ONE OF THE strangest pieces in EV+A 2009/ Reading the City, and one of the most resonant, is Seán Lynch's video installation, Peregrine Falcons Visit Moyross. Most people in Ireland know of the Moyross estate for all the wrong reasons. You could go so far as to say that it is emblematic of the failures and shortcomings of planning and social policy in urban Ireland, problems that are by no means unique to Limerick. For Lynch's video, three peregrine falcons were fitted with miniaturised video cameras and their flights recorded.
It’s not a new work, and it wasn’t made specially for EV+A, but it is completely apposite, and actually putting it together must have been very difficult. When you encounter it, you quickly realise that it’s not your typical wildlife documentary, with high-definition slow motion and a knowledgeable commentary. On the contrary, it’s rough, jagged and abrasive, and utterly compelling. The camera’s flight isn’t smooth at all: the images vibrate and shake, lurch and judder. The falcons seek out vantage points, alight abruptly on them and scan the terrain. And the rawness of the urban landscape below seems in tune with the elemental nature of the raptors.
An accompanying note indicates a rationale for linking peregrines with Moyross – endangered species juxtaposed with an approach to urban housing past its sell-by date – that sounds not entirely convincing, but really it doesn't need a rationale. When you see it, it's visceral and scary, and it just works. That's not by any means true of everything in the show at Limerick City Gallery and around the city, and each comes with an explanatory caption. Outside of City Hall, two globular street lamps are blinking. That's the work of Diango Hernandez. It's called DJ President, because the fluctuations in light are controlled by a sound trigger linked to a speech by Fidel Castro.
Hernandez is referring to the prevalence of blackouts in Havana in the 1990s as electricity was rationed successively around different districts. He lived in Havana at the time. He posits Castro as a DJ making a lightshow on an epic scale but gosh, you’d have to say he has an eccentric way of going about it. A fair proportion of what we see in EV+A consists of comparable interventions, whereby cultural connections and meanings are tweaked in mostly oblique ways. If you get the point your response might be a wry smile. If not you may be inclined to wonder if the artist made the right career choice.
This year’s EV+A consists of work selected from open submission by two curators working collaboratively, Angelika Nollert and Yilmaz Dziewior. They are both based in Germany. Open submission is a relative term. Given the make-up of the list of 36 participating artists, it’s reasonable to assume that some were encouraged to submit proposals. That might seem unfair, particularly if you happen to be an artist who submitted something off your own bat and were not accepted, but it broadens the reach of the show, and the selectors’ preferences set the tone anyway.
There was no given theme but, Nollert and Dziewior say, going through the hundreds of submissions, they realised that many artists seemed to be dealing with "the multiple perceptions of urban space". So the theme emerged from the submission and then shaped their final selection, which is fair enough. In fact, they have applied the word urban broadly. Several works venture further afield, into the rural, including Michelle Horigan's Nature Obscured by Factory, again not a new piece but an exemplary one that explores and documents the controversy over the environmental impact of the Alumina plant in the area of Askeaton, Co Limerick.
IRISH ARTISTS ACQUITthemselves very well in the overall selection. There's a new piece by Willie Doherty, Three Potential Endings, a terse video installation in which an unnamed male protagonist broods and rages. Why? Doherty doesn't explain and shuffles his character through several different settings, opening up different narrative possibilities. The work was made in 2008 and might have from the start possessed or has acquired an allegorical point. Its imposing architectural settings and its prosperous-looking lead suggests the end of the boom times, the realisation of catastrophic failure.
Photography has been slow to establish itself in contemporary Irish art but has well and truly done so now. There are several strong projects in evidence at EV+A, though not necessarily receiving their first showings. Garvan Gallagher’s set of portraits of the inhabitants of a small Co Donegal village is outstanding, and made with great generosity of spirit. Siobhan Ogilvy tracks a secret rural pathway through the patchwork of urban development in Dublin with views of the Royal Canal. Donal Sheehan has recorded street life in Temple Bar by night over a period of many years, though his intimate snapshots might be better suited to a smaller scale and less elaborate framing. Eoin O’Conaill’s photographs reflect the changing fabric of the country with great atmospheric intensity.
One of the most ambitious installations is Eamon O'Kane's Eames Studio Limerick, a really impressive work that takes its starting point from the fact that the great designer Charles Eames's grandfather emigrated from Limerick to American in the mid-1700s.
Coleman’s model of Eames’s studio and house has a playroom quality that leads to the other part of his installation, which is itself a playroom, in recognition of the fact that Eames, and Frank Lloyd Wright, were educated using the Froebel method of teaching with blocks and shapes, liberally available for use in the installation.
There’s a certain earnestness to several of the interventions.
Nevin Aladag has positioned light curtains billowing in the breeze outside the windows of the Custom House and renamed it the Curtain House. This modest gesture is taken to harbour all manner of cultural significance, not very convincingly. Andreas Fogarasi frowns upon the nicknaming of cities – such as City of Light – as vulgar marketing devices and provides a list of sarcastic alternatives.
Marjetica Potrc is able to make a point with a light touch. Her informal, cartoon-like drawings quote Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches" speech with reference to what she identifies as the two dominant emergent urban forms: the gated community and the shanty town. It's a fascinating idea that could have done with further exploration. There's lightness as well to An Te Liu's Cloud, a fantastic conglomeration of air purification appliances, all the same shade of cream and all interconnected like a swarm, suspended in the void in the hall of the City Art Gallery. But for restrictions the piece would have been even larger, but it's still outstanding.
Practical constraints also arose for Eduardo Daniel Navarro’s proposal. He wanted to make lollipops from purified Shannon water, all from a house boat floating on the river, and give them away to passers-by. You can almost hear the thud of the rule book hitting him.
Instead, he’s installed a hut, a temporary abode, near City Hall in the midst of glass recycling containers. Makeshift shelters are the theme of Olaf Unverzart’s series of photographs. He travels the word documenting the universal human instinct and necessity for making shelter with whatever means are available.
Several works seemed interminable. Jan Freuchen shows 26 internet photographs, all very similar to each other, of petrol stations damaged by extreme weather. One would have sufficed. Luis Jacob's The Album VIIis an "image bank" culled from books, magazines and other sources. It recalls Gerhard Richter's image archive, Atlas, but comes across as too diffuse and miscellaneous by comparison, perhaps partly because it doesn't refer, as Richter's does, to related works. On the whole, though, longueurs are rare in what is, for EV+A, a relatively concise and generally user-friendly exhibition.
EV+A 2009/Reading the City, Limerick City Gallery of Art (and five other city centre venues), Pery Square, until May 24
