“It takes a village to raise a child” is the seemingly benign proverb titling Ireland’s contemporary art biennial, the latest iteration of which (curated by Eszter Szakács) runs across thirteen venues in Limerick. The villages represented within are varied, but the majority of artists shown are Irish. This bucks the biennial model that brings in artists and art mavens from each continent for the sort of hooley that seems off-key in an era characterized by violent dispossession. Most other artists here come from the Global South, albeit via the Netherlands, where Szakács studies. One unrecognized state preoccupies all the villagers, and lots of townsfolk too. Ireland’s public support for Palestine is pronounced, identifying with it through its own lived experience of colonization, military occupation, and media control. In Limerick, the Palestine flag is everywhere: pinned to lapels, taped to windows, billowing across city squares. A lot of the artists gathered are trying to make sense of our world by finding novel forms and new allegiances (or “villages”) to challenge modern statecraft.
At One Opera Square, the ground floor of a new city block, Naeem Mohaiemen’s A Missing Can of Film (2025) is curtained off. It is a forty-two-minute requiem for filmmaker Zahir Raihan, who disappeared in January 1972, just weeks after Bangladesh’s independence was declared. Mohaiemen juxtaposes Raihan’s commercial films with his more critical ones (like Stop Genocide, 1971), sometimes in split-screen, representing both his lauded status in East Pakistan and his wariness of the state. Cut between sections filmed last year in the eerie Film Development Corporation (emptied of management after a student uprising in Dhaka), the question of where Raihan and his missing film canisters lie is asked through intertitles, which—though compelling—seem insufficient to articulating the political complications that came of his vanishing. Though that task may take a lifetime.
Noor Abuarafeh’s twenty-minute lecture performance, An Orange Tree, An Olive Tree and a Painting That Knows No Borders (2024/25), was held in a darkened event space at the rear of The Cinema Café. She guided attendees with a diaristic account of biweekly group walks on the peripheries of the West Bank. Onto a screen were projected photographs of what is there now: settlements and failed pine forestation schemes. Then came slides of landscape paintings with indigenous vegetation that both recall Palestine’s past and help conjure a picture of its renewal, a future dense with orange, olive, and pomegranate trees. It was a contrast evocative enough to devastate, and the audience sat motionless long after she had concluded. This stillness found its counterpoint in the circulation of Yazan Khalili’s limited edition football scarves bought and worn by many on the opening weekend (All the Languages of Our Tongues, 2025). Twelve distinctly colored scarves host Khalili’s twenty-four-line poem (also hung at Limerick City Gallery of Art, LGCA) reflecting on unity and proximity in a time of genocide. Weaving through the streets of Limerick, the wearers trailed its silent chorus.
International relations are explored by many of the Irish cohort. In Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty’s indirect fire (2025), fireworks explode over the White House in a spectacular sequence displayed on a large upright monitor. On an adjacent floor-bound screen, short phrases appear before dissolving: “a barrage / of strikes / fiery trails / of burning matter / fall from the sky / setting the ground alight.” They describe fireworks or bombs (or both) which are produced at Radford, a US munitions plant in the Appalachian Mountains that equips the United States military, who land and refuel their warplanes not twenty kilometers from here, at Shannon Airport. As with Abuarafeh, the withheld images are as searing as what’s screened.
Ireland’s political complicities were under scrutiny throughout the show. Eimear Walshe’s LANCERS / LOVERS (2025) is a choreography for two Irish dancers wearing cheap business suits and latex masks, part gimp, part terrorist. Between set dances (accompanied by three masked Irish musicians), the dominated and the colonized wrestle for control, representing a country mangled by economic self-interest and a brutalizing kind of love. Eoghan Ryan’s Carceral Jigs (2025) is a video that digitally animates Bosco, a red-haired puppet beloved by Irish children of the 1980s, now frayed at the edges. It’s a proxy for the question of what could have been before a rogue neo-liberalism set in—its image cut between footage of far-right demos with bozos in baseball caps holding placards reading, “Ireland Is Full,” and that of activist Lucky Khambule, campaigning for asylum seekers incarcerated in the appalling “direct provision” scheme, who asks, “full of what?” Éireann and I’s Call Centre Sound Structure (2025) is an audio work reflecting the necessary voice modulations of migrant call center workers who must navigate “different shifts, different desks, different versions of yourself” in the lower echelons of Ireland’s technology sector.
Olivia Normile’s Limits and Demonstrations (2025) provided welcome delight, set within in a dark stone outbuilding used as storage (and an annual Santa grotto) for a local theater company. A film shot on Super 8 glances at objects in charity shops, focusing in on the doleful eyes of a ceramic Dalmatian and the vacant stares of pre-loved teddies carefully enough to transport us into their forlorn world. Nearby, a video of the artist wrestling a black pup pauses on the image of his paws standing beside the claw ends of table legs, almost identical. It’s a mischievous reminder that we are surrounded by non-human possibilities, formations, and bonds, if we let loose enough to see them. An animated interest in the animal runs through the work of Anikó Loránt at LGCA. This delicate set of drawings imagines strange hybrids—owl-man, fish-woman—rendered in pencil, their contours wetted by watercolors or framed by hatched graphite patterns. They are troubling, melancholy works.
Touch points between the natural and spiritual continue at Ormston House, including a set of “sculptural scenarios” by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. She presents three salmon-colored blocks of Himalayan rock salt, often given to large animals for their saliva glands and digestive systems. Her rocks have been shaped by the licks of equine therapy ponies and are elevated on an ash stanchion, dripping slowly onto the floor. It’s perversely captivating viewing, like watching a pain being released.
Nearby is Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh’s Caoimhín (2022/25), carefully thrown and glazed ceramics based on his father’s colon, consumed by cancer. The work connects to his glass fish innards Triploid / Diploid (2025), made with glass blower Andrea Spencer, at Sadlier’s, the nearby fish and poultry shop. “There’s not everyone who can make something like that,” says Ray, who works there, gesturing at Ó Dochartaigh’s fish entrails blown in colored glass and suspended from the ceiling. “It’s fabulous.” The work is beautiful to behold, but it is serious, too. The entrails are studies of how the brown trout has colonized Lough Fad, a lake in Donegal, by eating the indigenous fish, Arctic char. The stomach is the body’s most communicative organ. It will starve or save us, and it will often keep the score—refusing to digest half-buried pasts. Ó Dochartaigh is the biennial’s sole representative from the north of Ireland, and his is a deep meditation on conflict’s malignant aftermath. This extraordinary set of works brings everything together here, all this feeling, this grieving.
There are details I could nitpick. But EVA has produced a biennial that is worlds away from those that feign international concerns without addressing imperialism’s current victims. EVA’s 2025 offering is what some of us needed instead, a temporary refuge inside a little old town with work full of thought and heart—and guts.