Irish Pavilion, Irelandat Venice Biennale of Art - Arsenale, Castello - City of Venice
Exhibition in progress from April 20th to November 26th 2024
The 60th Biennale Arte will open to the public on April 20. But on the 17th, 18th and 19th there will be the various events and collateral events that always enliven
suddenly Venetian artistic life. The awards ceremony will take place the day of opening to the public.
The title of the 60th edition of the Art Biennale is Foreigners Everywhere - Foreigners Everywhere.
The exhibition will be divided into between the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale, including 213 artists from 88 nations. There are 26 Italian artists, 180 first participations in the International Exhibition, 1433 works and objects on display, 80 new productions.
Go to the page of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
Curator of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
The 2024 edition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
– Adriano Pedrosa (born 1965) is a Brazilian curator. He is the artistic director of the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) and the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Icelandic Pavilion, Iceland at 59th Biennale Arte of Venice
The title of the exhibition at the Irish Pavilion is Romantic Ireland.
Artists: Eimear Walshe.
Curators: Sara Greavu and Project Arts Centre.
Commissioner: Culture Ireland.
Seat: Irish Pavilion, Arsenale - Venice
Press Release of Irish Pavilion
Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council is
delighted to present ROMANTIC IRELAND, an exhibition by
Eimear Walshe curated by Sara Greavu and Project Arts Centre
for the Irish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of
La Biennale di Venezia.
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 explores the complex politics of collective
building through the Irish tradition of the meitheal: a gang of
workers, neighbours, kith and kin who come together to build,
harvest and cooperate in mutual aid. It 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.
“There are a lot of insights from Irish history that we owe
it to the wider world to share,” Walshe states. “Life on the
island — its history of colonisation, revolution, and partition —
provides so many opportunities to re-enact historical traumas,
so many invitations to betrayal of our past, our neighbours,
and ourselves. We are a colonised nation, and yet we aid in the
colonisation of others. Some of us were dispossessed, and went
on to do the same ourselves. History doesn’t split the difference.
This is where the work for Venice emerges from.”
ROMANTIC IRELAND is representative of what curator
Sara Greavu 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.”
Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and
Media, Catherine Martin TD, comments: “I wish Eimear Walshe,
Sara Greavu, and Project Arts Centre the very best of luck
as they represent Ireland at the 2024 Venice Biennale. This
is an enormous achievement and opportunity for both artist
and country. Participation at the Venice Biennale increases
awareness of Ireland’s strong visual arts sector and provides
the artist with an international platform for their work. My
Department through Culture Ireland commissions Ireland
at Venice in partnership with the Arts Council, and it is an
important date in our cultural calendar. I’m wishing everyone
involved the very best of luck at the Biennale this year.”
ROMANTIC IRELAND is on view at the Biennale Arte 2024
from 20 April to 24 November, 2024. After Venice, Walshe’s
exhibition will tour nationally through 2025, returning to
locations and communities across Ireland that have helped to
inspire and foster the making of the work.
Useful information for the visit
Hours:
Gardens from 10.00 to 19.00. Arsenale from 10.00 to 19.00 (from 10.00 to 20.00 on Friday and Saturday until September 30th). Closed on Mondays (except April 22, June 17, July 22, September 2, September 30, October 31, November 18).
Tickets: please visit the official website.
Phone: +39.041.5218711; fax +39.041.2728329
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: Biennale
of Venice |
