Launch of Ireland’s Representation at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, today (Thursday 15 February) launched Ireland’s Representation at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia at the Mansion House. Artist Eimear Walshe, with curator Sara Greavu and Project Arts Centre, has been selected to represent Ireland at the prestigious event. The department, through Culture Ireland, commissions Ireland’s representation in Venice in partnership with the Arts Council.

The Venice Architecture Biennale, which will run from 20 April to 24 November 2024, remains the most important global platform for the exhibition of visual arts involving the public, members of civil society, individuals and institutions. It offers a unique opportunity for Irish artists to engage with international audiences.

Responding to this year’s theme, Foreigners Everywhere - selected by curator of the Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa, the Irish Pavilion as it’s known is entitled ROMANTIC IRELAND. It will comprise a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an immersive earth-built sculpture. Eimear Walshe’s project explores the complex politics of collective building through the Irish tradition of the ‘meitheal’: a group of workers, neighbours, kith and kin who come together to build.

Minister Martin said:

The video work was shot on location at the sustainable skills centre, Common Knowledge, based deep in the Burren, on Ireland’s west coast. It features a group of seven performers led by choreographer Mufutau Yusuf. The soundtrack is an opera describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe.

Ireland at Venice 2024 will build on Ireland’s strong presence at the La biennale di Venezia. In recent years, Ireland has been represented by Niamh O’Malley with TBG+S and by Eva Rothschild in an exhibition curated by Mary Cremin. Project Arts Centre previously presented Jesse Jones’ Tremble Tremble at Venice in 2017, curated by Tessa Giblin.

Following its presentation in Venice, ROMANTIC IRELAND will tour Ireland in 2025 supported by the Arts Council. Recreating elements of the installation in each venue, the Irish tour will enable the Irish public to experience Eimear Walshe’s work. A film documentary of the project is also being made.

ROMANTIC IRELAND is representative of what Sara Greavu the project’s curator describes as:

“a swelling Irish cultural revival, increasingly visible across artforms that has received national and international interest. Walshe’s work is not nostalgic or relying on imagined mythologies, and it is not nativist, but is opening out and reconfiguring, sensitively displacing and embracing these elements as it prefigures alternative social relationships.”

ROMANTIC IRELAND

Through a practice that spans video, sculpture, publishing, sound, and performance, Eimear Walshe’s work traces the legacies of late 19th century land contestation in Ireland and its relation to private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment.

ROMANTIC IRELAND comprises a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an immersive sculpture. Set on the site of an unfinished earth build, the video stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from the 19th – 21st centuries.

These figures occupy an abstracted ruin, a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. The pavilion soundtrack is a five-voice opera describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe.

Walshe’s project depicts a frenzied and fraught engagement with the ancient labour-intensive practice of earth building, a form of construction with an 11,000 year history and local iterations across the world. The video work was shot on location at the sustainable skills centre, Common Knowledge, on Ireland’s west coast. Led by choreographer Mufutau Yusuf, a group of seven performers, including the artist, enact characters in constantly rupturing historical dyads. This was filmed on four mobile phones passed between each actor, blurring the traditional distinction between director, performer and camera person.

Made in the shadow of the ongoing housing crisis in Ireland, the installation becomes, variously, a building site of possibility, a wrestling ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonisms, a space of tender care, and a structure made into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction. The exhibition forces encounters between historic moments, and draws out their parallel power dynamics and affective registers; their forms of labour, conflict and pleasure; the entangled histories of sexuality, property and the state.

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Biographies

Eimear Walshe (b. Longford, 1992, they/them) is an artist from Longford, Ireland. Their work traces the legacy of late 19th-century land contestation in Ireland through private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment. They travel across the island of Ireland, screening, reading, and performing their work. They have recently exhibited with Van Abbemuseum, EVA International, the National Sculpture Factory, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, with work held in the collections of the Arts Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Speaking about their work in general, Walshe explains: “I'm very interested in what's called local history, or even family history, or queer history. But the more you look at it you realise that all history is local history. All history is family history.... The other thing with history, coming from a queer perspective, is there's always the notion in the back of your mind about erasure — like what gets left behind in the moment, and what gets abandoned in the future; what stories get let go of and can never be told."

Sara Greavu (she/her) lives and works between Derry and Dublin and is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. A researcher, writer and organiser, Greavu’s recent projects include the archive exhibition We realised the power of it, at EVA International in collaboration with Ciara Phillips and former members of Derry Film and Video Workshop. An iteration of this work will open in IMMA in March 2024.

Project Arts Centre was founded by artists in 1966 and was Ireland’s first arts centre. As Ireland’s foremost centre for the development and presentation of contemporary arts, Project offers the public over 600 events annually & reaches an audience of over 50,000 people, as well as supporting the presentation of work, and national & international touring, by independent artists.

Romantic Ireland is commissioned by Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council Ireland with principal sponsorship from Dublin City Council for Ireland at Venice 2024.

To date, support and funding partners include:

• Culture Ireland
• Arts Council of Ireland
• Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
• Dublin City Council
• National Museum of Ireland
• Longford County Council
• Limerick School of Art and Design
• Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT)
• UCD School of Art History
• the Embassy of Ireland Italy
• Keith and Yvonne Browne
• Peter Crowley
• Paul Gannon and Anna Devlin
• Gerard and Monica Flood
• Emma and Fred Goltz
• Helen Kinsella
• Adrian and Jennifer O'Carroll
• Louise Church
• Paul Duggan - Gardiner Group
• Kathy Gilfillan
• Simone Janssens
• Ann Kennedy
• Paul McGowan
• Lochlann Quinn
• Dave Raethorne
• Odette Rocha
• Richard Whelan