ROMANTIC IRELAND
Eimear Walshe
Curated by Sara Greavu and Project Arts Centre
Commissioned by Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council Ireland
With principal sponsorship from Dublin City Council for Ireland at Venice 2024
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.
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.
Read more about the project here.
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