Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media, Catherine Martin T.D. has announced the selection of artist, Eimear Walshe to represent Ireland at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024.
The Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious international platforms for the visual arts, attracting over half a million visitors, including global curators, gallerists, art critics, and artists.
Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre Sara Greavu, working with and Project Arts Centre, will serve as the curator for Walshe's Venice exhibition. Previous Irish artists selected to feature at the Art Biennale include Niamh O'Malley (2022), Eva Rothchild (2019) and Jesse Jones (2017).
Comhghairdeas Eimear Walshe, Sara Greavu & @projectarts! They will represent Ireland at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale@la_Biennale is one of the most important international platforms for visual artists
— Catherine Martin TD (@cathmartingreen) June 8, 2023
Delighted we'll be so strongly represented next year pic.twitter.com/cLN9ZcZezq
Eimear Walshe is an artist from Longford. Their work is made public through sculpture, publishing, video, performance and lectures, or combinations of these forms.
Their practice is based on research in fiscal and sexual economies and histories, working to reconcile the aesthetics, values and tastes of their queer and rural subjectivity.
Their pavilion for Venice 2024 will 'offer a new cultural synthesis that links our contemporary moment to the past, particularly to gendered and sexual legacies related to the history of land and housing'.
Eimear Walshe said: "I'm very proud to be representing Ireland at Venice this coming April. My practice is deeply enriched by being embedded in Ireland, in a place, and with people, so beloved to me. At the same time, my work emerges from the context of a nation in escalating crisis; this is the subject of my work. With Sara Greavu as curator, we aim to make a pavilion in tribute to those who persist, against the odds, in being shelter for each other."
Following the Venice showing, the work will return to Ireland on a national tour, supported by the Arts Council.
Curator Sara Greavu said: "The Venice Biennale offers an incredible opportunity to connect the ideas, practices and urgencies of contemporary art in Ireland to those of artists, thinkers and publics internationally. Eimear Walshe’s extraordinary work speaks of and from a precarious generation, and proposes new ways to claim a sense of kinship, place and love; refusing estrangement from history and community, language and tradition. We are so thrilled to work with them for Ireland's representation in Venice."
