The 41st edition, It Takes a Village, might just pull off its somewhat hokey aspirations
The title of Eszter Szakács’s guest curator programme for the 41st edition of EVA International – It Takes a Village – risks setting a tone of hokey, barn-raising positivity. The phrase originated, some say, as an African proverb: a time-honoured adage, espousing community participation in childrearing. Put to use, however, as the headline theme of Ireland’s Limerick-based biennial, this familiar slogan might make a corny kind of sense: declaring, within the frequently unforgiving public context of a citywide exhibition, an upbeat, come-together ethos.
Accordingly, Hungarian curator Szakács – a seasoned researcher on models of solidarity through her work with the Off-Biennale Budapest, the Kyiv Biennial and more besides – invokes the ‘village’ axiom to proclaim belief in art as a socially energising, cocreative endeavour. Unifying moments of political activism or public assembly thus feature prominently within Szakács’s sensibly scaled guest programme (23 artists, collectives or partnerships, across 13 relatively central locations). In collaboration with local fabricators, ruangrupa member Reza Afisina presents, for instance, to have heart like Grass, holds up and stand fast (2025), a modest pop-up and pack-away platform for community-led performances and projects: a portable structure, barely the size of an eight-seater dining table, made to host an open-call schedule of inclusive creative work. Ana Bravo-Pérez’s If we remain silent (2023), at Limerick City Gallery of Art, is a beautifully fragile analogue-film installation, a Rosa Barba-like kinetic sculpture made from extending loops of filmstrip, showing, on projection screens framed with intricate toquilla straw weavings, ten feminist campaigners staging protest-performances outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Wall-graphs, threaded with loops of film, map the context: women’s role in resisting ecological destruction and lasting colonial exploitation in ‘Abya Yala’ (an Indigenous term for much of South and Central America). Also at the City Gallery, Yazan Khalili displays a collection of 28 football-style scarves, entitled All The Languages of Our Tongues (2025), each one emblazoned with a distinct, but incomplete, text (‘Our bones like a beam of light that is’ / ‘Growing from the soil to what is left of…’). If worn together by a gathered body of people, the individual lines link up as a coherent poem: a hopeful paean to the promise of solidarity. (Proceeds on sales of the scarves will be distributed to grassroots organisations in Palestine.)
These and a number of other geographically diverse contributors (such as Family Connection from the Caribbean island of Curaçao, and the damdam ‘collective of collectives’, a further off-shoot of ruangrupa’s Indonesian-born ‘Lumbung’ initiative), press the case for art’s civic significance in terms of cooperative effort and shared achievement. And yet, paradoxically, what often best distinguishes Szakács’ selections – and enriches the guiding concept – is uneasiness with confident expressions of group identity.
Eoghan Ryan’s agitated video Carceral Jigs (2025), a standalone, single-screen installation at the small terraced-house venue Starling, jump-cuts between footage spotlighting contradictory visions of Irish national experience. This deliberately jarring miscellany includes: digitally animated recreations of a popular children’s TV character from the 1970s and 80s (an awful squealing red-haired puppet who addressed audiences both in English and Irish); fragmented, sinister, up-close sequences documenting recent far-right anti-immigrant protests in Dublin; and archival clips of the former Mosney holiday camp north of the capital, an Irish version of Britain’s Butlin’s resorts, repurposed over recent decades as a centre of ‘direct provision’ for international-protection applicants. (A widely criticised, almost prisonlike paradigm of asylum support, hindering proper integration of resident families into the wider society.) More meditative but equally charged with nationalist complexities, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty’s US-focused indirect fire (2025) combines slo-mo shots of dazzling Inauguration Day firework displays on one screen with, on another, fragments of text drawn from conversations about environ- mental damage with the ‘New River Valley Citizens for Arsenal Accountability’, a cohort of activists based in Radford, Virginia – home to America’s largest munitions factory and its preeminent pyrotechnics company.
Clinton and Moriarty wear their extensive research lightly, elegantly pairing extravagant demonstrations of bombastic patriotism with elliptical allusions to alternative, resistant solidarities. Alongside indirect fire at the One Opera Square venue (one of several nongallery spaces adapted for the EVA exhibition), other tidily self-contained installations further nuance the ‘village’ narrative. Through the production of small books, delicate ceramic figurines and a spoken word video-performance, for example, Gideon Horváth’s The Most Dangerous Person (2025) elaborates on interviews with representatives of sexual minorities in small-town Hungary: dialogues dealing with everyday fears triggered by stigmatising, authoritarian government policies. (From one of the printed interviews: ‘Do you ever get explicit attacks or insults here in the countryside?’, ‘Of course… because I’m not getting married, because I’m not having children.’) Village life, as described through Horváth’s one-to-one encounters, is manifestly, for some, more threatening than nurturing.
Szakács’s EVA programme is bookended by a busy timetable of live events, enhanced by institutional collaborations (among them Bíodh Orm Anocht [Be With Me Tonight], an involving four-artist reflection on folk knowledge at Ormston House) and supplemented by a modest array of additional ‘platform commissions’ (selected by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter). Loosely themed around the subject of ‘access’, the latter include Call Centre Sound Structure, a project by Éireann and I (Joselle Ntumba and Beulah Ezeugo) that gives fresh-feeling voice to accounts of identity and marginalisation, reimagining the dreary routine of a ‘customer care’ conversation – a drag for the caller, a deadening necessity for the call-centre worker – as a potential occasion of intimate communication. Headphones on, visitors sink into beanbags, listening to challenging stories of Black life in present-day Ireland. It’s a neat, testing form-and-content contrast (intended or not). On the one hand, we participate in the convivial comforts of a contemplative artwork, with its invitation to be at rest, to join with others in the shared activity of paying meaningful attention. On the other, we hear chronicles of pressure and precarity in the daily lives of migrant workers – lightly fictionalised perspectives on the many enduring barriers to civic, national, cultural or economic ‘access’. In this productively contradictory way, perhaps, Éireann and I’s work typifies something of the broader outlook and curatorial ethos of EVA 2025: staging a welcoming situation to address – or discover, or debate – uncomfortable complexities of social connection and disconnection, inclusion and exclusion.
41st EVA International, Various venues, Limerick, through 26 October
From the October 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
Read Next The 40th edition of the Limerick biennial, titled The Gleaners Society, took a polemical look at the modern Republic of Ireland, wrote Rebecca O’Dwyer.
