Art News

Eimear Walshe in Venice

Representing Ireland at the 60th Venice Biennale, Eimear Walshe (they/them) presents Romantic Ireland, curated by Sara Greavu with Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Eimear Walshe in Venice
Related Issue

Share

Representing Ireland at the 60th Venice Biennale, Eimear Walshe (they/them) presents Romantic Ireland, curated by Sara Greavu with Project Arts Centre, Dublin. The work is a multi-TV installation with video shot using mobile phones and an opera soundtrack, set into earth-built walls. Its libretto tells of an 1840s eviction where a dying man’s house is demolished as he laments his former home.

Walshe was born in 1992 and is part of a generation that has been especially impacted by the ongoing housing crisis. Time is collapsed in the plot – the work is set on the building site where the future home will be demolished. Walshe states, ‘There’s a before, during and after at play in the life of a building. The way that eviction impacts people’s lives alongside the built environment shows this symbiotic dependency between people and houses. It is a very different model from property ownership.’

Walshe transposes the horrors of pre-independence Ireland’s land-tenure system onto the present.

Effectively, Walshe transposes the horrors of pre-independence Ireland’s land-tenure system onto the present. Each character wears ‘authentic’ costume, but with their faces and heads covered in a mud-coloured gimp mask. The masks can reference the balaclava of violent political resistance, with the gimp a submissive partner in bondage or sadomasochistic sexual practices. Walshe’s work connects lack of property to a lack of privacy, or as they assertively asked in the work The Land Question (2020), ‘Anyway, look, the way I see it, there’s one, and only one, land question: where the fuck am I supposed to have sex!?’

This year’s Biennale, titled ‘Strangers Everywhere’, is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who sets the megashow against global crises involving migration and issues of identity, nationality and social disparities. Pedrosa’s definition of strangers encompasses minorities and LGBTQIA+ people and privileges indigeneity. Pedrosa’s vision has been criticised by some for flattening out the cultural contradictions and distinctions in a global commons. Walshe’s clever excavation of Irish history and unruly subversion of its clichés avoids these pitfalls, managing to enact a precise cultural moment, while simultaneously thinking globally and differentiating between speaking about the world and acting in it. Romantic Ireland shows at the Irish Pavilion in Venice until 21 November.

Seán Kissane

More Art News

Photography and nature
Art News

Photography and nature

Photography’s power to influence our perception of the natural world and its fragility has been gaining impact with the rise in awareness of climate change.


Continue Reading
Revitalising Irish towns
Art News

Revitalising Irish towns

Touring Ireland over the past six months, ‘The Reason of Towns’ celebrates the design qualities of Irish towns and aims to motivate people to choose them as a place to live.


Continue Reading
RDS Visual Art Awards
Art News

RDS Visual Art Awards

The winner of the 2024 RDS Taylor Art Award, given to the most promising emerging visual artist of the year in Ireland and worth €10,000, is Sorcha Browning.


Continue Reading
Shopping cart0
There are no products in the cart!
Continue shopping
0