welcomed our new Director, Matt Packer, who has already begun developing a strategic approach to strengthen and hone the biennial in the next three editions up to 2024. We sincerely thank our former Director, Woodrow Kernohan, who initally worked closely with Guerrero in preparing this exhibition and successfully led us from an annual exhibition format to our current biennial status. We are truly grateful for the ongoing public support of the Arts Council and Limerick City and County Council, which ensures an innovative, progressive programme. We welcome the key support of the OPW, JP McManus, the Crescent Shopping Centre, and education partner Limerick Institute of Technology, EI Electronics, Shannon Airport, HOMS, ESB, and many more. A special word of appreciation to former Chair Hugh Murray for his sterling service, our dedicated board and team, curator Inti Guerrero, and most importantly the artists for their participation and creativity. — Mike Fitzpatrick, Chair
Transmission Loop System across Ireland, 1930, taken from ‘The Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme’, 1930s. PG.SS.R.1. © ESB Archives and Siemens Historical Institute, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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Seán Keating’s Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out, produced during the construction of the Ardnacrusha Power Station, is a painting that comments on the fate of society in the wake of a new technological era and a new Ireland, while also being a reflection on artistic practice at the intersection of these changes. It is remarkable how much reverberates ninety years later. In Ireland, as elsewhere, ideas of nationhood are returning to the core of political rhetoric, while technology continues to change our interactions and labours. Artistic practice remains vital in its response to the seemingly endless accelerations of our super-connected (but still divided) world. What began as an encounter with Keating’s painting during an initial site visit at the Hunt Museum, has led to the exhibition of fift y-six artists across five venues in Limerick, with an extended programme taking place at IMMA in Dublin. The reference to hydroelectricity is embodied in Inti Guerrero’s curatorial approach, in its thematic porousness and connectivity. The 38th EVA International features artists from twenty-eight countries and across historical timeframes, with a fluid understanding of how contemporary art articulates the various (material, experiential, referential) registers of power. The decision to propose no title for the biennial breaks an EVA tradition that dates back to 1992, but was determined as a way to emphasise the ‘International’ that is essential and instrumental in EVA’s identity. This catalogue serves as an accompaniment to the exhibition and adds another dimension again. It includes texts by Sorcha O’Brien, Emer O’Toole, and Joan Didion, nineteenthcentury cartoons from American and British humour magazines, materials drawn from the ESB Archives, and images and texts relating to the participating artists. The venues for the exhibition Seán Keating painting the Shannon Scheme, ca. 1926. photo: The Cashman Collection, courtesy of RTÉ Archives.
Seán Keating, Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out, 1928–29, oil on canvas, 102 × 125 cm On loan to the ESB with kind permission of Gallery Oldham, UK.
Preface Matt Packer
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range from the institutional to the industrial and ex-industrial, to the domestic. In addition to the exhibition, there is a comprehensive public programme of talks, events, and workshops that provide a further reach of thematic ideas that connect back to the prophecy of Seán Keating’s original painting. In my first year as Director / CEO, I have overseen this edition on the remarkable journey of becoming a reality. A lot has been made possible through the generous support of organisations and individuals who are credited in this publication. Particular thanks go to the EVA International team, the Board of Directors, Members, and Advisors; Funders and Supporters; venue partners, Hunt Museum, Limerick City Gallery of Art, IMMA, RHH, and venues made possible by Limerick City and County Council. I would finally like to thank Inti Guerrero and all participating artists. — Matt Packer, Director / CEO
Installation of turbine at Ardnacrusha Power Station. PG.SS.PH.477.48. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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C U R ATO R ’ S ES S AY
The Thirty-Eighth and the Eighth Inti Guererro
Some, but certainly not all of the characters in Seán Keating’s social-realist painting Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out (1928–29) seem aware that their lives were about to change. A new era of technological progress was beginning to unfold with the construction of Ardnacrusha Power Station, the hydroelectric dam that appears in the background of the canvas as a large mass of concrete breaking through the Irish landscape. Ardnacrusha, which derives from the phrase Ard na Croise, meaning ‘the height of the cross’, is the name of the town in which the dam was built between 1925 and 1929 on the River Shannon, County Clare, and the dam was destined to hold a special place in Irish art history. Through his work, Keating expressed Ireland’s ambition in the first years following independence for a new beginning, which would be pursued through modernisation (in which electrification played a crucial role). The main focus in Keating’s painting, however, is the Irish psyche of the time, allegorically depicted by the motley crew of characters in the foreground who are on the cusp of changes from old to new. In Keating’s words: The stage Ireland and the stage Irishman are typified by the skeletons hanging on the left from one of the steel towers, which support the electric transmission lines. Beneath are the types of Irish workmen. In the centre of the foreground are two men. One represents the capitalist, who carries under his arms plans for industrial development. A gunman confronts him menacingly. The two symbolise the constant antagonism between the business elements and the extremists, which hinders the material progress of the State. The priest, reading (the bible) represents the unchanging church ever present when spiritual guidance is needed but concerning itself only with a kingdom that is not of this world.1 Built by the German company Siemens-Schuckert, the Shannon Scheme along with the power station in Ardnacrusha,
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which has been managed by the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) since 1929, became the futurist emblem of a modern free state after hundreds of years of British colonial rule. The transnational European business project between the Irish government and Siemens-Schuckert of the Weimar Republic was led by young Irish engineer Thomas McLaughlin, who had worked for the company in Berlin in the early 1920s, together with Patrick McGilligan TD, Minister for Industry and Commerce. As part of the drive to industrialise Ireland, McLaughlin implemented a pioneering plan to harness the power of the River Shannon, providing electricity on a national scale to all major cities and towns, and later, following the implementation of the Rural Electrification Scheme, to four hundred thousand homes in the rural countryside that had been lit by candlelight and paraffin lamps. With the support of the government of the new Free State, the project of the dam became a reality after four years of construction. The Germans also saw this as an opportunity to engage with a new market at a time when most of Europe had closed off economic relations with Germany in the geopolitical order during and after the First World War. Ireland didn’t have reservations making business with a former enemy of the British, thus creating an alliance with Siemens-Schuckert’s expertise. It took one thousand German and four thousand Irish workers to achieve this Herculean and costly dream, which generated 96 percent of the electricity needed for the country by 1931. The 38th EVA International uses this Irish dam history as a point of departure. Alongside Keating’s paintings of Ardnacrusha, which includes Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out, the exhibition also comprises works by artists from across geographies, generations, and media that address the construction of hydroelectric dams and its effects, not only in Ireland but elsewhere, over the course of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. These more explicit works on the subject bring to the foreground the specific politics and societal impacts these dams have had on nation-state narratives. Inji Efflatoun’s painting les diables rouges (1964) alludes to the heavy machinery used to modify the Nile when Egypt’s Aswan High Dam was erected between 1960 and ’70 — the dam was an
16 Curator’s Essay: The Thirty-Eighth and the Eighth Inti Guererro
emblem of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s state project of modernity, and also served as a platform for Soviet propaganda within Pan-Arab nationalism. At EVA, the documentation of the making of Liu Xiaodong’s 2006 large-scale canvases that portray some of the 1.3 million displaced residents from the towns on the banks of the Yangtze River, which were flooded during the construction of the monumental Three Gorges Dam, will be exhibited for the first time. It is the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, built in the early 2000s, and is instrumental in China’s growing economic leverage and power. Also included in the exhibition are more recent works and new commissions, such as Malala Andrialavidrazana’s digital collages, which juxtapose vintage banknote illustrations of dams and other sites of civil engineering that represent the failed utopian beliefs of progress. John Gerrard’s computer simulation of an existing solar thermal power tower in the Nevada desert brings back a feeling of wonderment towards technological progress in humanity’s search for renewable energy. This wonderment is comparable to the effect that the Ardnacrusha dam seems to have had on Keating. In Gerrard’s simulated world, who in the future will have the right to access this advanced technology, and who will be using it to build energy markets? Another future landscape presented in the exhibition is the newly commissioned installation by Sam Keogh in which remnants of technological advancement appear as ruins. Other narratives that unfold throughout the exhibition further expand on themes of electricity and light and on metaphors of power. In a number of works, the chandelier motif appears as a symbol of excess wealth that is related to Western civilisation. From Steven Cohen’s queer ‘chandelier’ cross-dressing that alludes to the imminent gentrification of a neighbourhood in Johannesburg, to Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s drawing of a chandelier hanging from a banana branch, representing the dominant Eurocentric tastes and aesthetics of landlords in the tropics and the commodities and people they exploit. Light as a representation of spirituality can also be seen throughout the show, especially in the reduced form of Eileen Gray’s 1920s modernist tube lamp, in which the bare light bulb is itself
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celebrated as the primal modern design principle to mimeticise form and function. Gray’s reductionist functionalism, in a way, unveils the soul of electrical light. The soul appears more evidently in the works of Mainie Jellett and Bruce Conner, who both create forms that seem to represent a spiritual ‘inner light’. Though they were working forty years apart, the religious and mystical undertones in both of their work seem to exteriorise the struggle some people face to find a balance between spiritual belief and the modern world. Though Jellett’s paintings from the 1920s are part of a wider obsession with modern machinery, as seen in many other artists’ work of her generation (e.g., Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay), her work is nevertheless set apart by her belief in a spiritual value of colour and Catholic iconography, both of which are made visible on canvas. Conner’s series Angels (1973–75), made at the height of the Vietnam War, highlights a moment in history when there was a collective disillusionment with modern society. This triggered aesthetic explorations in the work of artists like Conner, who found other forms of secular spirituality. In the experimental short film by director Alejandro González Iñarritu, the phrase ‘Can God’s light guide us or blind us?’ appears on-screen after flashes of footage show bodies falling from New York’s Twin Towers in 2001. His film anchors a constellation of other works and ideas in the exhibition that discuss current societal anxieties in the West in the post-9/11 condition. Rhetoric over the fear of immigrants (heightened by the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), the escalated hatred towards people based on their religion, and the subsequent rise of nativist nationalisms are addressed across the exhibition. Ian Wieczorek’s series of paintings, Crossing (2017), and a surrealist painting by Juan Dávila highlight the fascist reality of the forced confinement of immigrants in detention camps off the shores of Australia; while Jenna Tas presents a drawing installation that reminds us of the horrors of the Second World War, the dehumanising catastrophe of the Holocaust, by poetically honouring the lives of those killed out of hatred and xenophobia.
Curator’s Essay: The Thirty-Eighth and the Eighth Inti Guererro
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Ireland also bears the memory of recent violent antagonism and ethnonationalist conflict. This active historic memory appears through the anthropological lens of John Duncan who documents the uncanny normality of the Eleventh Night in Northern Ireland, an annual celebration in which Ulster Protestant loyalists burn bonfires with Irish flags in an open display of anti-Catholic and anti-republican sentiment. Patrizio di Massimo’s unique language in painting and sculpture explores the psychological dimensions of antagonism by bringing to light sexual undertones and the power dynamics found in family structures, which he links to an unconscious desire for that which you are repulsed by. Patriarchal hierarchies, machismos, and masculinity linked to sectarian conflict are also found in the figurative paintings of Rita Duff y. Her compositions depict the division between societies in Belfast in the late 1980s and early ’90s — during the last decade of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Beside Duff y’s work is the TV comedy sketch by Top lista nadrealista (TLN), a legendary former Sarajevo-based community of comedians-artists-intellectuals who were active in the years prior to the war in Bosnia. Through black humour, their scripts and characters predicted the collapse of Yugoslavia, a multicultural, multinational state dissolved by forces of ethnonationalism, which led to the war in Bosnia, Europe’s most recent moment of radical Islamophobic violence. Like Duff y’s work, the video by TLN presents a divisional line physically on-screen thereby splitting two communities that, in the end, seem to have more in common than not. The 38th EVA International brings back artistic and cultural productions made during and after the difficult periods in Northern Ireland and the Balkans as a way to reflect upon the current issues today, such as the possibility of reestablishing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic following Brexit, as well as the rise of xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe and throughout the world. Liberal democracy, as the possible site of tolerance and consensus, inhabits the vacuum left by the installation Brasília Hall (1998–2000) by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Between 1957 and 1960, Brazil’s capital was built in the country’s emblematic
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functionalist architecture, deriving from the International Style with its gleaming steel, concrete, and glass forms. Like Ardnacrusha Power Station, the construction of Brasília was a monumental engineering project that marked the modernisation of a nation-state. The empty space in GonzalezFoerster’s piece is an invitation for the public to create horizons for political imagination. In Ireland today perhaps one of the main political battlefields for change in the social body is the decriminalisation and legalisation of abortion. Abortion is still a major topic of discussion in many parts of the world. While abortion is legal in many countries in Europe, in Ireland it is still illegal and heavily demonised by the religious establishment, which is ‘concerning itself only with a kingdom that is not of this world’.2 The date for the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the 1983 Constitution Act — the patriarchal law that continues to subjugate the female body and psyche in Ireland — will take place during the course of the 38th EVA International. The inclusion of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment is therefore a crucial part of the exhibition. At the opening, the campaign will organise a procession of banners that will be displayed together with documentation of previous acts of protest. The campaign represents the drive for a new model of citizenry, body, and state. In this sense, the referendum might be seen as part of a continuous and unfinished process of societal change that began with the Shannon Scheme nearly one hundred years ago.
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Seán Keating, cited in John O’Beirne Ranelagh, preface to A Short History of Ireland, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xx. Keating, cited in ibid.
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Man pictured inside spiral casing of one of the penstocks at Ardnacrusha Power Station, May 1929. PG.SS.PH.112. Š ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
Hoover Dam, 2008 photo: Niall Sweeney
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Joan Didion
Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialise, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace. Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert light. Quite often I hear the turbines. Frequently I wonder what is happening at the dam this instant, at this precise intersection of time and space, how much water is being released to fill downstream orders and what lights are flashing and which generators are in full use and which just spinning free. I used to wonder what it was about the dam that made me think of it at times and in places where I once thought of the Mindanao Trench, or of the stars wheeling in their courses, or of the words. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.
At the Dam Joan Didion
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Dams, after all, are commonplace: we have all seen one. This particular dam had existed as an idea in the world’s mind for almost forty years before I saw it. Hoover Dam, showpiece of the Boulder Canyon project, the several million tons of concrete that made the Southwest plausible, the fait accompli that was to convey, in the innocent time of its construction, the notion that mankind’s brightest promise lay in American engineering. Of course the dam derives some of its emotional effect from precisely that aspect, that sense of being a monument to a faith since misplaced. ‘They died to make the desert bloom,’ reads a plaque dedicated to the ninety-six men who died building this first of the great high dams, and in context the worn phrase touches, suggests all of that trust in harnessing resources, in the meliorative power of the dynamo, so central to the early Thirties. Boulder City, built in 1931 as the construction town for the dam, retains the ambience of a model city, a new town, a toy triangular grid of green lawns and trim bungalows, all fanning out from the Reclamation building. The bronze sculptures at the dam itself evoke muscular citizens of a tomorrow that never came, sheaves of wheat clutched heavenward, thunderbolts defied. Winged Victories guard the flagpole. The flag whips in the canyon wind. An empty Pepsi-Cola can clatters across the terrazzo. The place is perfectly frozen in time. But history does not explain it all, does not entirely suggest what makes that dam so affecting. Nor, even, does energy, the massive involvement with power and pressure and the transparent sexual overtones to that involvement. Once when I revisited the dam I walked through it with a man from the Bureau of Reclamation. For a while we trailed behind a guided tour, and then we went on, went into parts of the dam where visitors do not generally go. Once in a while he would explain something, usually in that recondite language having to do with ‘peaking power,’ with ‘outages’ and ‘dewatering,’ but on the whole we spent the afternoon in a world
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so alien, so complete and so beautiful unto itself that it was scarcely necessary to speak at all. We saw almost no one. Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition. Generators roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was. And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of Lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and then into thirteenfoot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves. ‘Touch it,’ the Reclamation said, and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine. It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself. There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind. When I came up from the dam that day the wind was blowing harder, through the canyon and all across the Mojave. Later, toward Henderson and Las Vegas, there would be dust blowing, blowing past the Country-Western Casino FRI & SAT NITES and blowing past the Shrine of Our Lady of Safe Journey STOP & PRAY, but out at the dam there was no dust, only the rock and the dam and a little greasewood and a few garbage cans, their tops chained, banging against a fence. I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realising what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.
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Detail of the star map embedded in the concrete at Hoover Dam, 2008. photo: Niall Sweeney
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In 1959 the Egyptian and the Sudanese governments requested UNESCO to assist their countries in the protection and rescue of their endangered monuments and sites. In 1960 the director of UNESCO launched the campaign. As part of the campaign and with the help of the Egyptian government, Abu Simbel, the site of two temples located in Nubia that were built by the Egyptian king Ramses II, were salvaged from the rising waters of the Nile River caused by erection of the Aswan High Dam. The disassembling of the temples began in November 1963, and the temples were successfully moved and reconstructed on top of a cliff another 200 feet above the original site.
Views of the work site at Abu Simbel in Nubia, Egypt, during the removal of the ruins of the ancient rock temples of Ramses II to protect them from flooding, owing to the construction of the Aswan Dam. courtesy of Terence Spencer Photo Archive
A Short History of Dams
One of the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, Lake Kariba straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The reservoir is not only a key source of hydroelectric power for the area, but is also an important resource for agriculture and fisheries. Water first began to fill the reservoir in 1958 following the damming of the Zambezi River. The dam, which took five years to build, was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1960. In February 2016, water levels near the dam declined to near-record lows — just 12 percent full and within about 2 metres of the lowest level required for energy generation. The Kariba Dam rehabilitation project (KDRP) was launched in November 2017 and is expected to be complete by mid-2018, just in time for its sixtieth anniversary.
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33 Below is an architectural drawing of the proposed Rampart Canyon Dam on the Yukon River in Alaska, which is from the official US Army Corps of Engineers’ report on the project carried out in February 1979. Originally proposed in 1954 by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the project planned to dam the Yukon River in Alaska and would have made it the largest man-made reservoir in the world. Though hugely beneficial to Alaska’s economy, the project was cancelled after objections came from Native Alaskans who protested the threatened loss of nine villages, which would have been flooded by the dam, and by conservationists who argued against the destruction of fish and wildlife reserves, including the loss of the Yukon Flats, a crucial breeding ground for waterfowl.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, courtesy of NASA
Image by US Army Corps of Engineers [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A Short History of Dams
Venezuela has four hydroelectric plants that belong to the fortieth largest dams in the world. Guri Dam was the largest worldwide at the time of its construction but now ranks in third place. Closely linked to the history of the country’s democracy, the dam project was initiated by Rómulo Betancourt in the 1940s and developed and built under President Raúl Leoni in the ’60s. It was one of the most ambitious and important civil projects of the period, central to the dream of modernisation and industry. Carlos Cruz-Diez’s kinetic intervention inside Guri, Ambientación Cromática, which is probably the country’s most significant public art project to date, together with the work by Alejandro Otero on the exterior, are a meeting point between colour, light, and energy, and symbolise the coming together of different sociocultural sectors of government in democratic Venezuela.
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Alexander Apóstol’s sixchapter film, Contrato Colectivo Cromosaturado (2012) explores this history through the lens of kinetic art, in particular the work of Cruz-Diez (one chapter was filmed at Guri), and alludes to the idea that kinetism, like Venezuela’s populist policies, can be can be perceived in very different ways depending on the observer’s position. Today the dam activity has significantly dropped and Cruz-Diez’s work is deteriorating. The original name of the dam, ‘Raúl Leoni’, was changed to ‘Simón Bolívar’, the name of an historical military hero who was instrumental in the revolutions against the Spanish empire. The democratic project, the dam, and the work of Cruz-Diez are trapped in time, out of focus — monuments to a dream on the edge of ruin.
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CONTRATO COLECTIVO CROMOSATURADO, 2012, HD video, 3-screen installation, 54 min, divided into 6 chapters (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), courtesy of the artist
A Short History of Dams
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Liu Xiaodong, Great Migration at the Three Gorges, 2003, oil on canvas, 200 × 800 cm courtesy of the artist
Constructing the embankments of the canal leading from Parteen Weir to Ardnacrusha Power Station. PG.SS.PC.34. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
In 1923 Thomas McLaughlin, a young engineer from Drogheda, returned to Ireland after a period working abroad with Siemens in Berlin and studying hydroelectric schemes in Europe. In 1925, together with SiemensSchuckert and Patrick McGilligan TD, McLaughlin succeeded in getting a ‘White Paper’ on the scheme accepted by the newly formed Free State government. A budget of £5.1 million was allocated to the ambitious project — 20 percent of Ireland’s national revenue at that time.
The world’s largest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtze River in the Hubei province in China, came into operation in 2012. Since being built it has caused a slew of urgent environmental, geological, and economical problems. While the project was deemed successful it requires action to curb pollution, counter risks of natural disasters, and improve the living standards of the 1.4 million people who were forced to relocate.
A Short History of Dams
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39 Following the construction of Ardnacrusha Power Plant, the first phase of the Rural Electrification Scheme in Ireland was implemented between 1946 and 1965, but the scheme itself continued until the late 1970s. The sheer scale of the project can be seen from the early estimates of the materials needed for its completion: 1 million poles, 100,000 transformers, and 75,000 miles of line. Each pole was erected, one at a time.
The Itaipu Dam is a hydroelectric dam located on the Paraná River, on the border between Brazil and Paraguay. In the Guarani language, the name ‘Itaipu’ means ‘the sound of a stone’. While the dam is an amazing achievement and was selected by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1994 as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, its construction did come at a cost. Almost 10,000 families had to be relocated before their homes were flooded by the growing reservoir. The Guaíra Falls, which had a total height more than twice that of Niagara Falls and a water flow that was more than double, was submerged under the lake and then dynamited to allow safe navigation of the river.
Installing a turbine in Itaipú Dam, Brazil. photo: Luis Castañeda
Erecting a pole during the Rural Electrification Scheme, ca. 1940s. RE.PH.597. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
A Short History of Dams
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40 On 30 September 1935, with a crowd of 10,000 people looking on in 102-degree heat, President Franklin Roosevelt opened what was then the world’s biggest dam. Situated on the Nevada-Arizona border, 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas and stretching 1,244 feet across the Black Canyon, Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression between 1931 and 1936. It took more than 10,000 people to build the dam, and more than 100 people died during its construction. Built to control flooding along the Colorado River and to provide water and hydroelectric power for California and the southwest, the dam spurred tremendous growth in that part of the United States.
Workers at Boulder Dam site in 1934.
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You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone: Infrastructure, National Identity, Technology, and Modernity Sorcha O’Brien
I am writing this text in the middle of Storm Emma, the largest snow event to hit Ireland since the 1980s. I have spent the last few days working at home in north Dublin, watching the snow rise, the local children throw snowballs, build snowmen, and igloos, and the occasional car skate by on our icy road. I have watched national emergency briefings on my laptop, followed @MetEireann and @emergencyIE on Twitter, and made sure to follow official advice about stocking up and staying warm, while making use of our continued electricity and internet coverage to continue writing, reading student work, communicating with colleagues across the UK and Ireland, and with friends stranded in London and Krakow, unable to fly home. In between jokes about the availability of sliced bread, my social media feeds have seen accolades to Irish Rail’s #OrangeArmy of maintenance workers keeping the trains running by clearing snow from the tracks and to nursing staff sleeping on pallets to ensure continuity of care in Irish hospitals, and concerns about the twelve women a day travelling to the UK for abortions. Unlike 1982, this snowstorm did not catch the country unawares, due to improved weather forecasting techniques, and it has not, at the time of writing, necessitated airdrops of food to outlying areas (despite the constant stream of bread jokes). The events of the last few days have thrown into sharp relief how much we take our infrastructure for granted — we rarely think about things like access to clear roads, continuing electricity supply, or indeed, having a warm home to retreat to in cold weather. And even though our very pockets are weighted with symbols of national identity, jangling around with keys and other assorted small objects, and even though we engage with the national system of stamps and postage every time we send a letter, we seldom think about the country in which we live until we encounter borders (either hard or soft), or we are called
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone Sorcha O’Brien
upon to vote in a referendum. In a supposedly frictionless digital world, many of us use email addresses and websites with national top-level domains, such as www.winterready.ie, where the two-letter code acts as a marker of national identity. The background nature of infrastructure belies the importance it plays in our lives as well as its generally openly accessible nature. While the use of some infrastructure requires payment (such as buying stamps) and others (such as street lighting) don’t, all members of the community may generally use them on equal terms, as public goods. Resources may be managed or rationed, particularly on a long-term basis or in times of crisis, but the general principle remains the same. The spillover of social gain for people living among functioning infrastructure is huge, regardless of whether it is managed by government or private enterprise.1 Electricity supply, media and communications (both paper and digital), police and army, emergency and medical services, meteorological services, public transport and road maintenance, the postal and internet services — all of these types of infrastructure are not just geographically specific, but specific to Ireland, or rather, to this state. Despite interconnectors, motorways, and train lines that span borders, and ports and airports that connect them, much of our infrastructure is bounded by the state we live in, and tends to fade into the background until we find ourselves watching the National Emergency Coordination Centre run throughout the efforts being made to keep essential services running. What is very important is to be clear about the difference between the nation and the state — two words that are often used interchangeably, but have rather different meanings. The important difference is that the state is a legal and political entity, whereas the nation is something that exists in the minds of its people, continuously imagined by them through newspapers and other written formats, as described by historian Benedict Anderson, but also continuously imagined and performed through art, performance, radio, television, and other creative activities. The two terms may or may not cover the same geographic territory, although they often do. For example,
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the state of Northern Ireland can simultaneously be claimed to be part of two different nations, and the current Republic is a different state to the Irish Free State and to part of the previous United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, although the majority may imagine them to be continuous. The use of the term ‘imagined’ is not to say that the nation is ‘fake’ or doesn’t exist — an idea that continues to exert such a strong hold on people’s minds and to inform their actions most certainly exists, and can manifestly influence the political situation and the formation of the state. Indeed, one of Anderson’s points about the paradoxical nature of nationalism is ‘the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of the nationalist’.2 For Clifford Geertz, the process by which nationhood is formed in new states tends to follow a set of four steps, each of which may take different lengths of time, depending on particular circumstances. These start with ‘the formation of nationalist movements’, which corresponds to the political movements of both Home Rule and Republicanism in late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Ireland, bolstered by the rise of cultural nationalism. The ‘achievement of partial or total national independence’ is easily pinpointed in an Irish context as the period from the Easter Rising in 1916 to Partition and the formation of the twenty-six-county Irish Free State in 1922, and the third stage, that of ‘the organisation of the new state’, covers the following years, including the reestablishment of the existing state apparatus (i.e., the railways, the police force, the court system, and the council structure) and the creation of some new ones (such as electricity supply, a broadcasting company, and an airline). Indeed, the Civil War was very much a disagreement about the form of the new state in geographical terms, as well as in differences in approach of to how to achieve the goal of a thirty-two-county state encompassing the whole island of Ireland. Geertz’s fourth stage covers ‘the definition and stabilisation of the new state’, which in some ways started happening the late 1920s with the design of new stamps and coins and other ‘silent ambassadors of the national taste’, but from other viewpoints this has not yet completely happened.3
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone Sorcha O’Brien
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The other useful idea from Geertz in thinking about the formation of the nation is his twin concepts of ‘essentialism’ and ‘epochalism’. He describes essentialism as ‘the indigenous way of life’, focused on tradition, culture, and history as well as ideas about national character and ethnicity, all of which were strong influences on the character of the early years of the Irish Free State. On the other side stands epochalism, which he calls ‘the Spirit of the Age’; which looks outward to the wider world and universal ideas through science, technology, and modernity, and looks forwards to the future. Geertz emphatically points out that these two ideas are both present in every nation and national identity, but that they swing back and forth at different times, depending on cultural, economic, or political factors at any given time, and are amenable to change.4 The second set of ideas, which are particularly important in the consideration of technology and modernity, often come wrapped up in each other.5 Technology tends to be thought about as computers, robotics, or other manifestations of ‘high technology’, whereas the word actually encompasses the use of humble tools such as the needle and the kiln. It tends to be tied into ideas about ‘the march of progress’, where relentless, expansionist progress is seen as nothing but a good thing, particularly in determinist thinking where the invention of new technologies is seen as inevitable and unstoppable, rather than something that is shaped and developed by humans.6 The experience of modernity, to borrow a phrase from Marshall Berman, came about initially in Europe as a result of rapid urbanisation, mechanisation, and population growth in the nineteenth century.7 It describes a style of living that would be recognisable to a mid-nineteenth-century city dweller, as it forms the foundation of the developed world today, including the mass media, very fast communications and energy transmission, mechanical transport, urban living, mass manufacturing and its corollary, mass consumption (including department stores, advertising, and the fashion cycle). However, the particular ways in which this world manifested or continues to manifest are profoundly shaped by the particular circumstances of each state or location, cultural as well as economic, political or social.8
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Björn Wittrock describes modernity as a kind of promissory note to the future, a set of hopes and expectations not always set out in a document. These promissory notes often come in national formats (such as a Proclamation or Declaration of Independence), but these hopes and expectations come from different expressions and balances of essentialism and epochalism, and are put into place in different ways, creating ‘a multiplicity of modernities’ in different states.9 The modern movement in art, design, and architecture is very much, despite the name, a set of heterogeneous creative responses to living in such a world, again, differing by place.10 While researching my book Powering the Nation: Images of the Shannon Scheme and Electricity in Ireland (2017), I came across a number of alternative approaches to nationhood in the early years of the Irish Free State.11 In addition to the technological vision of an electrically powered Ireland, espoused by the young Irish engineer Thomas McLoughlin and endorsed by the setting up of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), these included the alternative political vision of a ‘phantom Republic’, advocated by the anti-Treaty forces as an alternative to the newly agreed Irish Free State.12 The role of women in Irish society has been increasingly recognised in recent years, particularly the work of Irish feminists and suffragettes in gaining the vote for women over thirty in 1918, and the idea of a feminist Ireland re-emerged later in the century, despite the decades-long bar against married women working in the public service.13 The idea that Ireland could be socialist was promoted in the cities by the trade-union movement and the Labour Party, and in the countryside by the co-operative movement, where the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society promoted a ‘self-help’ ethos that aimed to make the Irish farmer self-reliant and technically competent, providing capital finance through credit unions and economies of scale through food-processing co-ops.14 Science was still a minority pursuit mostly restricted to university-educated figures, although promoted by Horace Plunkett and George Russell (under his pseudonym AE) as a way of developing Irish identity.15 All of these ‘alternative Irelands’ have shifted and changed throughout the decades,
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone Sorcha O’Brien
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like the development of an information technology industry in the 1990s, and the recognition of previously closeted ones, such as in the 2015 marriage equality referendum that amended our constitution to allow same-sex marriage. As Ireland starts to return to a level of post-snow normality, and we resume thinking about going to art exhibitions and to the cinema and taking the train to work, my challenge to EVA visitors, and one that Inti Guerrero and the artists have considered in their selection and production of artworks, is to think about the relationship between the infrastructure we take for granted, both its fragility and potential, and its relationship with national identity and the state. What sort of a country do you want to live in and how can you help it come about?
Thanks to the ESB, Kingston University, the the Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Society for the History of Technology for supporting my research on the Shannon Scheme, and to my students and colleagues in NCAD, IADT, and Kingston University London for their support and discussion about this topic.
1. 2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15.
Brett M. Frischmann, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 5. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 238–43. The ‘silent ambassadors’ phrase was used by W. B. Yeats in a Seanad Debate on the Coinage Bill of 1926. Seanad Éireann, ‘Coinage Bill – Second Stage’, vol. 6, no. 12, Wednesday, 3 March 1926, cols. 501–2. Ewan Morris, Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 70–106. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 243–49. See Thomas J. Misa, Phillip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds., Modernity and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Thomas P. Hughes, Human-built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Thomas P. Hughes, ‘The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,’ in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51–82. Björn Wittrock, ‘Modernity: One, None or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,’ Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 31–60. Christopher Wilk, Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939 (London: V&A Publications, 2006). Mary E. Daly, Industrial Development and Irish National Identity 1922–1939 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992); Diarmuid Ferriter. The Transformation of Modern Ireland, 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2004); and R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988). The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 ended the Irish War of Independence with the establishment of the Irish Free State, consisting of twenty-six counties, retaining six counties in Ulster within Great Britain. This led to the Irish Civil War, where the Cumann na nGaedheal party accepted the treaty and took control of the new state, while Fianna Fail rejected the treaty, as it did not provide for a thirty-two-county Republic. The two sides of this split formed the basis of two of Ireland’s current political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. See Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996). Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Sinead McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004). Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, 2nd ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 1985), 92; and Oliver McDonagh, Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath, 2nd ed. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 81. Nicholas Allen, ‘States of Mind: Science, Culture and the Irish Intellectual Revival, 1900–30,’ Irish University Review (2003): 150–64.
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Diver pictured during the construction of the Shannon Scheme. PG.SS.PH.475. 10. Š ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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Paddy & Mr Punch
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Despite a proliferation of Irish images in the media in the late 1820s and ’30s, it was only after the founding of Punch, a satirical British magazine, in 1841 that images mocking the Irish ‘Paddy’ became truly widespread. Although not always negative in its depiction of the Irish, Punch was a significant vehicle in presenting an often simian image of the Irish to the public. Recognisable visual symbols of the Irish — including the ‘Paddy cap’ — were developed, which became synonymous with a racialised idea of Irishness.
‘A Daniel — A Daniel Come to Judgment!,’ Punch, January 1842, shows an Irish peasant failing to pay his ‘Catholic rent’ to Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was an Irish political leader who campaigned for Catholic emancipation — including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament, denied for over 100 years — and spearheaded the Repeal movement, which aimed to break political ties with Britain by repealing the Act of Union, a legislation passed in 1800. In the early stages of the famine, O’Connell was attacked for his alleged greed in collecting the ‘Repeal rent’ from the starving poor. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘The Real Potato Blight of Ireland,’ Punch, 13 December 1845, insinuated that the destruction wrought upon the Irish by the failure of the potato crop was being repeated by Daniel O’Connell, who is caricatured as potato fungus — Irish rebellion is pictured as a disease and the cause of misery. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘Young Ireland in Business for Himself,’ Punch, 22 August 1846, depicts a simianised, scowling young Irelander selling antiquated firearms and primitive agricultural weapons to a prognathous Paddy, and is suggestive of the inadequacy of nationalist military resources and the foolishness of the idea that Ireland could overthrow the English by arms. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘Here and There; Or, Emigration a Remedy,’ Punch, 15 July 1848, portrays a poor family in Ireland and a prosperous family living abroad who had emigrated during the Great Famine (1845–52). Dirty rags are replaced with clean clothes; gaunt, emaciated features are now healthy-looking. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘The English Labourer’s Burden,’ Punch, 24 February 1849, depicts an English labourer as he struggles under the weight of a grinning and lazy Irish peasant. The sack he is carrying with £50,000 written on it refers to the grant-in-aid money given by England to relieve Irish Famine distress. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘The New Irish Still,’ Punch, 11 August 1849, shows food and clothing (including an English top hat) emerging from whiskey still fed with labour. At the time, there was a belief that what was needed was an modern-minded approach and application of labour through industrialisation and urbanisation — ‘The New Irish Still’ suggests the possibilities of peat-derived power. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
‘The Fenian Guy Falkes,’ Punch, 28 December 1867, shows a grotesque-looking Fenian Guy Fawkes sitting on a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted match, surrounded by a women and children. The cartoon references a bomb that was exploded at Clerkenwell prison in London by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or ‘Fenians’, on 13 December 1867. In the attempt to release Fenian prisoners, 12 people died and 120 were injured nearby in the explosion. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
Paddy & Mr Punch
Large-scale immigration was also a heated issue across the Atlantic. In the late 1800s, people from many parts of the world emigrated to America, which was perceived as the land of economic opportunity, to flee crop failure, job shortages, rising taxes, or famine. Like Punch, humour magazines such as Puck and Harper’s Weekly published political cartoons that took on a similarly negative tone towards immigration, and illustrated the biases, fears, and anxieties that emerged from it. Racial, class, and religious resentments and stereotypes were prevalent: the Irish were characterised as apes, Italians as street filth, Chinese as parasitic locusts or pigs. Although such societal changes created many social tensions, they also brought about a new vitality and diversity to the cities and transformed society and culture in a positive way.
‘The Irish Frankenstein,’ Punch, 20 May 1882, shows Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist politician, depicted with his monster — threatening but also unsophisticated and animalistic. Inspired by the Phoenix Park murders of May 1882, an assassination in Dublin that involved the stabbing of the British chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his under secretary, T. H. Burke, the image of creator (Parnell) and monster (i.e., Fenians), which could not be controlled, was used for Irish matters in many other cartoons as well. courtesy of PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive
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‘The Ignorant Vote — Honors Are Easy,’ Harper’s Weekly (New York), 1 December 1876, a cartoon by Thomas Nast that appeared on the cover a few weeks after the presidential election, compares the difference that the African American Republican vote and Irish Catholic Democratic vote played in the 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes, a republican, and Samuel J. Tilden, a democrat. Equality on the scale asserts that the black vote in the South was equally inferior to the Irish vote in the North. courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo: Granger Historical Picture Archive
‘The Stranger at Our Gate,’ The Ram’s Horn (Chicago), 25 April 1896, shows Uncle Sam encountering an Eastern European Jewish immigrant at the gate to the United States. The illustration by Frank Beard shows a highly racialised portrait of the Jewish man, who is associated with disease, poverty, and anarchy — a threat to the purity of the country. courtesy of the Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
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‘Which Color Is to Be Tabooed Next?’ Harper’s Weekly (New York), 25 March 1882, a cartoon by Thomas Nast, depicts Fritz, a German, and Pat, an Irishman, discussing which race could be tabooed next. The Germans and Irish were often adversarial rivals for jobs, but by the late 1870s and ’80s were more unified as white men over concerns over Chinese immigration. In May 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed prohibiting the immigration of Chinese labourers. courtesy of Library of Congress
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Main Control Room of Ardnacrusha Power Station during operation. Š ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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1767 The first Magdalene laundry opens on Dublin’s Leeson Street to house ‘fallen women’, a term that implies female sexual promiscuity or work in prostitution. Four female religious congregations would come to dominate the running of the laundries: Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters.
NOV 1908 Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), a radical organisation for women’s suffrage, is founded by Hannah and Francis SheehySkeffington and Margaret Cousins in Dublin.
A Timeline: From the Magdalene Laundries to the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment
5 SEP 1911 The Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU) is created to give women a bigger voice in the workplace and to support the fight for the right to vote.
13 JUN 1912 IWFL begin militant campaign in Dublin. Eight members, including Sheehy-Skeffington, smash the windows of the General Post Office (GPO), the Custom’s House, and Dublin Castle. The women were arrested and sentenced to between a month and six months in jail where they went on hunger strike.
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6 FEB 1918 The Representation of the People Act is passed and women over thirty years of age were finally allowed to vote if they had property rights or a university education.
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28 DEC 1918 Voters of Dublin elect Constance Markievicz, the first woman to win a seat at Westminster, but she refuses to take her seat in the House of Commons.
1922 Irish women finally achieve equal voting rights with men. Both could vote at the age of 21.
1928 Women in Northern Ireland receive full suffrage due to the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 in the United Kingdom.
A Timeline: From the Magdalene Laundries to the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment
APR 1969 Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey) elected to Westminster in a byelection in the Mid-Ulster constituency a week before her 22nd birthday, making her the then youngest-ever woman MP.
22 MAY 1971 Members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement travel to Belfast by train to buy contraceptives in protest against the law prohibiting the importation and sale of contraceptives in the Republic of Ireland.
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31 JAN 1984 Ann Lovett, a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Granard, County Longford, dies giving birth to her son beside a religious grotto.
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1992 X case held in which a High Court ruling prevents a 14-year-old rape victim from travelling abroad for an abortion. The injunction on her freedom of movement is eventually overturned, as the girl’s life is deemed to be at risk through the threat of suicide. In February–March, multiple demonstrations are held in Dublin by both pro-life and pro-choice campaigners.
25 OCT 1996 The last Magdalene laundry, on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin, closes. Within these church-run institutions, more than 30,000 women, most of whom were sent against their will, received no pay, no pension, and no social protection.
2010 The Irish Feminist Network (IFN), a network of women and men promoting gender equality across all aspects of Irish society, is established by students doing a master’s degree in gender studies at Trinity College Dublin.
A Timeline: From the Magdalene Laundries to the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment
10 JUL 2012 Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC), a cross-island prochoice alliance of various groups across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, is formed. The main aim of the campaign is to have the Eighth Amendment in the constitution in the Republic of Ireland repealed.
28 OCT 2012 Savita Halappanavar dies in Galway University Hospital from septicaemia due to a ruptured foetal membrane. When a medical abortion was requested, she was refused on the grounds that there was a foetal heartbeat and was told, ‘This is a Catholic country.’
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5 FEB 2013 Following the publication of a report by the InterDepartmental Committee (justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages /MagdalenRpt2013) to establish facts of state involvement with the Magdalene laundries, then Taoiseach Enda Kenny issues an apology on behalf of the state to the thousands of women locked up in the Magdalene laundries between 1922 and 1996.
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JUL 2013 Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act is passed to allow the possibility of an abortion if the mother’s life is endangered, including through a risk of suicide.
22 MAY 2015 A referendum is held in Ireland in which 62 percent voted in favour of legalising same-sex marriage — the first country in the world to do so by popular vote. This significant accomplishment demonstrates how voices coming together and how people coordinating and marching can effect change, and perhaps can be seen as motivation for other liberalising movements in the push towards uncoupling the churchstate bind and creating conditions for state laws to be passed that can begin to reflect its society.
2015 #WakingTheFeminists, a grassroots campaign established to promote gender equity in theatres, emerges initially from the anger and frustration felt towards the Abbey Theatre’s male-dominated 2016 programme, Waking the Nation, that was to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter uprising.
A Timeline: From the Magdalene Laundries to the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment
8 MAR 2017 Strike4Repeal campaign in which thousands of people around Ireland, wearing black in solidarity, marched on International Women’s Day and called for the removal of the constitutional ban on abortion.
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2018 Irish referendum on abortion reform to be held at the end of May.
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment Banner by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon and Breda Mayock, 2017 photo: Alison Laredo
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, 6th Annual March for Choice, September 2017, Dublin. photo: Christian Kerskens
Detail of banner by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, and Breda Mayock, 2017. photo: Alison Laredo
Banners by Áine Phillips held by members of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, 2017. (left to right): Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, Breda Mayock, Áine Phillips, and Lisa Godson (historical advisor) photo: Alison Laredo
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, 6th Annual March for Choice, September 2017, Dublin, with banners by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, and Breda Mayock. photo: Christian Kerskens
Detail of banner by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, and Breda Mayock, 2017. photo: Rachel Fallon
Detail of banner by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon and Breda Mayock, 2017. photo: Alison Laredo
Banner by Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, and Breda Mayock, 2017. photo: Alison Laredo
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I Wish Ann Lovett Were Out Buying a Swimsuit for Lanzarote Emer O’Toole
On 31 January 1984, fifteen-yearold Ann Lovett left school to lie beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary in a grotto above her border town. Is Mary your mother? My mother’s Mary. It feels like half my friends from home have a mother called Mary, and the rest have at least one Mary for a granny. Mary, the mother of us all. Mary, my mother, was over six months pregnant when Ann Lovett pushed her baby out into a winter that killed him. Mary was moulding me from the stuff of her flesh as Ann bled to ascension. Ann would be forty-nine now, maybe fift y. Still young. She’d be done with bleeding, done with the years when her body could be wrest from her and declared a holy vessel. Out of danger. What would she be up to if her small town, her small nation, had not condemned her to die at the feet of an impossible ideal: virgin and mother; mother and virgin? Would she be planning a week in the sun?
I wish Ann Lovett were turning fift y, a little overweight, one of those women with a ‘fuck yis all’ loyalty to smoking, out buying a swimsuit for Lanzarote. I wish Mary had helped her. The Mother of God was tired, maybe. The year 1983 had been a big one: invoked endlessly in the campaign to introduce a ‘pro-life’ (ha!) amendment to the Irish constitution; standing for hours on end as a symbol of the only appropriate reason for and response to a crisis pregnancy; being marched up and down in front of Ireland’s family planning clinics in protest of the wanton distribution of lately legal (but only with a prescription) prophylactics. She’d had a lot on. (Besides, she was gearing up for her 1985 moving statue tour, with plans to appear at over thirty locations around the country.) In a poem that will always be my poem for Ireland, Paula Meehan has the statue at Granard speak: … and though she cried out to me in extremis I did not move, I didn’t lift a finger to help her, I didn’t intercede with heaven, nor whisper the charmed word in God’s ear.
Didn’t. Not couldn’t. Why? Watching a midsummer wedding, Meehan’s Mary confesses: … I would break loose of my stony robes, pure blue, pure white, as if they had robbed a child’s sky for their colour. My being cries out to be incarnate, incarnate, maculate and tousled in a honeyed bed.1 Mary is a sexy Mamma. She has needs. She was practising selfcare. It was ‘me time’. If she can’t have it, nobody can. My mother (Mary, you remember) worked as a nurse for the Galway Family Planning Clinic in 1984. She still tells funny stories of the Legion of Mary parading up and down outside the premises, holding a weighty effigy of the Virgin, chanting the rosary, keeping their beady eyes out for sinners to shame. Customers would nip in as the procession passed the doorway, and then wait for it to pass back again before running off in the opposite direction with their spermicidal spoils. Larks. The year 1984 gestated, and Mary stopped going to work because it was time to have me. On 14 April, at University College Hospital Galway, at ten past eight in the morning, I arrived. One week early. I continue to be a zealously
I Wish Ann Lovett Were Out Buying a Swimsuit for Lanzarote Emer O’Toole
punctual morning person. Mum says that a doctor took a picture of me as an example of a baby with perfect fat distribution. This characteristic, sadly, I failed to maintain. On the same day, another baby was breaking the waters. A plastic bag washed up on the shore at Cahersiveen strand, Co. Kerry. In it, there was a newborn who had been stabbed twenty-eight times. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. (This is upsetting to type. To type it is upsetting.) Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Sweet Holy Mother of Mercy. It was known that a local woman, Joanne Hayes, had been pregnant. (I am always fascinated by the ‘it was known’ in this story: how Hayes’s pregnancy was seen and unseen; how no questions were asked until there was a corpse.)
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Hayes and her family were interrogated, and, by their accounts, intimidated until they confessed to the murder of the Cahersiveen baby, a murder they did not commit. Afterwards, they produced another tiny body, Hayes’s own child, buried on the family farm. Hayes says her son died shortly after birth. The Gardaí, not to be deprived of what Nell McCafferty designates ‘a woman to blame’,2 ludicrously accused Hayes of conceiving twins by two separate fathers, killing one by stabbing it and throwing it in the sea and burying the other.3 April 1984: the cruellest month. So soon after the Irish electorate wrapped the noose of the Eighth Amendment around the Republic’s womb, bodies started to push up through the earth like shoots, refusing to stay quiet in cilliní, cilliní 4 refusing to be hidden within what James M. Smith calls Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’:5 the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes designed to catch the ideological overspill of de Valera’s dewy green dreams. Margo Harkin’s film Hush-aBye Baby (1990) is perhaps the most important cultural text to address this moment in Irish
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history. In it, our protagonist, Goretti Friel, a Derry teenager, hides a pregnancy against the backdrop of 1980s British army occupation; community devotion to both the blessed Virgin and Irish nationalism; enforced ignorance around contraception and reproduction; and a performance of modern sexual liberation influenced by cultural imports from the US. Indebted to global feminist avant-garde film, Hush-a-Bye Baby gradually muddies the distinction between Goretti and the Virgin. Feverish dreams confuse her pregnant body with Marian statues, until on Christmas day she goes into a nightmarish labour. Scholar Fidelma Farley astutely locates the film’s contribution to Irish national discourse in its demonstration of ‘an awareness of the pull and attraction of the fantasy maternal for women, at the same time as it deconstructs the myths that underpin that fantasy’.6 Mary, after all, is an unmarried teenage mother too. A small devotional figurine looks on as desperate Goretti tries to self-abort using castor oil, gin, and a scalding bath. Is the Virgin protecting her? Harkin’s film reclaims Mary somewhat from
an Ireland where, to quote Farley again: ‘Issues surrounding female sexuality and reproduction are so central to ideologies of national identity that they are constantly the subject of heated debate and seemingly endless changes and revisions in legislation.’7 Two years after Harkin’s film came the X case, in which a supreme court judge ruled that a pregnant suicidal teenage rape victim had the right to an abortion. I was seven years old; Miss X was only seven years older. In the aftermath, the government put three referendums to the Irish people asking them, first, to remove the grounds of suicide for legal abortion, second, whether pregnant women and girls should have the right to travel for terminations, and third, whether they should have the right to access information about abortion. The electorate took a pro-choice stance on each of these issues. The government, however, did not legislate. Instead, in 2002, it tried once again to have the people remove suicide as grounds for legal abortion. The people refused, by a hair’s breadth this time. In 2002 I was turning eighteen, but ineligible to vote by one month.
I Wish Ann Lovett Were Out Buying a Swimsuit for Lanzarote Emer O’Toole
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Probably a good thing. I had, after all, just spent a significant portion of my life being propagandised at Catholic school. I might even have voted to remove suicide as a ground for abortion in spite of my own pregnancy scare.
‘You don’t look pregnant. Are you sure you don’t have cancer or something,’ says Goretti’s best friend, Deirdre.
When I was sixteen, I started having (truly terrible) sex and, ergo, paid a clandestine visit to a lady doctor for the pill. I was told to wait until the first day of my period to start the prescription. But my period didn’t come. I was terrified. For weeks, I ran to the jacks between classes to check for blood.
A crisis pregnancy does not need to be worse than anorexia, worse than cancer.
One weekend, I managed to sneak into Galway alone to buy a pregnancy test in Boots on Shop Street (I couldn’t have bought one at the pharmacy in my village, for obvious reasons). I’ll never forget the look the woman behind the counter gave me. The Legion of Mary might not have been out marching, but it was alive and well. I took the test on a Sunday in a public bathroom after my dance class. I was so relieved it was negative that I didn’t worry about the fact I’d become so thin that my periods had stopped.
‘I wish to God I had cancer,’ replies Goretti, not missing a beat.
In Áine Phillips’s landmark performance art piece Love, Sex and Death (2003), she positions abortion as a point in a cycle of female sexuality, reproduction, nurturance, and even pleasure. Milk pumps from her maternal teats. A traditional Irish fruitcake in the shape of a foetus lies in a kidney dish. Phillips chops it up and relishes a slice, offers some to her audience, invites us to chow down on a feminine ideal that tells us we shouldn’t fuck or eat. A crisis pregnancy can be truly unterrible. But it wasn’t unterrible for (are you ready for the oppression alphabet?): Miss C, Miss D, Miss A, B, and C (yes, there are two Miss Cs, stay with me), or Ms. Y (don’t be fooled into thinking the progressive change of honorific represents a progressive change of anything else).
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It wasn’t unterrible for Savita Halappanavar. Nor for Amanda Mellet or Siobhán Whelan. Nor for the family of the braindead woman kept alive as a slowly decomposing cadaveric incubator for an unviable foetus. Nor for the ten a day who must travel to the UK, or the five a day who take abortion pills illegally and without medical supervision. Women must suffer for their sexuality in Ireland. But silently, you understand. We must pretend we’re off to London for a fun weekend. We must lie down at the Virgin’s feet. Breaking this holy silence has finally placed our referendum on the table. Tara Flynn irreverently sings her abortion story in her gentle, moving one-person show, Not a Funny Word (2017). The piece burns with conviction. And, like Phillips’s foetus cake, it’s pleasurable. Grace Dyas and Emma Fraser’s powerful installation and performance art piece Not at Home (2017) uses the anonymous collected stories of women who travelled to the UK for abortions to recreate a clinic waiting room where the reading materials are Irish women’s lived experiences.
We’re praying to each other now, us girls. Hail Mary, full of grace, Is the Lord with thee? No? He’s out? Could I have a word? I’m not doubting the whole Gabriel story and all. As a feminist, I believe women. But, you and Joseph, right? You got down. Yeah. That beard is hot. To thee do we cry, poor banished Daughters of Eve. We’re sick of ferries and flights. We don’t want to be Ms. Z. Mary, oh most gracious mother of us all: we know you’re on our side. Pray with us.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6.
7.
Paula Meehan, ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks,’ in Mysteries of the Home (Dublin: Dedalus, 2013). Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Cork: Attic Press, 1985). In January 2018 Hayes finally received an apology from the Irish state for its role in her treatment. Cilliní are burial grounds for un-baptised and stillborn babies. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture Of Containment (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Fidelma Farley, ‘Interrogating Myths of Maternity in Irish Cinema: Margo Harkin’s “Hush-a-Bye Baby”,’ Irish University Review 29, no. 2 (1990): 220. Ibid., 219.
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Construction of a turbine for Ardnacrusha Power Station, 1928. PG.SS.PH.476.2. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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Peju Alatise Nigeria b. 1975 Peju Alatise, an artist, a skilled poet, and a published author, uses a variety of media in her work. She holds a degree in architecture. Alatise’s practice addresses a number of social, political, and gender issues. She has had several solo exhibitions and her works are in private and institutional collections around the world. In 2017 she represented Nigeria at the 57th Venice Biennale.
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Alatise’s recent work has been dedicated to the fate of young women and girls in Nigeria, highlighting the violence, risks, and dangers of forced marriages at a young age and exploitation through child labour. Although the kidnapping and enslavement of more than two hundred school girls in 2014 (most are still missing) by Boko Haram, the jihadist militant Islamic group working out of northeastern Nigeria, made the headlines, Alatise’s work tries to highlight a wider systemic reality of abuse towards the young female body that exists across different social sectors in Nigeria. Over the years, the artist’s unique figurative sculptural work and writing has touched on the vulnerabilities and everyday realities of disenfranchised poor girls who move to the city from the countryside, where they are often sold as maids to wealthy families. This type of treatment has happened (and continues to occur) in many different countries worldwide — the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, mostly Catholic institutions in which ‘fallen women’ were confined and required to work, comes to mind. Presenting a figure as though struggling to emerge from the work’s sculptural backdrop, Girl Interrupted (2014) embodies the obstructed path of female youth and liberation. The young female figures appear to heroically emerge from a world that dehumanizes them, a world that has interrupted their childhood and halted their social mobility.
Girl Interrupted [detail], 2014, textiles, resin, and acrylic paint, 85 × 270 cm panel courtesy of the artist
Peju Alatise Nigeria
Girl Interrupted, 2014, textiles, resin, and acrylic paint, 85 Ă— 270 cm panel courtesy of the artist
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Malala Andrialavidrazana Madagascar / Andrialavidrazana’s research focuses France on the barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts. Primarily b. 1971 through photography, she uncovers the
Malala Andrialavidrazana has a background in architecture. Her work deals with the notion of barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Figures, Alessandro Casciaro Gallery, Bolzano, Italy (2018); and Echoes & Figures, 50 Golborne, London (2017). Recent international group exhibitions include: Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2018); 1st Karachi Biennale (2017): Witness, Pakistan (2017); Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2016). Participation in EVA International supported by the Institut Français and the French Embassy in Ireland.
relationship between private spaces and more global issues to explore social imaginaries. Like an anthropologist, she examines the space between the past and present to produce an alternative way to tell stories or to write history. In her ongoing series Figures 1856, Andrialavidrazana uses elements and symbols found in regional and world atlases, bank notes, and album covers that marked her generation and reveals the economic domination inherited from a colonial past. Through her deconstructions and reconstructions of imagery, she envisions cartography as a means to convey our current situation, one that is gripped by the phenomenon of globalisation. For EVA International, Andrialavidrazana presents newly commissioned digital collages that expand on her series. The original materials sourced for her compositions highlight sites of civil engineering, such as hydroelectric dams that were often used by governments as emblems of progress and national pride — or even as state propaganda. The economic optimism in this imagery, and the inherent masculine heroism symbolised in the erection of the structures being depicted, appears distant from today’s often-dystopian view of society. Such optimism contrasts greatly with the reality of impoverished societies that still await industrial development and a fulfillment of promised futures that dams and bridges once represented.
FIGURES 1876, Planisphere Elementaire, 2018 UltraChrome pigment print on Hahnemühle cotton rag, 110 × 140 cm courtesy of the artist, 50 Golborne, C-Gallery, and Kehrer
Malala Andrialavidrazana Madagascar / France
FIGURES 1928, Airline routes and distances, 2018 UltraChrome pigment print on HahnemĂźhle cotton rag, 110 Ă— 146 cm courtesy of the artist, 50 Golborne, C-Gallery, and Kehrer
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Alexander Apóstol Venezuela b. 1969 Alexander Apóstol’s work comprises photographs, films, installations, and texts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Geometría, acción y souvenirs del discurso insurgente: Tucumán arde, MALBA, Buenos Aires (2017); and Yamaikaleter at CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2015). His work has been presented in events such as Manifesta 9 (2013); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the Prague Biennial (2003 and 2005); and the Cuenca Biennial (2004), among others.
Apóstol’s work explores connections between art, political texts, and sociopolitical events within the history of art and architecture. He focuses on Latin American politics and culture. Contrato Colectivo Cromosaturado (2012) is a video installation that reflects on Venezuela’s recent political history through colourful and vibrating kinetic art. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the country, which was a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), enjoyed a period of economic prosperity that was accompanied by a promise of democracy. Cinetismo, a Venezuelan form of optical kinetic art, rose to prominence at the same time — nationwide participation underpinned the ideologies of both politics and art movements. Apóstol marks this historical timeframe in six chapters, each of which represents a Venezuelan social class in a staged, theatrical way. One of the main locations for this film production was the Guri Dam in the east of the country, a massive concrete gravity dam whose interiors were commissioned to the kinetic master Carlos Cruz-Diez in the 1970s.
CONTRATO COLECTIVO CROMOSATURADO, 2012, HD video, 3-screen installation, stills, 54 min, divided into 6 chapters (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), courtesy of the artist
Alexander Apรณstol Venezuela
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CONTRATO COLECTIVO CROMOSATURADO, 2012, HD video, 3-screen installation, stills, 54 min, divided into 6 chapters (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), courtesy of the artist
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Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment Ireland est. 2015
The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment was set up in 2015 by Cecily Brennan, Alice Maher, Eithne Jordan, and Paula Meehan.Three thousand artists have signed the petition so far, demanding the repeal of a law that has caused great mismanagement of women’s health care in Ireland and is a violation of international human rights. The aim of the campaign group is to promote national and international awareness of the restrictive reproductive laws of Ireland and to encourage and inspire other groups and activists to use cultural means to promote social change.
The campaign began online as an appeal to fellow artists, writers, musicians, and actors to put their names on a statement calling for a repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland. In the constitution, women are only mentioned twice: first, to say that women’s place is in the home (Article 41.2); and second, to say that the foetus has exactly the same rights as the mother (Article 40.3.3). The latter amendment, inserted into the constitution in 1983, means it is entirely illegal to procure an abortion in Ireland. As part of the 38th EVA International, members of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment will enact a street procession in Limerick and present an exhibition, archive, and information hub, which will include work by Sarah Cullen, Rachel Fallon, Alison Laredo, Alice Maher, Breda Mayock, and Áine Phillips. Banner by Sarah Cullen, Art & Action, NCAD Gallery, December 2017 photo: Rachel Fallon
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment Ireland
Members of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, 2017. (left to right): Alice Maher, Rachel Fallon, Áine Phillips, and Breda Mayock photo: Alison Laredo
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Jaime Ávila Colombia b. 1968
Jaime Ávila works with photography, drawing, engraving, silkscreen, prints, installation, video, and sculpture to develop projects that connect to ideas of urban ethnography. Solo exhibitions include: Ciudad Perdida, Museo de Arte de Pereira, Colombia (2016); Ciudad Perdida, Nueveochenta Galería, Bogotá, Colombia (2015); Talento Pirata, Nueveochenta Galería, Bogotá (2013): Bestiario, M& Galería, Cali, Colombia (2012); and Cinco Metros Cúbicos, MUSAC, Montería, Colombia (2009).
Through multiple mediums, Ávila examines social, political, and environmental topics in his work. In his projects, he connects ethnography to urbanism, after analysing the idiosyncrasy of the cities and their class and social layers. In La vida es una pasarela (Life Is a Catwalk, 2002–5) he photographs homeless men and women who pose as fashion models, and uses the dramatic urban perspectives of the city of Bogotá, Colombia, as a backdrop. Each of these portraits is paired with a photograph showing only the city, unto which Avila has inserted miniature LED light bulbs on areas of the image where real light would emanate from, such as lamposts and car lights captured in the photograph. In the work on view, the portrait of a homeless man (nicknamed James Dean) appears as a flâneur wandering the city, which is turning on its public lighting to commence the day. The model’s defiant posture and intimidating gaze captured by the lens gives him a temporal empowerment that confronts the modern world — a world from which he has become disenfranchised.
James Dean Cars, 2002, photograph, 150 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nueveochenta
Jaime Ávila Colombia
Life Is a Runway, James Dean, 2001, photograph, 162 × 120 cm courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nueveochenta
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Akiq AW Indonesia b. 1976
Akiq AW is an artist and member of the art collective MES56 where he builds visual awareness and literacy through the organisation of exhibitions, workshops, and projects. His notable solo exhibitions include: Stau Langkah Seribu Langkah, Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta (2017); Border V 2.0, Chan Contemporary Darwin, Australia (2014); Lina Cerita Dari Rumah, Selasar Solo Project Series, Selasar Sunaryo Bandung (2012); and The Order of Things, Ruang MES56, Yogyakarta (2010).
AW documents reliefs and statues in Jogja, Indonesia, that present an image of the ideological nuclear family. Following Indonesia’s communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s through to the mid-’60s, the second Indonesian President Suharto founded the ‘New Order’. The New Order was committed to achieving and maintaining order and economic development through a strong political role for the military, the bureaucratisation and corporatisation of societal organisations, and selective but effective repression of opponents. During the New Order there were efforts to control the national birth rate through a programme called Keluarga Berencana (Family Planning). A key idea of this programme was the depiction and normalisation of a heterosexual family with two parents and two children. During the peak of New Order reign, from the ’70s through to the ’90s, the nuclear family was represented in the form of reliefs, on statues, and on gates in every neighbourhood and at every village entrance. After the New Order regime ended, the Keluarga Berencana programme did too, but some of the reliefs and statues remain. Indonesian Family Portrait Series, 2016–17, photograph, 42 × 59.4 cm courtesy of the artist
Akiq AW Indonesia
Indonesian Family Portrait Series, 2016–17, photographs, 42 × 59.4 cm courtesy of the artist
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Patricia Belli Nicaragua b. 1964
Patricia Belli uses a diverse range of media, with an emphasis on the crossover of mechanical and natural elements. Through this junction, she constructs ideas of unbalance. Belli founded the Space for Artistic Research and Reflection (EspIRA), an organisation for the training of critical and intuitive capacities of artists. EspIRA has had a decisive influence on Central American art. Belli exhibits regularly in Central America, South America, the United States, and Europe. A retrospective, anthological exhibition, curated by Miguel López, travelled to San José, Managua, and Guatemala City between 2016 and 2017.
Human impulses such as aggression, desire, fear, and compassion shape Belli’s ideas when investigating the binary oppositions that are part of our everyday lives: oppressor and oppressed, pleasure and pain. Using personal experiences from the present and the past, her work questions who we are and what control we have over our condition, especially when faced with significant events such as birth or death. Crisalida II (Cocoon II) (1998) is a textile piece made out of more than fift y pieces of second-hand women’s clothes and hangs loosely from an iron rod. When hung, the work resembles not only a cocoon but also uncannily appears as both a crucifix and a womb. Crisalida II, which references ideas to do with the home and domesticity, was developed through the artist’s compulsive need to sew garments together and functions like a curtain, a hide out, a nest, or a safe place.
Crisálida II, 1998, garments sewn together, hung from an iron rod , ca. 180 × 140 × 30 cm courtesy of the artist
Patricia Belli Nicaragua
Crisálida II [detail], 1998, garments sewn together, hung from an iron rod , ca. 180 × 140 × 30 cm courtesy of the artist
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Colin Booth UK b. 1951 Colin Booth is an artist, curator, and freelance critic. His works use reclaimed and reused materials to show the relationship between form, function, art, and craft. In 2013 Booth opened a new collaborative gallery called the Electro Studios Project Space. Recent works include a neon text installation The Nothing New, Folkestone (2014). Solo exhibitions include: If Not Winter, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), London (2017); Anxiety Ground, MOCA, London (2016); Time Spins, One Six Gallery, Tenterden, Kent, Cities of Ashes, g39 Gallery, Cardiff, Omnia Somnia, UpDown Gallery, Ramsgate, Kent, and Seeing Beckett, Liverpool John Moores University and Hertfordshire University (2014). Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
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In its original form, ‘Jesus wept’ is a beautifully succinct sentence, with a profoundly spiritual meaning. It is the shortest verse in the King James version of the Bible, it describes Jesus’s sorrow at the death of his friend Lazarus, who had died before Jesus was able to reach him. Language and meaning change over time and ‘Jesus wept’ is now a secular expression of something like exasperation, yet it remains a uniquely powerful sentence and one of several poetic fragments and phrases that have entered into the English language from the Bible. In his practice, Booth often uses existing materials, or fragments of texts, ob-served in day-to-day reading. These found elements are re-presented in a way that might enhance or subvert their original function or meaning. For Jesus Wept (2012–13), Booth chose a font that resembles the typeface of the original King James Bible, but by re-interpreting the sentence in neon light, it refers to its more ambiguous and contemporary reading. White neon has an implicit clarity of form, which seems appropriate to the simplicity of the sentence ‘Jesus wept’ installed in the dense, sensory clutter of Limerick city.
Jesus Wept, 2012–13, neon, 200 × 20 cm courtesy of the artist
Colin Booth UK
Jesus Wept, 2012–13, neon, 200 × 20 cm courtesy of the artist
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Lee Bul South Korea b. 1964 Lee Bul works across a diverse range of media — from drawing, sculpture, and painting to performance, installation, and video. Her work explores themes such as the utopian desire to achieve perfection through technological advances, and the dystopic eff ects and failures that are often the result. Recent solo exhibitions include: Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2016/12); Vancouver Art Gallery, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015). Her work has been in many group exhibitions and biennials such as: Score_Music for Everyone, Daegu Art Museum, Korea (2017); the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); and Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); among others. A survey exhibition of her work opens at the Hayward Gallery, London, in spring 2018 and will travel to Martin-GropiusBau, Berlin, in September 2018.
Lee creates works that reflect her philosophical exploration of twentiethcentury cultural history. Exploring issues ranging from societal gender roles and the perceived failure of idealism to the relationship between humans and technology, she produces genre-crossing works rooted in critical theory, art history, and science fiction. Lee’s suspended sculptures are inspired by the futuristic spirit of prominent German architect Bruno Taut, who designed the Glass Pavilion, a prismatic glass dome structure, for the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition in 1914. In State of Reflection (2016) a dreamlike scene is constructed resembling a frozen landscape of floating mountains with winding roadways across a land studded with stalactite-like shapes. State of Reflection is inspired by Taut’s utopian visions of an ‘Alpine Architecture’, devised just before the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German empire. In an attempt to divert mankind’s energy away from war and conflict, Taut proposed the construction of dazzling cities in the Alps made entirely of crystal, glass, and light.
State of Reflection, 2016, crystal, glass and acrylic beads, mirrors, stainless-steel, aluminum and black nickel rods, steel and bronze chains, stainless-steel, and aluminum armature, 189 × 178 × 136 cm photo: Jeon Byung-cheol, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac
Lee Bul South Korea
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State of Reflection, 2016, crystal, glass and acrylic beads, mirrors, stainless-steel, aluminum and black nickel rods, steel and bronze chains, stainless-steel, and aluminum armature, 189 Ă— 178 Ă— 136 cm photo: Jeon Byung-cheol, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac
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José Castrellón Panama b. 1980
José Castrellón is a photographer whose work focuses on the physical evolution of urban or rural spaces brought about by commercialism, urban construction, or any event that can generate change in a community or its way of living. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Latin America, United States, Europe, and Asia including: A Chronicles of Interventions, Tate Modern, London (2014); 43 Salón (Inter)Nacional de Artistas, Medellín, Colombia (2013); and Photoquai Biennial 4, Paris (2013). In 2009 he received the IILA FotoGrafia Prize awarded by the Italo-Latin American Institute in Rome.
Through photography Castrellón considers cultural changes and the impact they have on different places, such as the physical transformation of urban or rural spaces brought about by commercialism and urban construction. Palo Enceba’o (2014–16) is an installation that reflects on Martyr’s Day in Panama, a day that commemorates those involved in the riots that took place on 9 January 1964 over the sovereignty of the Panama Canal Zone. Twenty-eight people were killed. Panamanian students entered the Canal Zone by climbing a huge lamppost on the Zonian side of the fenced border and managed to hoist and fix the Panamanian flag at the very top. Eventually the flag was torn down and riots broke out. The incident is considered a significant factor in the eventual decision by President Jimmy Carter to give back control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the late ’70s. The work emphasises the performative action of protesters who used a streetlamp to try to claim sovereignty. The lamp becomes a symbol of opposition in public space, a site for civil disobedience and antiimperialism.
Palo Enceba’o, 2014–16, installation, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
José Castrellón Panama
Palo Enceba’o, 2014–16, installation, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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Viriya Chotpanyavisut Thailand b. 1982 Viriya Chotpanyavisut is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited as part of international festivals and exhibitions including: Le divan des murmures, FRAC Auvergne, France (2017); Thailand Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London (2015); Mystère et boule de gomme, Maison des Arts Georges and Claude Pompidou, Cajarc, France (2013); Copenhagen Photo Festival and Rendez-Vous 12, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2012); 63rd Salon du Montrouge, France, and Rendez-Vous 11, L’Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, as part of Biennale d’art de Lyon, France (2011); and Voies Off, Arles, France (2010). Solo exhibitions include: Unnoticed Light, Schemata Gallery, Bangkok (2016); Urban Microscope and Quelque phares lunaire, Galerie de Multiple, Paris (2012/14).
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Chotpanyavisut’s video Late Summer in Bangkok was filmed at the end of April 2016, on the hottest recorded day in Thailand that year. The meteorology department reported a record temperature of 44.6 degrees Celsius. The high temperatures caused a series of unusually heavy storms — a great lightning storm filled the Bangkok sky. This film documented the storm from Chao Phraya River, which is often seen as the link between the city and nature, between the urban and rural. At one point, in contrast to the glittering lights of the neoliberal corporate skyline of the city, the shadow of a fisherman is seen; his impoverished reality is apparent. The work depicts people who are struggling to live while the raw, uncontrollable power of nature makes life even more diffi cult. The video highlights the interrelationships and constraints between man and nature that exist today.
Late Summer in Bangkok, 2016, video installation, still courtesy of the artist
Viriya Chotpanyavisut Thailand
Late Summer in Bangkok, 2016, video installation, still courtesy of the artist
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Steven Cohen South Africa / France b. 1962 Steven Cohen performs in the public realm as well as in theatre and gallery spaces. The work is derived from his identity as a white South African Jewish gay male. Cohen participated in residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Center for Performance Research in New York. Notable exhibitions include: Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, Seattle Art Museum and Brooklyn Art Museum (2015–16); Chercher le garçon, Musée d’Ar t Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France (2015); Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier in Rio — A Transatlantic Affair air, Museu de Arte do Rio, Black Milk: Holocaust in Contemporary Art, Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2014); My Joburg, La Maison Rouge, Paris, and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2013); Revolution vs Revolution, Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2012); and ARS 11, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011). Participation in EVA International supported by the Institut Français and the French Embassy in Ireland.
For his first performance of Chandelier (2001), Cohen dressed in strappy high heels, his face was painted silver, he wore a chandelier attached to a corset, and visited a community of homeless people in Johannesburg. The site was a shack settlement of the South African metropolis — which, unexpectedly, at the time of the intervention, city council workers were destroying. Part of the intention of the Chandelier project is to shed light on what is seldom seen, and the powerful video documentation of this first intervention attests to that. The rough footage is a strange visual: a white man in heels wearing an illuminated chandelier tutu improvises movements among a community of black squatters whose shacks are being destroyed. Taking place six years after South Africa’s transition from apartheid regime to democracy and reflecting the inequalities that still persist, Cohen’s Chandelier seems to announce the eminent social cleansing linked to gentrifi cation and urban ‘beautification’. The tinkling of the chandelier crystals, the bashing and hammering and falling tin, singing, the confused voices, and the animated reactions Cohen elicits. It is the unpredictable and diverse responses that people bring into the work as well as the intimacy of those interactions that make Chandelier visually strong and both beautiful and grotesque.
Chandelier, 2001, C-print, 71 × 90 cm photo: John Hogg, courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Steven Cohen South Africa / France
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Chandelier 2001, C-print, 71 Ă— 90 cm Chandelier, photo: John Hogg, courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
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Bruce Conner USA 1933–2008
Bruce Conner was one of the foremost American artists of the post-war era, and his work touches on various issues from that period, including a rising consumer culture and the dread of nuclear apocalypse. Conner exhibited widely throughout his career, and in 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a major retrospective of his career titled BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE.
Conner was a pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings in the post-war era. In his practice, he regularly challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, and questioned and subverted the value of artistic identity. He emerged in the 1950s among the Bay Area’s beat generation, and his work touches on many themes that were crucial to the times, such as a fear of nuclear apocalypse and the rise of consumer culture. In the 1970s, Conner created a series of haunting black-and-white life-sized photograms called Angels. To create these, his body was used as material by placing it between a large sheet of photosensitive paper and a light source: Conner’s figure appears as a stark white silhouette, as pure light, against a completely black ground. He becomes more spirit than flesh, as noted in the title of the series. The figures are presented as Christ-like; the impressions on paper also bring to mind the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth that allegedly bears the image of Jesus of Nazareth.
Butterfly Angel, gelatin silver print, photogram, 216 × 99 cm courtesy of di Rosa Collection, Napa, Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Israel Valencia
Bruce Conner USA
Butterfly Angel [detail], gelatin silver print, photogram, 216 Ă— 99 cm courtesy of di Rosa Collection, Napa, Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Israel Valencia
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Juan Dávila Chile / Australia b. 1946 Juan Dávila’s work has received retrospective exhibitions at: Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Chile (2016); National Gallery of Victoria (2007); and Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2006); and a survey exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery (2002). His work has been exhibited internationally, most notably twice in the Sydney Biennale (1982/84), as well as at documenta 12, Kassel (2007), and the touring exhibition Arte Contemporáneo Chile: Desde el Otro Sitio/Lugar at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2006) and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago (2006).
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Dávila is a Chilean-born artist who has resided in Australia since 1974, where he is considered a central figure for contributing new languages in painting that address identity politics and aim to widen and contradict representations of historical events and narratives. His work interrogates ideas and depictions of cultural, sexual, and social identity, particularly with regard to the effects of political violence as well as sexual and racial discrimination. An important body of his work explores the impact of colonial policies on indigenous peoples, on both Amerindian cultures and Australian aboriginals. His paintings satirically intertwine contemporary politics and art-historical references, including European history painting, Latin American modernism, Pop art, Aboriginal art, and native art traditions to discuss the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism on contemporary culture. The painting on view belongs to his recent body of work, where surrealist compositions address the fascist reality of the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in offshore processing centres in Australia. The dates appearing on the bottom left of the canvas reference the period following the Regional Resettlement Arrangement (RRA) between Australia and Papua New Guinea that stipulated that ‘any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees’, thereby institutionalising the ‘stop the boats’ right-wing slogan in Australian politics and public opinion.
Ex-Voto, 1992, oil on canvas, 274 × 274 cm photo: Mark Ashkanasy, courtesy of Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
Juan Dรกvila Chile / Australia
Entitling, 2015, oil on canvas, 255 ร 200 cm photo: Mark Ashkanasy, courtesy of Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
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Patrizio di Massimo Italy / UK b. 1983
Patrizio di Massimo, a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, uses different media, but his work is primarily rooted in figurative painting. His recent solo exhibitions include: ChertLüdde, Berlin (2018); Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2017); Monteverdi, Tuscany (2015); and T293, Rome (2014). Recent group shows include: Take me (I’m yours), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2017); Mundus Muliebris, CURA Basement, Rome (2016); I am here but you have gone, Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2015); and Don’t you know who I am, M HKA, Antwerp (2014).
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The family portrait, a classical trope of art history, and the way in which domestic and political structures replicate one another is fundamental to di Massimo’s practice. Mum (2014) is a red human-height curtain tassel attached to a veil of curtain with an ivydraped pelmet. This is part of a family portrait titled Me, Mum, Mister, Mad (2014), an installation that comprises three sculptural elements that contain something alive, contrasting with the crafted soft objects that refer to di Massimo’s own family members. In another series of figurative paintings, which includes The Roman Kiss (2017), there is a renewed focus on the erotics of figurative painting. Playing on the well-worn ideas of the viewer as voyeur and artist as seducer, di Massimo presents the subject caught unawares and litters his paintings with intimate clues as to their identity or the sources from which they are drawn. In his work, domestic or banal objects become uncannily alive by their outsized proportions, and act as reminders that what is familiar can often hide our darkest desires or fears.
Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
The Roman Kiss, 2017, oil on linen, 150 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome
Patrizio di Massimo Italy / UK
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Mum, 2014, 200 cm tassel, cord, hosiery net, pelmet, velvet, ivy, dimensions variable installation view, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, photo: Bruno Lopes, courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome
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Roy Dib Lebanon b. 1983
Roy Dib has exhibited his work internationally, including at: MAXXI Museum, Rome, Sharjah Biennial 13, ALFILM, Berlin (2017); JCC (2016); Beirut Art Center, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Sweden, Queer Lisboa, Lisbon (2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2016); and Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, SĂŁo Paulo (2017/15/13).
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On both formal and conceptual levels, artist, actor, theatre director, and filmmaker Dib challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text, and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day. Mondial 2010 (2014) is a film on love and place in which a Lebanese gay couple take a road trip to Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the contested territory of the West Bank, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony. The film, which is like a travel log that is relayed through the couple’s conversations, is recorded with a handheld camcorder and follows their journey that transgresses boundaries. It normalises the abnormal and in doing so creates an alternative universe of possibility. The relations between Israelis and Lebanese are governed by the 1943 Lebanese Criminal Code and the 1955 Lebanese Anti-Israeli Boycott Law, the former forbids any interaction with nationals of enemy states, and the latter specifies Israelis, making a trip for a Lebanese citizen to Israel (or Palestinian territories) impossible.
Mondial 2010, 2014, film still courtesy of the artist
Roy Dib Lebanon
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Mondial 2010, 2014, film stills courtesy of the artist
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Rita Duff y N. Ireland b. 1959
Rita Duff y is an artist whose work concentrates on the figurative surreal tradition. Often autobiographical, her work includes themes and images of Irish identity, history, and politics. She has worked with Goldsmiths, University of London on an artistic exchange with Argentina and Northern Ireland, looking at the role art has in post-conflict societies. Awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship 2009, she worked in the Transitional Justice Institute at University of Ulster and has lectured internationally on her work, increasingly preoccupied with international themes. Her 2016 Souvenir Shop project was selected for national commission; highly acclaimed it continues to travel internationally. Currently artist in res-idence in a former courthouse on the Irish border, she continues to explore issues of national identities, working in a specific border context, loaded with creative urgency in a world of increasing chaos and border obsessions. Duff y’s work exists in numerous public and private collections, in Ireland and internationally. Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
Dealing with a variety of themes from the domestic and personal to the political, Duff y’s work primarily began from the figurative and narrative tradition that recalls the work of Otto Dix or Georg Grosz in inter-war Germany — her characters are at times distorted or grotesque, starkly honest, and compelling. Siege II (1989) is a reflection on Northern Ireland’s social and political space — the deep cuts between communities are reflected in the division of the canvas into zones, separated by barbed wire. Each side is like a self-contained, parallel world yet they are inhabited by the similarly deformed figures that appear even more outlandish owing to variations in scale. The work seems to suggest different patterns and connections that also highlight themes of separation or divisions of space, offering a view of an antagonistic situation through the surfaces of paint.
Siege II, 1989, oil on gesso panel, 122.25 × 122 cm courtesy of The Model Home of the Niland Collection / Graeve Collection
Rita Duff y N. Ireland
Siege II [detail], 1989, oil on gesso panel, 122.25 Ă— 122 cm courtesy of The Model Home of the Niland Collection / Graeve Collection
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Adrian Duncan Feargal Ward Ireland b. 1978 b. 1976 Adrian Duncan is an artist and writer based in Ireland and Berlin. His visual art work is primarily installation-based, most often using photography, video, and sculpture. Duncan’s most recent project was the Bungalow Bliss Bus Tour (2017), made in collaboration with the Red Bird Youth Collective and Galway Arts Centre. During 2018, he and Feargal Ward will collaborate on a film on the subject of Irish engineer Peter Rice. Duncan’s writing has been published by frieze, the Times Literary Supplement, Art & the Public Sphere, the Dublin Review, Architecture Ireland, gorse, and the Irish Times, among others. He is co-editor of Paper Visual Art Journal.
The Soil Became Scandinavian (2018) is a work involving film and sculptural installation. The sculptural installation takes the skinned and creosoted electricity pole as its basic unit. The film work traces the steps of an Irish forester sent to rural Finland in 1946 to find trees in sufficient size and number to be used as electricity poles in Ireland. The necessity for poles was the result of the surge in demand for electricity across the country following the building of the Ardnacrusha Power Station, the hydroelectric power plant in County Clare. The electrification scheme had a huge impact on the social, economic, and industrial development of the Feargal Ward is a filmmaker and artist country, and transformed both urban based in Ireland and Berlin. His prac- and rural life. tice involves collaborations with other artists and filmmakers. His most recent feature-length film, The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, premiered in the main competition at IDFA Amsterdam in 2017. Ward’s previous feature, Yximalloo (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan), premiered at FID Marseille where it won the Prix Premier in 2014. From 2007 to 2014, he was co-director, with Miranda Driscoll, of The Joinery art space in Dublin. The Soil Became Scandinavian (research image), digital photograph, 2017 actor: Barry Ward, technical assistance: Jonathan Sammon, score: Declan Synnott Thanks also to Ari Kurvi and all at the Yandex data centre, Mäntsälä, Finland. This film was made possible by support from the Arts Council Project Award.
Adrian Duncan & Feargal Ward Ireland
The Soil Became Scandinavian (research image), digital photograph, 2017
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John Duncan N. Ireland b. 1968
John Duncan has been making work as a photographic artist in Northern Ireland since the late 1980s. Selected solo exhibitions include: Bonfires, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Belfast Exposed, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and Ffotogaller y Wales (2009/8); We Were Here, Gimpel Fils London (2006); Trees from Germany, Belfast Exposed (2003). Group exhibitions include: Art of the Troubles, Ulster Museum (2014); Loaded Landscapes, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2007); and Dogs have no religion, Czech Museum of Fine Art (2006). Duncan has been one of the editors of Source Photographic Review since 1994. Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
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Duncan’s practice stems from a sustained engagement with his home city of Belfast, examining and reflecting on its evolving state. Bonfires, a series of photographs, documents a long-standing tradition of bonfire building by Protestant communities in Belfast. The bonfires are built in preparation for annual 11th July celebrations that commemorate the defeat of the Catholic King James Stuart at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The imposing bonfire structures are a powerful provocation with which Protestant identity is asserted and a sense of solidarity and continuity is reaffirmed. Duncan’s photographs frame and measure the structures against their various social settings, revealing Belfast’s changing urban landscape and the deep divisions that, despite political progress, still affect Northern Ireland long after the ceasefire. In the past decade, such xenophobic divisions are becoming more apparent in the escalation and normalisation of anti-immigration and Islamophobic sentiments in Europe and across the globe. Duncan’s work also reminds us of the underlying threats and anxieties that Brexit poses to the Northern Irish peace process — anxieties that result from the potential reinstatement of a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Glenbryn Park, Belfast, 2008, photograph, 100 × 120 cm courtesy of the artist
John Duncan N. Ireland
Beacons, 2010, photograph, 50 Ă— 60 cm courtesy of the artist
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Beacons, 2010, photograph, 50 Ă— 60 cm courtesy of the artist
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Juan Pablo Echeverri Colombia b. 1978 Juan Pablo Echeverri’s work has focused on identity in portraiture for the past nineteen years. He has presented many solo shows including: Around the World in 80 Gays, Galería ASAB, Bogotá, (2016); miMundoscuro, Museo de Arte de Pereira, Colombia (2015); and APOCALIPSYNCH, Hudson Gallery, Provincetown, MA, USA (2015). Recent group shows include: Up All Night, LUMP, USA; La Vuelta, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France; and From Selfie to Self Expression, Saatchi Gallery, London (2017). His work was included in Younger than Jesus Directory Directory, published by the New Museum and Phaidon in 2009.
In both his photography and video work, Echeverri creates a universe in which he portrays ‘fantastical’ beings that depict endless possible forms of self-representation in contemporary visual culture. The artist himself embodies different types of personas by cross-dressing as characters to playfully challenge ways in which identity is negotiated in today’s vast field of image making. In his series futuroSEXtraño (2016), artificial light emanates on the back of various characters being photographed. The subjects are backlit and their silhouettes differ depending on the eccentricities of their attire. This multiplicity of identities reflects the artist’s commentary on the way people present themselves in social media — one often appears to be performing unlimited representations of the self to seek approval and acceptance of others. Echeverri’s work alludes to the certain emptiness and the lack of an authentic personality, which is represented in the facelessness of these individuals who are trapped in their own image making. The title of the piece, which translates as ‘future strangers’, also questions how that artifice of the self acts as an avatar within online sociability. How can we befriend strangers that come and go when they were truly never there? How can we appear to have large social networks yet simultaneously experience extreme loneliness? futuroSEXtraño, 2016, 60 inkjet prints, 400 × 240 cm courtesy of the artist
Juan Pablo Echeverri Colombia
futuroSEXtraĂąo [details], 2016, 60 inkjet prints, 400 Ă— 240 cm courtesy of the artist
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Inji Efflatoun Egypt 1924–1989
Inji Efflatoun was an artist and political activist who lived and worked in Cairo. Notable exhibitions include: Gallerie Adam, Egypt (1952); Sao Paolo Biennial, Brazil (1953); Cairo Atelier, Egypt (1956); Alexandria Biennial, Egypt (1958); and the Egyptian Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, Italy (1981). Efflatoun garnered considerable attention in Egypt and abroad in her lifetime. Her artwork was exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale, and in shows across Europe, including Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Prague, among others. More recently her work was featured in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 at Haus der Kunst, Germany (2016).
Efflatoun was an Egyptian painter and activist in the communist and feminist movements in Egypt during the 1950s and ’60s. Her artwork and activism was invested in class struggle, national independence, and women’s liberation. Her early paintings were Surrealist and Cubist in style and portrayed themes of confinement and rebellion. Perhaps most influential in both her painting style and politics was her painting tutor Kamel El-Telmessani. El-Telmessani was a founding member of the Egyptian Art and Freedom Group movement, launched in 1939 with the intention of using art to liberate the mind and nation. Surrealism in the twentieth century was considered a subversive form of expression; artists could rebel by tapping into their imagination and paint in the language of dreams. Her rebellion also led her to imprisonment: in 1959 Efflatoun was arrested, becoming one of the earliest female political prisoners. After her release in 1963 her social realist painting style changed and she began to depict lighter, more textured and brighter scenes of the working class, as can be seen in les diables rouges (1964), or in images showing the daily lives of women.
les diables rouges, 1964, oil on canvas, 79 × 66 cm courtesy of private collection, Alexandria, Egypt
Inji Efflatoun Egypt
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les diables rouges, 1964, oil on canvas, 79 × 66 cm courtesy of private collection, Alexandria, Egypt
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Gonzalo Fuenmayor Colombia b. 1977 Gonzalo Fuenmayor investigates themes of colonialisation and exoticism in his work. Recent solo exhibitions include: Tropicalypse, Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami (2017); Picturesque, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco; and Prohibidas las Metáforas, Galería El Museo, Bogotá (2016). Recent group exhibitions include: Let There Be Light, ArtNexus Foundation, Las Nieves Studios, Bogotá and Champions: Caribbean Artists Breaking Boundaries in South Florida, Armory Art Center, Montgomery Hall, USA (2017).
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Fuenmayor’s photo-realist charcoal drawings depict absurd pairings of objects, and the unusual juxtaposition of landscapes, objects, and uncanny interiors, such as palm trees growing in the middle of a grand baroque theatre or Victorian chandeliers hanging from clusters of bananas, as seen in Apocalypse XXI (2017). Banana clusters and banana palm trees are recurring images that appear in his work. Fuenmayor started painting them, often in a state of decomposition, on a large scale. In his recent work, he has linked the symbolism of the growing of this tropical fruit with the historical political violence towards banana plantation workers throughout the twentieth century at the hands of the former United Fruit Company as well as other fruit export corporations still operating today in the artist’s homeland, Colombia, and across Latin America. Fuenmayor’s chandeliers ultimately represent the dominant Eurocentric tastes and aesthetics of landlords in the tropics and the commodities and people they exploit.
Apocalypse XXI, 2017, charcoal on paper, 224 × 122 cm courtesy of the artist, and Francine Birbragher
Gonzalo Fuenmayor Colombia
The Seeds of Decadence, 2017, charcoal on paper, 214 ร 366 cm courtesy of Galeria El Museo, Bogotรก, and Dot Fift yone Gallery, Miami
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John Gerrard Ireland / Austria b. 1974 John Gerrard is best known for his large-scale works that take the form of real-time computer simulations, created in painstaking detail over the course of months or years. The works frequently refer to structures of power and networks of energy that have made possible the expansion of human endeavour in the past century. Recent solo exhibitions include: Western Flag, Somerset House, London (2017); Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); and Exercise, Darmstadt Kunsthalle (2015).
Gerrard’s Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) (2014) is a computer simulation of a power plant known as a solar thermal power tower, which is surrounded by ten thousand mirrors that reflect sunlight upon it to heat molten salts, forming a thermal battery that is used to generate electricity. Over the course of a 365-day year, the work simulates the actual movements of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky, as they would appear at the Nevada site, with the thousands of mirrors adjusting their positions in real time according to the position of the sun. This virtual world is meticulously constructed by Gerrard, a team of modelers, and programmers using a sophisticated simulation engine. Over a twenty-fourhour period, the point of view will cycle from ground level to a satellite view every sixty minutes, creating an elaborate choreography among perspectives, ten thousand turning mirrors, and a dramatic interplay of light and shadow. The monumental theatrics and sci-fi landscape in Gerrard’s solar thermal power station reminds us of our capacity to control nature to generate energy as well as the sense of wonderment technological progress brings — a wonderment previous generations might have experienced with the construction of hydroelectric dams, such as the one at Ardnacrusha.
Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014, simulation, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York
John Gerrard Ireland / Austria
Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014, simulation, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York
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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster France b. 1965
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster studied at L’école supérieure d’art of Grenoble, L’école du Magasin — Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, and Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, Paris. She participated in documenta 11 (2002), and also fi ve times in the Venice Biennale (1990, 1993, 1999, 2003, and 2009). In 2008 Gonzalez-Foerster created TH.2058 as part of the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. She received the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Award in 2002. Participation in EVA International supported by the Institut Français and the French Embassy in Ireland.
One of the most important and influential artists of her generation, Gonzalez-Foerster was one of the first artists to focus on the exhibition itself as an artistic medium. Her particular interest in space, alongside a preoccupation with literature, cinema, media, and technology, has resulted in a unique cross-disciplinary practice, though her work primarily takes the form of installation, film, and most recently, performance — or what she terms as ‘apparitions’. Brasília, which became the capital of Brazil in 1960, evokes certain ideas about modernist architecture, limitless possibilities, and social utopias. The city is characterised by its large road axes and wide streets, along which representative buildings with futuristic forms are aligned. Brasília was intended to be an ideal capital. The aim was to create a democratic space where every citizen could treat it as his or her own while moving around it; the city was projected as an open stage. For EVA International, GonzalezFoerster’s Brasília Hall (1998/2000), a spacious neon-lit environment with grass-green carpet, will be created as an homage to urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer who designed Brasília between 1956 and 1960. Brasília Hall, 1998, neon lighting, carpet, small monitor (built into the wall), dimensions variable exhibition view: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 1887–2058, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2016, courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin, photo © Andrea Rosetti
Dominique Gonzales-Foerster France
Brasília Hall, 1998, neon lighting, carpet, small monitor (built into the wall), dimensions variable exhibition view: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 1887–2058, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2015–16 courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin, photo © Gregoire Vieille
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Alejandro González Iñárritu Mexico / USA b. 1963 Alejandro González Iñárritu is a film director, producer, and screenwriter known for his award-winning films Babel (2007), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and The Revenant (2015). Iñárritu won the Academy Award for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture for Birdman in 2015. The following year he won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Revenant. In 2017 he realised Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible), a VR installation presented at Fondazione Prada, Milan, LACMA, Los Angeles, and Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Mexico City (2018). For this work, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Gonzalez Iñarritu with a Special Award.
An idea by French producer Alain Brigand, 11’09’’01 September 11 is a collective film made up of eleven short films by different directors, including Claude Lelouch, Youssef Chahine, Ken Loach, González Iñárritu, Amos Gitaï, and Sean Penn, which offer various perspectives on the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, in September 2001. Each film had to be no longer than eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame. González Iñárritu’s film is the only one without a clear narrative structure and in it he experiments with the traditional dichotomy between sound and image by separating the two elements. The screen is entirely black for most of the short film, interrupted sporadically by footage of men and women jumping from the Twin Towers, and so the mise-en-scène is dependent on a soundtrack that mainly consists of sounds recorded from around the globe on that day: snatches of newscasts, people’s voices, mobilephone recordings, the sound of floors collapsing. The viewer is forced to adopt a new kind of perception by being confronted with darkness and sounds that can’t be ignored. By separating sound and visual, González Iñárritu enhances both. The viewer is left to confront their own images, fears, and feelings about what happened, and the experience of watching is like a means of catharsis.
11’09”01 September 11, 2002, film still, 11 min, 9 sec courtesy of the artist
Alejandro González Iñárritu Mexico / USA
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11’09”01 September 11, 2002, film still, 11 min, 9 sec courtesy of the artist
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Laurent Grasso France b. 1972 Laurent Grasso explores sciences through electromagnetic energy, radio waves, and naturally occurring phenomena as they apply to paranormal activity. This was a favourite subject of eighteenth-century scientists and philosophers, often used as parlour entertainment during the Victorian era. Grasso was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008 and is the subject of a major monograph Laurent Grasso: The Black-Body Radiation, published by Les presses du réel. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Horn Perspective, Centre Pompidou; and Gakona, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009). Grasso was also included in 9th Sharjah Biennial and Manifesta 8. Participation in EVA International supported by the Institut Français and the French Embassy in Ireland.
Grasso weaves together philosophical and mystical references to create a multidisciplinary practice that ranges from classically painted oil works on canvas to video. One of the main concepts found in his work is what is real is twofold. His work Soleil Double (2014) — an animation that shows the sunrise and sunset of two suns — was shot in Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR), a residential and business district in Rome built for the unrealised 1942 World’s Fair, which was intended to celebrate the twentyyear anniversary of fascism and as a display of Mussolini’s power. In the film’s sequence showing the Palace of Italian Civilisation, two suns appear, referring to a theory that the sun has a twin — a nemesis. The scene is suggestive that some sort of natural disaster or phenomena is occurring. On a more symbolic level, Grasso’s work considers concepts of duplicity and ubiquity, and the idea that reality could be something other than what it appears to be. Shifting perceptions of reality and the investigation of known and unknown territory are common subjects throughout Grasso’s oeuvre. Soleil Double, 2014, 16 mm film transferred, stills courtesy of the artist, Galerie Perrotin and Sean Kelly Gallery © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris, 2018
Laurent Grasso France
Soleil Double, 2014, 16 mm film transferred, still courtesy of the artist, Galerie Perrotin and Sean Kelly Gallery Š Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris, 2018
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Eileen Gray Ireland / France 1878–1976 Eileen Gray spent her childhood in London and was among the first women to be admitted to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she took up painting before undergoing an apprenticeship in a London lacquer workshop. The experience she gained from working in this highly specialised medium influenced her profoundly when she moved to Paris in 1902. In 1922 she opened her own gallery, Jean Désert, in Paris as an outlet for her designs. Examples of her early work are in the V&A collection and her E1027 adjustable table is in the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Royal Society of Arts appointed her a Royal Designer for Industry in 1972.
Regarded as one of the most influential designers and architects in the twentieth century, Gray was self-taught and was one of the leading members of the modern design movement. She spent her adult life in Paris where she became well known as a furniture and interior designer — she also practised as an architect in the late 1920s. In her furniture and interior designs, she often combined traditional techniques with modern aesthetics; for example, her lacquer furniture used a Japanese tradition often associated with art deco style. Gray was later influenced by contemporary modern architecture and the abstract geometric works of the Dutch avant-garde group de Stijl. She began to design precise and functional furniture using inventive materials. She was the first designer to work in chrome, and was original in her use of aluminium, celluloid, tubular steel, Bakelite, and cork. In the mid1920s, her work became increasingly geometric yet she maintained interest in the feel and eff ect of materials. She innovatively used industrially produced materials, letting them exist in their bare original form, as seen with her modernist tube light lamp in which the opal tube bulb stands alone. The architectural tungsten strip light had become very popular, so Gray, in her words, ‘decided to design a floor lamp using just a lit tube’. Tube light, 1927, polished chromium plated spun steel base and tubular steel stem with black plastic sockets, opal tube bulb, 25 × 104 cm courtesy of Aram Designs Ltd.
Eileen Gray Ireland / France
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Bibendum chair, tube light , and E1027 table. photo courtesy of Aram Designs Ltd.
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Claire Halpin Ireland b. 1973 Halpin’s work explores themes and concepts around contested territories and histories. The Jigmap Series navigates the complexity of the contemporary theatre of war as “battlefield” expands to “battlespace” in the Information Age. Her paintings employ imagery from the media, surveillance, military history, maps, archaeology, early civilisation, biblical stories, and Byzantine and early Renaissance art history, all of which are woven together to form a narrative. She is influenced by the complex compositions of space and time in Renaissance paintings that show the co-existence of multiple narratives on a single picture plane and applies Claire Halpin works with a variety of this device to the aesthetic of gammediums including painting, drawing, ing and virtual reality. The work is video, and installation. Halpin has concerned with the perception and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions interpretation of images of connationally and internationally including, temporary war, and raises questions most recently, 187th RHA Annual about how we choose to record history Exhibition, Cáirde Visual, The Model, and the veracity of painting, photoSligo (2017); and Glomar Response, graphy, and the media in documentOlivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin (2016). ing future history. In one of Halpin’s She also curates exhibitions. panels, there is a peculiar depiction of a dam surrounded by growing poppies, a central element of the War in Afghanistan that has continued to unfold since 2001. Poppies in Afghanistan are farmed to produce opium; the illicit crop is cultivated and sold, often feeding power to militant groups, drug lords, corrupt officials and the American military.
Afghan Tour Tour, 2016, oil on canvas, diptych, 60 × 150 cm courtesy of the artist
Claire Halpin Ireland
Jigmap Iraq, 2016, oil on canvas, diptych, 60 × 150 cm courtesy of the artist
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Sanja Iveković Croatia b. 1949
Gender and the formation of identity have been ongoing themes in Iveković’s practice over the years. Among the many projects that represent her feminist position, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001) is her most public statement. The work, which was created for Casino Luxembourg and the Musée d’Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg, is a sculptural replica of Gëlle Fra (Golden lady) — a sculpture of Nike in the city centre of Luxembourg designed in 1923 in memory of volunteers who fought with the Allies in World War I — with three differences: it was dedicated to the Marxist philosopher and activist Rosa Luxemburg, who was executed for her radical political ideas in 1919; Nike was pregnant and renamed (as Rosa of Luxembourg); the plaque honouring male heroism was replaced with words such as ‘resistance’, Sanja Iveković was raised in the Soc- ‘justice’, kitsch’, ‘capital’, ‘art’, ‘whore’, ialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ‘virgin’, and so on. Iveković’s new and is associated with the ‘New Art monument has provoked fierce dePractice’ generation of artists from the bate since it was first exhibited — the Balkan region, who emerged after 1968. most violent opposition focused not Iveković continuously contests the role on the pregnant figure but on the of art in society through a wide range of plaque: the displacement of ideals media, and focuses on the intersection of male bravery by abusive terms between gender, nation, and class. regularly used to describe women. She has participated in numerous The work renegotiates the purpose international biennials and major of the memorial by questioning the exhibitions, including: Kiev Biennale conventions of social remembrance (2015); documenta 8, 11, 12, 13, and and insisting on justice for women’s 14, Kassel (1987, 2002, 2007, 2012, position in society. 2017); Artes Mundi, Cardiff (2014); and Istanbul Biennial (2009/7). She had solo exhibitions at DAAD Gallery,Berlin, (2015); South London Gallery/Calvert 22, MUDAM, Luxembourg; MAC/VAL, France (2012); MoMA, New York (2011); and BAK Utrecht Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009). Iveković was previously in the 2012 edition of EVA International.
Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, gilded polyester, wood, inkjet print, 240 × 160 × 90 cm photo: Christian Mosar, courtesy of the artist
Sanja Iveković Croatia
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Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, gilded polyester, wood, inkjet print, 240 × 160 × 90 cm photo: Christian Mosar, courtesy of the artist
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Uchechukwu James-Iroha Nigeria b. 1972
Uchechukwu James-Iroha studied sculpture at the University of Port Harcourt Art School in Nigeria, and started taking photographs in 1996. He is a prominent figure in the new generation of Nigerian photographers. Pairing the documentation of everyday life with creative imagery, JamesIroha’s images reflect the diversity of people who form the mix of cultures and influences in Lagos, a fastgrowing megacity in Nigeria. In 2008 he received the Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands, and his series Fire, Flesh and Blood won the Élan Prize at the 2005 Mali biennial exhibition, African Photography Encounters. He is a founding member of the collective Depth of Field (DOF), and also mentors emerging photographers.
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James-Iroha’s Realities of Self-Help, from Power and Powers (2012) explores the dark and unprogressive relationship between political power and electrical power distribution in Nigeria. By far the most populous country on the African continent, Nigeria, with its vast human and material resources and enormous potential, has major issues with its erratic supply of electrical power. Political office seekers use lofty promises of ‘light’ as the most effective bait for support from citizens. The trend of investing in white-elephant projects across Nigeria — publicly funded government projects that are extremely expensive to operate and maintain, don’t add value to the economy, or make profit — point to a failure of local policy. Such projects are dependent on an efficient electrical supply system and are set for defeat from the outset. James-Iroha’s intense black-and-white photographs are performative and theatrical. The body appears in staged compositions where individuals enact different roles: from images of corrupt patriarchal politicians to common people who appear ‘chained’ by electric cables, as though enslaved to the dehumanising quality of life owing to the lack of consistent electrical power.
Enthroned, from Power and Powers, 2012, photograph, 80 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist
Uchechukwu James-Iroha Nigeria
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Looking Forward but Standing on the Fence, from Power and Powers, 2012, photograph, 80 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist
Rolls Royce II, from Power and Powers, 2012, photograph, 80 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist Looking Upwards but Standing in Chains, from Power and Powers, 2012, photograph, 80 × 100 cm courtesy of the artist
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Mainie Jellett Ireland 1897–1944 Mainie Jellett was one of the most significant pioneers of modern art in Ireland. Her Decoration (1923) was among the first abstract paintings shown in Ireland when it was exhibited at the Society of Dublin Painters Group Show in 1923. She represented Ireland, as an artist, at the 1928 Olympic Games, was commissioned for works for the Glasgow Empire Exhibition in 1938 and for the Irish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and was founding Jellett is a seminal figure in Irish art chairman of the Irish Exhibition of Living history, both as an early advocate of Art in 1943. abstract art and as a champion of the modern movement. She trained in Paris in the early 1920s under Albert Gleizes, and his method of pure abstraction and theories on colour strongly influenced her painting style. Jellett’s abstract compositions, a series of which are on show in this edition of EVA International, often have religious titles and resemble religious paintings by artists such as Fra Angelico in composition, yet also express similarities to the modernist avant-garde aesthetics of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Believing that modern art was an expression of spirituality and a way to convey Irish nationalism, she sought to show it in Ireland despite initial rejections towards her painting style when she returned to the country in 1923. Using Celtic art, which she considered Ireland’s form of ‘primitive’ art, Jellett modernised the art form through abstract and Cubist gestures. Abstract Composition [detail], 1935, oil on canvas, 119.6 × 96.9 cm courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
Mainie Jellett Ireland
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Abstract Composition, 1935, oil on canvas, 119.6 × 96.9 cm courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Abstract Composition [detail], 1935, oil on canvas, 40 × 20 cm courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
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Seán Keating Ireland 1889–1977
Seán Keating was born in Limerick and moved to Dublin in 1911 to study at the Metropolitan School of Art. He was heavily influenced by the work of William Orpen and went on to work in Orpen’s studio when he had left art college. Keating felt his mission was to define Irish nationhood through his painting. Although abstract art thrived during his lifetime, he was a realist painter and remained a staunchly traditional one. In 1924 Keating received the gold medal at the Dublin Exhibition of Irish Art for his painting Homage to Hugh Lane, and in 1926 he began to undertake some drawings and paintings of the Shannon Scheme, which was a powerful record of the workers and of industrialisation, painted in a heroicrealist style, later purchased by ESB. This included the mural for the Irish Pavilion at New York’s World’s Fair in 1939. He was president of the RHA from 1948 until 1962. Participation in EVA International supported by ESB.
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In 1914 Keating travelled to the Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland. This trip had a profound effect on him, and he saw the hardworking men and women of the West as the true heroes of Ireland. The figure of the proud Irish peasant was popular in the writings of W. B. Yeats and others, and for Keating represented themes of immigration and the loss of past values. Nationalism became the driving force behind his work, and in it he depicted a heroic and sometimes idealised view of Ireland. After hundreds of years of rule by a foreign power, the new Free State showed it could independently and successfully realise one of the major engineering undertakings of the day: the Shannon Scheme project (1926–28). For Keating, the project at Ardnacrusha was analogous to his hope for Ireland as it emerged from its colonial past, and his allegorical, social-realist painting Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out (1928–29) attests to this: in the foreground, a number of figures representing both the past and present are depicted; in the distance, the enormous dam dominates the landscape. The work expresses Ireland’s pursuit for a new beginning through electrification and modernisation, as it unfolded before Keating’s eyes. For EVA International, the painting is presented alongside a selection of other works that depict the construction at Ardnacrusha. Imagery of grand industrialist machinery used to modify the soil and landscape is often abstracted, bringing to mind techniques and forms used by constructivist artists.
Study for Ardnacrusha, ca. 1926–27, pencil and charcoal drawing, 52 × 59 cm ESB Collection 136
Seán Keating Ireland
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The Timber Gang, ca. 1926–27, charcoal, 43 × 59 cm ESB Collection 10
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Sam Keogh Ireland b. 1985 Sam Keogh is an artist whose recent solo exhibitions include: Eurocopter EC135, Dor tmunder Kunstverein, Germany (2016); Four Fold, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015); Mop, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2013); and Terrestris, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Dark Water: Dead of the Night and A---Z, Dilston Groove, London; Hmmm, London; and Something to Be Scared of II, Syndk, Cologne (2017). Participation in EVA International supported through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Open Call programme and production partnership between EVA and IMMA.
Keogh’s recent work includes installations that facilitate performances and aim to produce an intimate encounter with the audience through the grotesque extrapolation of recognisable images, figures, or myths, from Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, to a two-thousand-year-old Irish ‘bog body’, to the myth of Medusa. For the 38th EVA International, Keogh has produced a large-scale mixedmedia installation that will provide a set for a series of live performances, resembling a TED talk or a sales pitch. Taking the form of a spaceship’s control panel, Integrated Mystery House evokes complex and alien technologies of the near future, and explores subjects related to technomasculinities, histories of Silicon Valley, and fetishes of the future. Kapton Cadaverine, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable photo: Gert-Jan van Rooij, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery
Sam Keogh Ireland
Kapton Cadaverine, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable photo: Gert-Jan van Rooij, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery
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Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien France b. 1990
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien works across a variety of media including drawing, sculpture, painting, video, performance, and installation. In her work, she creates stories and poetic narratives with myriad cultural influences that result in a ‘plural identity’. She graduated from École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris (2016). Participation in EVA International supported by the Institut Français and the French Embassy in Ireland.
Messouma Manlanbien considers recent acts of violence towards women in her work. In #No Name (2016), she responds to the 2012 ‘Delhi gang rape’, as it came to be known, when Jyoti Singh Pandey, a twenty-threeyear-old physiotherapy intern, was beaten, gang raped, and tortured on a private bus she was travelling on in New Delhi. The crime immediately riveted Indian society, setting off street protests, months of national and international media coverage, and was considered in India as a game changer in the public opinion on the epidemic problem of rape. Messouma Manlanbien’s installation tells a story of a past event that should not be forgotten. It is a reminder of the cruel hatred towards women that occurs through the dehumanisation of the female body. Messouma Manlanbien’s sculptural language signifies a shrine; rather than honouring Hindu deities, she honours the mundane subjugated female victims of misogynist violence.
#No Name, 2016, installation: sculpture, volume rafia, resin, copper, rope, raffia, razor blades, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien France
#No Name, 2016, installation: sculpture, volume rafia, resin, copper, rope, raffia, razor blades, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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Napoles Marty Cuba b. 1982 Napoles Marty lives and works between Madrid and Havana. His work includes sculpture, drawing, and installation. Solo exhibitions include: Deconstruction / Restructuring at the 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015). Selected group shows include: Ciudad autónoma de Melilla, Museo Casa Ibánez, Melilla, Spain; International Biennial of Contemporary Emerging Art Eve-Maria Zimmermann, Canary Island, Spain; and International Exhibition of Fine Arts. Ciudad Real, Spain (2016). Marty’s creative process is based on research into figurative space and the human condition, expressed through organic and geometric relationships. The body, which is always presented as fragmented, is central to the work and enters into a sort of conversation with the surrounding space, as both container and constitutive part of the work. Often the space opens up and becomes more atmospheric; it dissolves the shapes to become a constituent part of them. Transhumants VIII (2017) questions Marty’s own displacement as a migrant within different places, and starts from a more personal approach to one that is based on the collective. In the work he reflects on the idea that contemporary society continues to shift and adapt, always in search of change. The imagery of beheaded figures, each carrying his or her own head, represents the struggles and violence that individuals and societies go through as a result of these shifting changes. Transhumants X, 2017, charcoal, chalk, pastel, graphite, and acrylic on paper, 228 × 151.5 cm courtesy of the artist
Napoles Marty Cuba
Transhumants IX, 2017, charcoal, chalk, pastel, graphite, and acrylic on paper, 198.5 Ă— 152 cm courtesy of the artist
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Transhumants XI, 2017, charcoal, chalk, pastel, graphite, and acrylic on paper, 200 Ă— 139 cm courtesy of the artist
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Francis Matthews Ireland b. 1980
Francis Matthews works primarily in painting. His paintings are informed by light, architecture, memory, and place. Matthews graduated with a firstclass honours degree in architecture from University College Dublin (2004) before pursuing a career as an artist. He recently had a solo show at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2016), and previously participated in EVA International (2010).
Matthews’s work is influenced by the language of film. Almost always absent of people, his work describes places of neglect or moments of silence in otherwise inhabited locations. These unoccupied places can be seen as empty sets where scenes are about to unfold. Six Streets (2016) is a series of oil paintings that depicts a short but varied route through the deserted streets of Dublin’s south inner city at night. Each painting is like an intense observation of a particular place, which documents a location that is often overlooked or ignored. The illumination of these canvases comes from the light emanating from the street lamps, bulbs, and lit shops. Matthews’s painting acutely depicts a perception of night as defined by electrical power. Off Amien’s Street, 2008, oil on canvas, 50 × 80 cm courtesy of the artist
Francis Matthews Ireland
Camden St. Lower, 2015, oil on canvas, 100 Ă— 120 cm courtesy of the artist
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Julie Merriman Ireland b. 1963 Julie Merriman creates large-scale drawings and uses the visual languages and methodologies of other professions: architects, engineers, scientists, cartographers, and mathematicians. Solo exhibitions include: Revisions, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2016); Part Drawing, Drawing Project, Dublin (2014); and Draw Full Size, RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin (2012). Group exhibitions include: Tulca Festival of Visual Art, Galway, A Knowing Nature, The Dock, Leitrim (2016); Uncovering a Collection (2015); and Soundings (2014), Municipal Gallery, DLR Lexicon, Co. Dublin.
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The work of an engineer is often hidden, concerned with the internal workings of a subject. This information, however, is conveyed through the language of drawing, using mathematics, physics, and quantitative measurable criteria such as weight, scale, and balance. In constructing a drawing, Merriman considers these elements, but in an alternative way and for different purposes — drawing becomes a form of problem solving. Her work focuses on the current state of the built environment from the point of view of an architect and engineer. The drawings presented were developed on residency at University College Dublin (UCD) College of Engineering and Architecture, and look at how technology currently influences architectural and engineering projects and the role it plays in linking an idea, its communication, and visual realisation. By enabling the fabrication of structures and surfaces not previously possible, technology has the potential to change our built environment and to aid its conservation.
Compiler I, 2015, typewriter, carbon film, carbon on paper, 140 Ă— 140 cm courtesy of the artist
Julie Merriman Ireland
Compiler IX, 2016, typewriter, carbon film, carbon on paper, 120 Ă— 120 cm courtesy of the artist
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Housing Area X, 2017, typewriter, carbon film, carbon on paper, 120 Ă— 120 cm courtesy of the artist
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Kevin Mooney UK / Ireland b. 1973 Mooney’s work explores the dialectics involved in the idea of homeland as integral to one’s memory of place. These memories are not fixed, however, but remain as an intangible essence. His parents emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s, and as child he was partly excluded from a ‘real’ Irish identity, meaning his understanding of Irishness is partly from an ‘outsider’ perspective. With painterly techniques encompassing prehistoric, medieval and contemporary periods, his work maps, retraces, and reimagines cultural history, and is an interplay between loss and renewal. His series of paintings Psychic SpectreLand (2017–18) reimagines a ‘lost’ part of Irish art history — a history that didn’t happen. The figuration in the work comprises the abstraction of prehistoric symbolism and medieval flatness while also including more contemporary painting techniques. Landscape appears to be animated Kevin Mooney’s paintings are rooted by a spirit, generating the imagery of in folklore, mythology, and a semi- surrealist nature, which is both prefictitious Irish art history. His solo modern and apocalyptically postshows include: Seeing Things, ArtBox, industrial. Dublin (2017); Twilight Head Cult, Ormston House, Limerick (2016); and Wave, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2014). Selected group exhibitions include: What Is and What Might Be, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2015); Making Familiar, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2012); and Video Killed the Radio Star Star, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2010). Seeing Cloud, 2016, oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm courtesy of the artist
Kevin Mooney Ireland
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Storyteller 2016, oil on canvas, 80 Ă— 60 cm Storyteller, courtesy of the artist Visitor 2017, oil on canvas, 85 Ă— 65 cm Visitor, courtesy of the artist
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Locky Morris N. Ireland b. 1960 Locky Morris has exhibited both regionally and internationally since the mid1980s. His work touches on a broad range of subjects, from the highly personal and familial to the political. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Morris has also received acclaim for his quietly powerful and intimate work, infused with a dark wit. Morris has presented solo shows at: Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast (2016); mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2010); and Mannheimer Kunstverein, Germany (2008). He has shown in group shows at: The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh, USA (2017); the Museum for Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2014); and the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague (2006). In 2016 Morris received the Irish American Cultural Institute’s O’Malley Award for Art. Participation in EVA International is supported by British Council.
Morris’s work Comm (1992) refers to the term ‘comm’, which is a prisoner’s letter written in tiny lettering on either toilet paper or cigarette papers. Wrapped, and often heat-sealed in cling film, it is concealed in the mouth or other body orifices and smuggled in and out of jail, sometimes through a kiss. His sensual sculptural piece was the beginning of a number of works by the artist around that period that focused on comms and explored themes of suppression and censorship in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the exhibition, the work further expands on concepts of clandestine forms of communication that subvert and bypass police control and electronic communication lines. As with a lot of Morris’s work, it holds in play a complex set of ideas and social concerns together with art-historical references — albeit in this case in a somewhat brazen and humorous way.
Comm, 1992, installation: toilet paper, wallpaper paste, cling film (sealed with flame) dimensions variable, each element ca. 30 × 75 × 20 cm courtesy of the artist
Locky Morris N. Ireland
Comm, 1992, installation: toilet paper, wallpaper paste, cling film (sealed with flame) dimensions variable, each element ca. 30 Ă— 75 Ă— 20 cm courtesy of the artist
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Isabel Nolan Ireland b. 1974 Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing, and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures, and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. Recent solo exhibitions include: Another View from Nowhen, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, Calling on Gravity, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); and The weakened eye of day (touring exhibition), Mercer Union, Toronto, CAG, Vancouver (2016) and IMMA, Dublin (2014). In 2005 Nolan represented Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale as part of a group exhibition, Ireland at Venice 2005.
In a dilapidated, blackened room, a painted steel screen hangs. Comprised of arches, the simple geometry of the ascending and retreating forms simultaneously obstructs the space and makes a threshold of sorts. The allusion to perspectival depth draws the eye up and through the room. The form and colours are loosely based on the interior of a local church and steal something of the ways architects use light and height to lead one towards the heart of a building, or even an idea. Beyond it hang chandelier-like sculptures that cast no light. There are no bulbs, or crystals strung from branching, decorative metalwork, just simple steel forms, draped with hand-dyed cotton. Their structures replicate classic chandeliers but their dysfunctional, provisional nature is utterly antipathetic to grandeur. This approximation of beauty is not opulent but unceremonious, vulnerable and colourful. The brightest colours might refer to the sun, or gaudy, artificial illuminations, but blacks, navies, and earth colours give a different heft to these incompetent faux-chandeliers. The frayed, lightweight fabric falls elegantly in straight and curved lines, absorbing and blocking light, but refuses resolutely to offer any to the space.
Radiant Lines, 2017, mild steel, paint, fabric and dye, ø 112 × h 57 cm courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery
Isabel Nolan Ireland
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Section (Sun Comprehending Glass), mock up courtesy of the artist
258 Participating Artists
Masahito Ono Japan b. 1983
Masahito Ono creates installations, photographs, and films that explore memory, the human condition, geopolitical boundaries, and the history the world has forgotten or ‘de-experienced’. Previously, he was a video journalist working for global media organisations for nearly a decade. Ono has participated in a number of exhibitions worldwide including: Push Pull, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery, New York (2015); Auckland Festival of Photography, Auckland, NZ (2014/15); So Many Things Don’t Know, MUSEE F for The Month of Photography, Tokyo, Japan (2014); and Ping Yao International Photo Festival, Shanxi Province, China (2013).
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While working as news cameraman, Ono witnessed the speed with which stories and images appear and are then forgotten and how coverage of some stories, but not others, is discouraged by society and the media. Using photography as his central medium, he incorporates other materials to expand the potential of photography beyond its traditional form. Ono’s work investigates photography and its relation to present time and space and may take the form of a durational work. Years within Years (I Love You Always) (2014–ongoing) is a work he intends to complete over the course of his lifetime. A photograph of the sunrise is taken each day as a way to acknowledge the uncontrollable nature of the world around us — as well as our own. In Ono’s words: ‘All the photographs I make are a failure and a success of some sort, one way or another. Photography reveals its best ability and inability when facing the sun.’ Each photograph is then transferred onto a canvas scroll containing the age of a person to whom Ono dedicates the work. The height of the installation is determined by the artist’s age in relation to his life expectancy at the time of each production. As time passes by, the future scrolls grow longer and fewer, and they hang a little closer to the ground. Though the project will eventually end, Ono has left instructions to let the last produced scroll lie flat on the ground. Years within Years (I Love You Always), 2014–ongoing, installation: archival pigment prints on canvas rolls and wood, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
Masahito Ono Japan
Years within Years (I Love You Always), 2014–ongoing, installation: archival pigment prints on canvas rolls and wood, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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David Pérez Karmadavis Dominican Republic b. 1976
David Pérez Karmadavis focuses on the human form and issues surrounding migration and individuals of different nationalities. Notable exhibitions include: Our Land / Alien Territory Territory, 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); Karmadavis: Art, Justice, Transition, Escala, University of Essex (2013), Tumulus, Exit Art, New York (2011); and Myths of the Cave, Dominican Republic (2010).
Pérez Karmadavis’s performance work often focuses on the social conflict and hatred between Dominicans and Haitians who are citizens of a shared island. Estructura completa (Complete structure) was a recorded performance carried out at El Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes (Centro León), Dominican Republic, in 2010. In the video, a blind Dominican man carries in his arms a Haitian woman, who has had both legs amputated. They both speak different languages (he speaks Spanish and she speaks Creole Haitian). Despite physical impairments, both work together to navigate through the public space: she guides while he walks. The ‘incomplete’ bodies are like an allegory for individual alienation and suggest that they can successfully operate in a public space through a symbiotic arrangement dictated by physical necessity. Karmadavis’s work invites us to understand that a complete structure can be obtained through a new form of communication between two nations that share the same ground. Estructura completa, 2010, video still courtesy of the artist
David PĂŠrez Karmadavis Dominican Republic
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Estructura completa, 2010, video stills courtesy of the artist
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John Rainey N. Ireland b. 1985
John Rainey is an artist working in sculpture, ceramics and 3D printing, exploring themes of technology, artifice, and the human figure. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at: Golden Thread Gallery Project Space, Belfast (2016) and Marsden Woo Gallery Project Space, London (2013). Selected group exhibitions include: Dissolving Histories at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2017); Less + More, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2015); and (Im)material Artefacts, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (2014). Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
Our lives are increasingly played out on virtual stages that provide unprecedented motivation for self-imaging and identity formulation. Reflecting on the shifting boundaries between public and private life, Rainey’s sculptures focus on the plasticity of this digital culture and consider concepts of authenticity, overrepresentation, and mediated experience of our selves through platforms such as social-media sites and dating apps. Going to ruin (you) (2018) is an architectural collage using the façade of the Hunt Museum onto which Rainey imposes sections of the eighteenth-century building but as ruins. The staged destruction shows an imagined vision of future demise — of a fallen future. The work recalls the eighteenth-century landscape tradition in which artificial Greek and Roman ruins were used within wealthy estates and country gardens. These architecture features are markers that suggest the landowner’s advanced and progressive position in civilisation. Going to ruin (you), a hybrid object that sits somewhere between the digital and the physical, contradicts the way in which ‘authentic’ ruins materialise through the passage of time.
Going to ruin (you), 2018, CAD visualisation courtesy of the artist
John Rainey N. Ireland
The Fall of a Connection, 2014, Parian porcelain, 30 × 25 × 40 cm courtesy of the artist, photo: Matthew Booth Photography
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Dan Rees UK b. 1982
Dan Rees has had recent solo exhibitions including: Ruins of the Cambrian Age, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, Depressed Earth, Murias Centeno, Lisbon (2016); and Road Back to Relevance, Nomas Foundation, Rome (2015). His work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at GAMeC, Bergamo; Budafabriek, Kortrijk, Belgium; Fellbach Small Sculpture Triennial (2016). In 2017 a monograph of Rees’s work was published by Mousse. Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
Rees’s sculptures are made using a building method in which earth is compressed in wooden moulds to form walls that are suitable for housing. They are highly dense and have been compressed layer by layer in a process that mimics that of deep geological time. Rees plays with the relationship between painting and sculpture, drawing inspiration from patterns found in rock strata to create sculptures and imprints that are reminiscent of landscapes yet maintain an unknowable quality. This new body of work is of a calm reflective nature and speaks of the manner of sedimentation, in which the inherent exchange value of the resources beneath our feet, taken as a given, imprint on our minds, mediate our understanding of landscape, and mould our social conditions. In the exhibition, Rees’s work also evokes the symbiosis of concrete and soil, which characterise the material junction between nature and concrete dams. Sediments of the Mind, 2017, installation view, clay, sand pigment, lime, horsehair, wood, 89.5 × 140 × 36 cm courtesy of Nuno Centeno
Dan Rees UK
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Sediments of the Mind, 2017, installation view, clay, sand pigment, lime, horsehair, wood, 89.5 × 140 × 36 cm courtesy of Nuno Centeno
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Sediments of the Mind, 2017, installation view, clay, sand pigment, lime, horsehair, wood, 89.5 × 140 × 36 cm courtesy of Nuno Centeno
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Marlon T. Riggs USA 1957–1994 Riggs’s seminal documentary on black gay life, Tongues Untied (1989), uses a mixture of styles, such as poetry, personal testimony, rap, and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others), to confront the homophobia and racism experienced by black gay men at that time. In the film, public expression of black homophobia with undertones of antigay violence is revealed: a man is refused entry to a gay bar because of his colour; a college student is left bleeding on the sidewalk after a gaybashing; a drag queen feels lonely and isolated in society. Riggs also gives a more affirmative side of the black gay male experience, touching on dance (vogue), for instance, as a form of cultural resistance, community, and cultural affirmation. He also celebrates the innovation and expression of flamboyant and witty gestures like black queer snapping. In the exhibition, an excerpt from the film focuses on the politics behind snapping as a clandestine form of communication that subverts and bypasses both police control and electronic-based Marlon T. Riggs was an Emmy Award– communication lines. Diagnosed winning filmmaker, artist, and gay- with HIV in 1988, Riggs’s continued rights activist. His films address to produce documentaries as way to questions of cultural memory and race interrogate the politics of identity, relations in America, and more personal specifically in relation to masculinity, topics such as sexuality or HIV. Riggs sexuality, and race. In his own words: produced, wrote, and directed several ‘My struggle has allowed me to trantelevision documentaries, including scend that sense of shame and stigma Ethnic Notions (1986), Tongues Untied identified with my being a black gay (1989), Color Adjustment (1992), and man. Having come through that fire, Black Is ... Black Ain’t (1994). they can’t touch me.’
Tongues Untied, 1989, film still photo: Ron Simmons, courtesy of Signifyin’ Works and Frameline Distribution
Marlon T. Riggs USA
Tongues Untied, 1989, film stills photo: Ron Simmons, courtesy of Signifyin’ Works and Frameline Distribution
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Beto Shwafaty Brazil b. 1977 Beto Shwafaty is an artist, critic, and researcher. He produces installations, videos, and sculptural objects using a diverse array of methodologies, such as curatorial thinking, institutional strategies, criticism, and archival research. Recent solo exhibitions include: Parque Funcional, Complexo Cultural Funarte, Brazil, and Hablemos de Reparaciones, Prometeogallery, Milan (2017); and Risk Contract, Galleria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2015). In 2013 his docu-fiction photobook, The Life of the Centers, was published that explores historical and urban fluxes of development of three regions of São Paulo. Shwafaty is represented by Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, and Galeria Prometeo, Milan.
Shwafaty’s collages form part of his wider project titled Remediations (2010–14) that meditates on the idea of progress and modernisation and is closely identifi ed with the latemodernist aesthetics that emerged in Brazil in the 1950s. Central to the work is how this modernity has been constantly undone and opposed by old colonial structures. The project addresses the multifaceted relations between territorial planning, economics, architecture, ideology, history, and progress as they relate to modernism and colonialism. His interest in designed objects and structures within society emphasise how these materials, which still permeate our everyday lives, can produce shared meanings and behaviours. By exploring the connections between nature, culture, and politics, Remediations draws attention to the ideological uses of visuality, of discourses related to progress, and of communication strategies used as a means of power in specific times and places in Brazil. The project considers the country’s structural problems through different historical periods, and highlights the many ways in which these are manifested discursively or visually.
Remediations, 2010–14, installation view, dimensions variable courtesy of Paço das Artes
Beto Shwafaty Brazil
Remediations, 2010–14, installation views, dimensions variable courtesy of Paço das Artes
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Sutthirat Supaparinya Thailand b. 1973
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Supaparinya’s When Need Moves the Earth (2014) reflects on the impact of changes in the natural environment owing to human activities, such as mining or the building of hydroelectric power plants. Supaparinya presents a visual exploration of a coal mine and a water dam, which are both used to generate electricity. Her video installation combines documentary footage and experimental techniques to create a narrative about the Srinakarin Dam and the Mae Moh Lignite Mine, which are both administered by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand. While also altering the landscape, coal mining and dam building can cause earthquakes and can therefore have a direct impact on people’s lives. Through the work, Supaparinya encourages the viewer to consider his or her own consumption of electrical power and the effects of this.
Sutthirat Supaparinya’s work encompasses a wide variety of mediums, such as installation, sculpture, and still and moving imagery. She was selected to par ticipate in the International Creator Residency Program at the Tokyo Wonder Site Aoyama (2012), Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany (2013), and Wellington Asia Residency Exchange, New Zealand (2015). Her work was featured in the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2018 at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Participation in EVA International with thanks to Disaphol Chansiri. When Need Moves the Earth, 2014, stills courtesy of the artist and Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU
Sutthirat Supaparinya Thailand
When Need Moves the Earth, 2014, still courtesy of the artist and Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU
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Mina Talaee Iran b. 1985
Mina Talaee is an artist and researcher. Since 2003 she has been exhibiting her work, which mainly focuses on political, cultural, and social issues, such as gender equality and cultural hegemony in Iran, Europe, and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include: Haft Negah Art Exhibition, Niavaran Cultural Center, Tehran (2016); Norouz Art Show, Galerie Nicolas Flamel, Paris (2014); and Monument to Poet, Shirin Art Gallery, Tehran (2013). She has also participated in a group exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Flamel (2016/17). Talaee has been a lecturer at several universities, namely, Soore University, at which she was also head of the BA/MA programmes for handicrafts, Islamic arts, book arts, and Persian painting.
Talaee explores the role of culture and its effect on humans as well as social and cultural issues to do with power and control. Hair Headscarf (2016) is a handwoven shawl made out of the artist’s and her mother’s hair. In Iran, females are obliged to cover their hair in public by the age of nine, regardless of their faith or origin. The work highlights the country’s cultural restrictions and obligations that are based on gender, and questions and challenges the forced control over women’s bodies by the state. Talaee uses types of craft typically associated with women, such as kilim making and crochet weaving, which have been done in her family for generations. The pattern for the artwork is based on traditional Persian arabesque, commonly depicted in the margins of Ardabil carpets, a type of carpet that originated in Ardabil Province, northwestern Tehran, an area that has a long history of weaving. In the exhibition, Talaee’s work expands the dialogue of the role of the state apparatus upon the female body — either by controlling the surface of the body (through clothing restrictions) or the reproductive organs. Her work also calls attention to the deeply embedded traditions that are difficult to detach from. Talaee’s work, which includes a performance of the artist wearing the scarf outdoors, is a way to honour the women in her family.
Hair Headscarf Headscarf, 2016, kilim and crochet of the artist’s and her mother’s hair, 104.5 × 37.5 cm courtesy of the artist
Mina Talaee Iran
Hair Headscarf Headscarf, 2016, kilim and crochet of the artist’s and her mother’s hair, 104.5 × 37.5 cm courtesy of the artist
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Jenna Tas The Netherlands b. 1933 Jenna Tas is an artist who works across disciplines in drawing, painting, photography, and installation. She has recently presented a solo exhibition at Museum Elburg, The Netherlands (2016), and has exhibited widely throughout her career.
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Central to Tas’s work is a concern with questions of life and death. Looking at life as ephemeral, transient, and passing is the lens through which she looks at the world around her and is a way to deal with the past, a past of suffering, violence, and sadness. She attempts to highlight the current rise in anti-Semitism by remembering past events. For EVA International, her installation, ‘Oh Mnemosyne’ – (The Stone Drawings) (1992), comprises a large number of intimate drawings that individually represent the anonymous burial of individuals who lost their lives in the Holocaust. On top of each unique drawing, she lays a small slate as a way to bring back distinct personalities of those buried in mass graveyards. Tas originally made this work of around four hundred drawings in response to her visit to Lodz, Poland, in 1992, where she participated in the 7th International Textile Triennial, which was held in what used to be a Jewish-owned textile factory. Between 1939 and 1944 around three million Jews were killed in Poland by the Nazis — an engineered ethnic cleansing that was condoned by the Polish Catholic church.
‘Oh Mnemosyne’ – (The Stone Drawings), 1992, floor sculpture with A4 paper and slates, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
Jenna Tas The Netherlands
‘Oh Mnemosyne’ – (The Stone Drawings), 1992, floor sculpture with A4 paper and slates, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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Darn Thorn Ireland b. 1975
Darn Thorn has lectured and taught photography in Bristol, Dublin, and Melbourne. Recent solo shows include: Arcadia in Grey, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh (2015); Histronica in A Flat, Bristol Biennial (2012); Imported Zone, Bei Gao Studio — Red Gate Gallery, Beijing (2009). Recent groups shows include: 2nd NSK State Folk Art Biennale, Burren College of Art, Co. Clare; 2116, Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Cork (2016); and Silver, West Cork Ar t Centre, Skibbereen (2015). Thorn is published in Photofile, The Age (Australia), and 36 Exp. (University of Manchester).
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Thorn’s Aggiornamento (2016) considers the impact of the religious thinkers and urban planners on the physical and cultural landscape of contemporary Ireland. During the 1960s, the church and state embarked on a project to improve and modernise society through innovative construction and design. The title of Thorn’s work, which means ‘to bring up to date’, was a popular phrase used during the establishment of the Second Vatican Council (1962–66), an ecumenical council that addressed relations between the church and society. By the 1980s, following social problems in key public-housing projects, post-war architecture became synonymous with failure. Significant buildings like the County Hall, Cork (1968), or the Ballymun tower blocks, Dublin (1966), have either been unsympathetically redesigned in recent years or demolished. With dry humour, Aggiornamento responds to this failure and proposes another future, one in which the utopian ambitions of the post-war era succeeded. Shot on black-and-white film, the images are colourised digitally and collaged from multiple negatives. Period buildings are relocated into romanticised landscapes, then re-coloured making reference to sci-fi cinema. Printed as large-scale billboards, the images create an uncanny projection of the future and the inescapable role of the church within it.
Aggiornamento #2, 2016, giclee-printed wallpaper, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
Darn Thorn Ireland
Aggiornamento #1, 2016, giclee-printed wallpaper, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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Top lista nadrealista Former Yugoslavia 1984–1991
Top lista nadrealista (The Surrealists’ top chart), also known as Nadrealisti (Surrealists) was a sketch comedy and variety show that aired on TV Sarajevo in three separate installments from 1984 to 1991. Originating from a fifteenminute radio-comedy segment, it was broadcast as part of the weekly programme called Primus on Radio Sarajevo during the 1980s. The show was linked to New Primitivism (Novi primitivizam), a subcultural movement established in Sarajevo in 1983. Music, as well as comedy on radio and television, was its form of expression. Its three most prominent members Zenit Đozić (a Muslim-Bosnian) Branko Đurić (half Muslim half Serbian), and Nele Karajlić (Serbian-Bosnian) later departed the show and became respectively a media celebrity, an Academy Award Winning film director, and a revisionist nationalist author.
Towards the late 1980s and early ’90s, Top lista nadrealista incorporated political satire along with depictions of people’s idiosyncrasies in former Yugoslavia. The show became so popular that some of the language and phrasing used in the programme entered into the public vernacular. The TV programme often dealt with societal issues at that time in the build up to the Balkan Wars. In the video presented in the 38th EVA International, Nadrealista predicted what seemed farfetched at the time, and imagined that the country was divided into East and West Yugoslavia, with the boundary running through Bosnia so that Sarajevo was bisected by a wall. When portraying the rising ethnic tensions and imminent war in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they used dark humour and absurdity and held strong pacifist attitudes. For instance, in one skit they enacted an escape from one side of the wall to the other, while guards threw rubbish at the escapees. In May 1992, fighters in Sarajevo began attacking with real gunfire. The civil war had at that point already ravaged large areas of Croatia and inflicted devestation and ethnic cleansing on the multiethnic republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Top lista nadrealista Sketches, 1984–91, film stills courtesy of the artists
Top lista nadrealista Former Yugoslavia
Top lista nadrealista Sketches, 1984–91, film stills courtesy of the artists
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Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez Colombia b. 1991
Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez works in a variety a media, collaboratively working on socially engaged projects, writing, editing, and curating. In Colombia he has had two solo exhibitions, Cabezas Calientes, Paraíso Bajo (2017), and Mientras tanto en el mundo, Más Allá (2016), and has participated in group exhibitions at the Valenzuela Klenner Gallery (2017); Espacio KB (2016); and Casa Rat Trap (2015). Internationally he has been involved in fairs such as the Art Book Fair of Bergen, Norway (2015), and Feira Plana, São Paulo, Brazil (2015). Most recently he participated in a group show in The Box Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). He studied art and political science, and currently investigates the mysteries of ‘Viche’, a handcrafted drink made by Afro-descendant communities on the Colombian pacific coast.
In the northwest state of Chocó in Colombia, bright colourful beads can be found in traditional clothing, ornaments, and amulets used by the indigenous Embera people, and in hairstyles worn by many AfroColombians living in this region. Throughout the twentieth century and to the present, both social groups have been marginalised from the state and labour market owing to governmental policy that is based on racist social hierarchies and dates back to colonial society. In recent years, the Embera people have been persecuted and forcibly displaced across the country, becoming refugees within Colombian territory. The pattern created by the beads in this work is the artist’s visual representation of human movement across a landscape. The work’s imagery appears as if it had been generated by thermal-vision technologies used by the military. Vizcaíno’s visual reference cites the thermal-vision weaponry used by the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987), which tells the story of a violent military operation in a rainforest in an anonymous South American country. The chromatic playfulness of Fiebre Súper Nórdica (2016–17) and the need for the audience to cross through this work, creates a direct relation with the body, and encourages an experience of crossing a threshold of uncertainty with the sensation of distorting space and altering perception. Fiebre Super Nórdica [detail], 2016–17, bead curtain, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez Colombia
Fiebre Super Nórdica [detail], 2016–17, bead curtain, dimensions variable courtesy of the artist
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Ian Wieczorek Ireland / UK b. 1958
Ian Wieczorek’s practice is primarily based in painting, installation, and curating. He has presented recent solo shows in: Galerie Katakomby, Brno (2015); Queen Street Studios, Belfast (joint show, 2014); and The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon (2013). He has exhibited widely in group shows in Ireland and internationally.
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Wieczorek’s practice looks at how the digitisation of everyday life shapes the dynamics of contemporary society, in particular our social and cultural identity and notions of citizenship. Wieczorek makes paintings that are based on low-res digital images found on the internet. Stripped of their specific contexts, the images assume a more malleable, subjective significance that transcends the original. They also establish a dialogue between painting — a traditional visual medium — and contemporary digital media. The ‘found’ low-res images are presented as objects of aesthethic consideration in their own right. In the series Crossing (2017), blurred figures are seen mounting fences, walls, and presumably crossing borders — geographical, political, and cultural. While the phenomenon of borders and attempts at controlling the movement of people has existed throughout history, current political events have brought this to the fore. In his paintings, Wieczorek presents the border as an imposed but permeable construct — a hope for those who aim to heroically cross it.
Participation in EVA International supported by the British Council.
Crossing #12 and Crossing #2, 2017, oil on canvas, each 25 × 30 cm courtesy of the artist
Ian Wieczorek Ireland / UK
Crossing #4 and Crossing #7, 2017, oil on canvas, each 25 Ă— 30 cm courtesy of the artist
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Crossing #15 and Crossing #3, 2017, oil on canvas, each 25 Ă— 30 cm courtesy of the artist
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Liu Xiaodong China b. 1963 Liu Xiaodong is a figurative painter of everyday life, and a leading artist among the Chinese neorealist painters who emerged in the 1990s. Recent solo exhibitions include: Painting as Shooting, Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, (2016); Diary of an Empty City City, Faurschou Foundation, Beijing (2015); and Liu Xiaodong’s Two Projects, Shao Zhong Foundation Art Museum, Guangzhou (2014). His work has been exhibited in many group shows including: Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2018); Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); and the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014).
Comprised of five panels, approximately ten metres total in length, Xiaodong’s Hot Bed I (2005), which combines photorealism, cinematic framing, and storytelling, is a largescale painting created en plein air over approximately four weeks. It is a response to the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which was constructed on the Yangtze River in China in the mid-’90s. It is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world and when it was built more than one million people were displaced and many towns and villages were flooded. Within Hot Bed I, a temporal development and narrative unfolds, similar to ancient Chinese scroll paintings that often depict landscapes or scenes from daily life or literary or historic narratives. In the city of Fengjie, Liu painted eleven peasant labourers sitting on old mattresses on a rooftop, relaxing together in the warm sun. The artist makes visible the plight of people whose lives have been changed by the state’s attempt to resolve issues relating to water and power. Exhibited for the first time at EVA is the documentation of the making of what is considered Liu’s masterpiece — a seminal work in Chinese art history of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Documentation of Liu Xiaodong’s painting Hot Bed I, 2005 photo: Hung Liu, courtesy of the artist
Liu Xiaodong China
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Documentation of Liu Xiaodong’s painting Hot Bed I, 2005 photo: Hung Liu, courtesy of the artist
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Trevor Yeung China / Hong Kong b. 1988
Trevor Yeung’s practice comprises photographs and installations, and mostly describes human processes and relations through the lens of horticulture and botanic ecology. Using phenomena from the natural world, he stages dramatic scenarios — onto which he imposes his own rules and parameters — that are intimately connected to his own personal experiences. He graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University (2010). Solo exhibitions include: The darkroom that is not dark, Magician Space, Beijing (2017); The Sunset of Last Summer Summer, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2016); no pressure :), Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich (2015). Group shows include: Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2017); Sea Pearl White Cloud, Observation Society, Guangzhou, China (2016); and Daguerréotypes, Neptune, Hong Kong (2016).
Yeung’s Sunset Light (2017) is an installation of two candles that, at close proximity, appear to share a flame and are placed on a palm treeshaped candelabra. Audiences are invited to take part by lighting the candles, which temporarily radiate in vermilion. The piece also includes an antique bench formerly used in a British government office, a style of furniture found in Ireland, the artist’s native Hong Kong, as well as other former British colonies. In Last Summer Sunset (2016), two other palm tree-shaped candle stands are almost entirely covered in thick layers of congealed wax, which symbolise a physical trace of the candle’s existence. The presence of candles in the exhibition reminds us of a premodern source of light. By lighting a candle, a slightly romanticised gesture, the viewer is asked to engage with an alternative source of power that isn’t reliant on technology or electricity, and allows us the opportunity to contemplate the world around us in a slow, decelerated way. Through the light of a candle, like a sunset, our surroundings take on a different glow, a different speed, a dif-ferent time.
Participation in the EVA International with thanks to William Lim, Living Collection. Last Summer Sunset, 2016, candle, candle stands, wooden table, 108 × 33 × 33 cm courtesy of William Lim, Living Collection
Trevor Yeung China / Hong Kong
Jenolan Caves, New South Wales, Australia courtesy of the artist
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Sunset Light, 2016, candle with reddish orange flame, candle stand, travertine, 44 Ă— 22.5 Ă— 22.5 cm courtesy of Elaine W. NG and Fabio Rossi
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Curator Inti Guerrero Colombia b. 1983 Inti Guerrero is the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate in London. He was previously Associate Artistic Director and Curator at TEOR/éTica, a non-profit art space founded in 1999 in San José, Costa Rica. He has curated exhibitions at Tate Modern, London, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Para Site, Hong Kong, KADIST, San Francisco, and Museo de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, as well as museums and institutions in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. His writing has been published in Afterall, Art Nexus, Art Asia Pacific, and Manifesta Journal. Guerrero primarily lives and works in Hong Kong.
Three men in the interior of a penstock — one of 40 collectable Will’s Cigarette Cards released during the construction of the Shannon Scheme PG.SS.CC.28.1. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie
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Funders & Partners Principle Funders and Partners
Key Sponsors
Supporters and Partners
Programme Funders
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Board
Team
Board of Directors Mary Conlon Brian Haugh (Treasurer) Mike Fitzpatrick (Chair) Lisa Killeen Áine Nic Giolla Coda Con Quigley Kevin Roland
Curator 2018 Inti Guerrero
Graphic Design Niall Sweeney / Pony Ltd.
Director / CEO Matt Packer
Public Relations Pelham Communications
Communications Manager Emma Dwyer
Website Development Surface Impression
Members Professor Merritt Bucholz Sheila Deegan (Secretary) Declan Long Mary McCarthy Úna McCarthy Rosanne McDonnell Hugh Murray Naomi O’Nolan
Administrator Maria Casey
Art Transport Maurice Ward Joe Murphy / Irish Art Courier
Business Sub-committee Brian Haugh Ciara O’Brien Sheila Cusack Hugh Clohessy Con Quigley Dominic Punch Rachel Wong Caoimhe Walsh International Advisory Panel Omar Berrada Annie Fletcher Emily-Jane Kirwan Paul O’Neill
Production Manager Aidan Kelleher Curatorial Scholar Sara Dowling Project Manager Niamh Brown Volunteer Coordinator Bryan Hogan Public Programme Coordinator Eimear Redmond Venue Manager Kate O’Shea Education Facilitator Aisling Collins Catalogue Editor Niamh Dunphy Office Assistant Adam O’Shaughnessy Communications Assistant Emily Irwin Installation Technicians Derek O Sullivan Raymond Griffin Brian Fitzgerald Isabella Walsh Ciaran Nash Mary Conroy Kevin O’Keeffe Chris Boland
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Previous EVA International Curators 2016 Koyo Kouoh 2014 Bassam El Baroni 2012 Annie Fletcher 2010 Elizabeth Hatz 2009 Angelika Nollert and Yilmaz Dziewior 2008 Hou Hanru 2007 Klaus Ottmann 2006 Katerina Gregos 2005 Dan Cameron 2004 Zdenka Badovinac 2003 Virginia Pérez Ratton 2002 Apinan Poshyananda 2001 Salah M. Hassan 2000 Rosa Martínez 1999 Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn 1998 Paul M. O’Reilly 1996 Guy Tortosa 1995 María de Corral 1994 Jan Hoet 1993 Gloria Moure 1992 Lars Nittve 1991 Germano Celant 1990 Saskia Bos 1988 Florent Bex and Alexander Roshin 1987 Ida Panicelli 1986 Nabuo Nakamura 1985 Rudi Fuchs 1984 Peter Fuller 1982 Liesbeth Brandt Corstius 1981 Pierre Restany 1980 Brian O’Doherty 1979 Sandy Nairne 1978 Adrian Hall, Charles Harper, Theo Mcnab, Cóilín Murray 1977 Barrie Cooke, John Kelly, Brian King
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Thanks
Colophon
EVA International and Inti Guerrero would like to thank:
38th EVA International
Limerick City Gallery of Art, Úna McCarthy, Siobhan O’Reilly, Ger Moloney, and the entire team; The Hunt Museum, Dr. Jill Cousins, Naomi O’Nolan, Mark Healy, and the entire team; The Arts Council, Sheila Pratschke, Orlaith McBride, Claire Doyle, Justine Harrington, and Ben Mulligan; Limerick City and County Council Arts Office, Sheila Deegan, Dr. Pippa Little, Aoife Potter-Cogan, Lizanne Jackman, Marta Sławińska, Oonagh Kirby, Evelyn Noonan; Limerick City and County Council, Donogh O’Donoghue, Tom Cassidy, Jennifer Enright, Rory McDermott, Laura Ryan, Jayne Leahy, Matthew Tierney, Seamus Hanrahan, Pat Butler; Limerick School of Art and Design, Mike Fitzpatrick, Tracy Fahey, James Greenslade, Maria Finnucane, and Edel Hogan; Limerick Institute of Technology, Vincent Cunnane, Sue Corcoran; JP McManus Benevolent Fund, Gerry Boland, Brenda Dowling; Embassy of France in Ireland, H.E. Stéphane Crouzat, Elisabetta Sabbatini; Institut Francais, Alexandra Servel; British Council, Liz McBain, Amy Herron, Jenny White; OPW, Jacqui Moore, Marian O’Brien; Crescent Shopping Centre, Kevin Kenny, Conor Kenny, Grainne O’Rourke, John Davitt; EI Electronics, Mick Guinee, Peter Murphy; Shannon Airport, Andrew Murphy, Laura Chawke; Holmes O’Malley Sexton Solicitors, Harry Fehily; RTÉ Supporting the Arts, Maria Forde, Carol De Buitleir, Stephen Kelly; UL, Nick Ward; Creative Ireland, Madeline Boughton; RHH International, John Moran; Ormston House, Mary Conlon, Niamh Brown, and the entire team; IMMA, Sarah Glennie, Janice Hough, Christina Kennedy, Marguerite O’Molloy, Sophie Byrne, and the entire team; Maurice Ward, Mary McLoughlin, John Ward, Deirdre Donnellan, Emer Bermingham; Visual Artists Ireland, Noel Kelly, Lily Power, Bernadette Beecher, Monica Flynn, Joanne Laws, Chris Steenson; International Biennial Association, Kate Jarocki; Yana and Steven Peel; Disaphol Chansiri; William Lim; Francine Birbragher; Pelham Communications, Jasmin Pelham, Sophie da Gama Campos, Emma Gilhooly, Milly Carter Hepplewhite, Lisa Hopf and the entire team; Leahys and Partner Solicitors, Alec Gabbett; Power and Associates, Emma O’Meara; Don Reddan Insurances, Diarmuid Reddan; Liam Casey; Jennie Guy, Maeve Mulrennan, Stephen Murphy, Orlaith Treacy, Clare Breen, Ciaran Nash, Mary Conroy; Ahalin National School, Bríd Leahy; Scoil Íde Naofa, Catherine Murphy, and Marie Geoghan; Mahoonagh National School, Yvonne Condron and Allan Kelly; No.1 Pery Square, Patricia Roberts; Absolute Hotel, Melanie Lennon; Limerick City Hotel, Lauren Higgins; Tom Collins; Cosmin Costinas; Woodrow Kernohan; Van Abbe Museum, Annie Fletcher; Jeff Kelley; Eric Booth; Treaty City Brewery; Rebecca Breen; Tom Lewis; Neuveochenta, Carlos Hurtado; Frameline, Daniel Moretti; Moderna Museet, Galería Fernando Pradilla, Kirstina von Knorriing, Aram, Sarah Bennett; ESB, Brendan Delaney; Kerlin Gallery, Darragh Hogan, Bríd McCarthy, Mai Eldib, and David Fitzgerald; Prince Claus Fund, Fariba Derakhshani; Luis Fernando Pradilla. All the volunteers who are contributing their time to EVA.
Catalogue for the 2018 edition of EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick, Ireland, 14 April – 8 July 2018. Curated by Inti Guerrero. Published by EVA International Editor: Niamh Dunphy Editorial Assistants: Emma Dwyer, Emily Irwin Proofreading: Rebecca Breen Design: Pony Ltd., London Printing: Cassochrome ISBN 978-0-9576258-4-6 © EVA International 2018, authors, artists, photographers All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. ‘At the Dam’ by Joan Didion. Copyright © 1979 Joan Didion. Originally published in THE WHITE ALBUM. Reprinted by permission of the author. Front cover: Man pictured inside spiral casing of one of the penstocks at Ardnacrusha Power Station, May 1929 [detail] PG.SS.PH.112. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie Back cover: View from the Hoover Dam, 2008 photo: Niall Sweeney
EVA International — Ireland’s Biennial Registered address: Limerick City Gallery of Art Pery Square Limerick City Ireland www.eva.ie info@eva.ie Company Number: 510483 EVA International Biennial of Visual Art Limited trading as EVA International is a company limited by guarantee not having a share capital.
Early ESB print advertisement, ‘Visit the Shannon Works’, ca. 1928 MK.PA.1.141. © ESB Archives, courtesy of esbarchives.ie