Artists’ Organising
Looking back at art works and projects hosted by EVA International and Limerick city through the lens of artists' organising follows EVA’s own history. Founded by Limerick artists’ in 1977 as an annual exhibition platform, then called ‘eva’ (exhibition of visual arts), it became remodelled as a biennial in 2012, adopting the identity ‘EVA International - Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art’ – the format that remains in existence today.
Artists’ organising – which seems to run parallel to the written and unwritten histories of art – can also take many forms and aims. Arguably, however, what they have in common is a grassroots level interest in doing something for a community’s ‘common good,’ especially in cases when supporting and governing structures have failed or did not even exist to begin with.
Among others, these projects not only identify historical, political, social ruptures – such as the subjugation of and discrimination against women in art and life – but they also present an organised form in which actions can be taken (Women Artists Action Group and Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment). Others are artistic as well as life experiments, such as self-sufficient and autonomous modes of living (Tamás Kaszás), creating an artist-led alternative to (state) news broadcasting (Journal Rappé), to initiating a discussion forum (Art Links Limerick), or building an infrastructure for pan-African publishing (Chimurenga).
Since 2012 EVA editions have been underpinned by ‘turbulent times’ that the catalogue essays reference: The Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, the referendum about the legalisation of abortion in Ireland, the pandemic, or the still ongoing full scale Russian military invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the legacy of British colonisation in Ireland was the point of departure for the 2016 EVA International, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. Against this backdrop, together with the currently ongoing genocide in Palestine, looking back at projects of artists organising for a better future or at projects in which art appears as a strategic tool to understand past histories and chart future scenarios (Eric Baudelaire) might offer a handrail in these dark times. Such as, Five Principle No-s: Make No Promises, Take No Prisoners, Do No Harm, Go No Further, Kill No More (Raqs Media Collective + Iswanto Hartono).
– Eszter Szakács (2025)
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Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam, where she is taking part in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. In 2023 Szakács curated the research-cum-solo exhibition Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We Are Together at de Appel in Amsterdam. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, she co-edited Solidarity Must Be Defended, the recently published anthology of visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realised and failed, during the Cold War. Szakács as part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest were recipients of the Goethe Medal award (2023) and lumbung members and participants at documenta fifteen (2022). Szakács was a curatorial team member in OFF-Biennale’s second (2017) and third edition (2021) and a member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest—part of the East-Central European independent network tranzit/org—where, among others, she curated the Budapest premier of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2018), co-curated the exhibition Imagining Conceptual Art: László Beke’s 1971 Collection in an International Context (tranzitdisplay, Prague, 2017), co-edited the online international journal Mezosfera (2016–2020), and the collaborative Curatorial Dictionary (2012–2018), which was also a participant in the travelling exhibition Publishing Against the Grain (2017–2023), organised by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.