Reading the City
March 14 – May 24, 2009
CURATORS: ANGELIKA NOLLERT &
YILMAZ DZIEWIOR (GERMANY)
City-wide venues in Limerick City, Ireland
OPEN e v + a 2009, Ireland’s pre-eminent annual exhibition of contemporary art, now in its 33rd year, opens to the public on March 14th. Selected by Angelika Nollert and Yilmaz Dziewior (please refer to CVs below) the exhibition will present the work of 36 artists drawn from 14 countries of Continental Europe, Asia and the Americas. A variety of art-formal and alternative sites throughout Limerick’s city – centre chosen by the curators include the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Istabraq Hall at Limerick City Hall, the Hunt Museum, the former Art College among others.Artists participating in OPEN e v+ a 2009 / Reading the City:
Nevin Aladag (Turkey/Germany); Andreas Bunte (Germany); Lynda Devenney (Ireland); Willie Doherty (N.Ireland); Andrea Faciu (Romania/Germany); Andreas Fogarasi (Austria); Jan Freuchen (Norway); Garvan Gallagher (Ireland); William Hamilton (Ireland); Diango Hernandez (Cuba/Germany); Michele Horrigan (Ireland); Florian Hüttner (Germany); Luis Jacob (Canada); Daniel Knorr (Romania/Germany); Jakob Kolding (Denmark/Germany); Nicky Larkin (Ireland); An Te Liu (Canada); Sean Lynch (Ireland); Eduardo Daniel Navarro (Argentina); Vukasin Nedeljkovic (Serbia/Ireland); Seamus Nolan (Ireland); Isabella Oberländer (Austria/Ireland); Eoin O’Conaill (Ireland); Siobhan Ogilvy (Ireland); David O’Kane (Ireland); Eamon O’Kane (Ireland); John O’Reilly (Ireland); Alan Phelan (Ireland); Marjetica Potrč (Slovenia); Gavin Redmond (Ireland); Tom Ryan (Ireland); Jochen Schmith (Germany); Donal Sheehan (Ireland); Nicole Six/Paul Petritsch (Austria); Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Greece); Olaf Unverzart (Germany).
About the Curators:
Angelika Nollert, born 1966, studied art history, archaeology and German philology in Würzburg and Münster (Phd. 1997) worked on exhibition projects at a number of museums, including the Sculpture Projects in Münster 1997; as Curator of the Portikus Frankfurt/Main (1997-2000); asProject Manager for Documenta11 (2001); Project Manager, Visual Arts at the Siemens Arts Program, Munich (2002-2007). Since 2007, the Director,The New Museum for Art and Design, Nureberg.
Yilmaz Dziewior
born 1964, studied art history in Bonn and London; (Phd.Thesis on Mies van der Rohe). Independent Curator, critic and catalogue essayist; published regularly in Artforum, Camera Austria and Texte zur Kunst; Freelance curator, MuseumLudwig, Cologne (1997, 1999-2000); Director, Kunstverein, Hamburg (2001-08); Professor Art Theory (2003-2009), Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg.
2009 Curators’ Statement:
This exhibition is about the multiple perception of urban space. As a theme ‘Reading’ in this context develops two perspectives. It refers to the reception of City as a linguistic structure, to the ‘limerick’ as a famous poetic structure, and most of all, the title reacts to those artists’ approaches that deal with urban questions from different angles within a great variety of media: installations, photography, drawings and paintings as well as text and sound pieces and performances. They negotiate how the city can be read, identified and classified; they comment on how place is generated, transformed and developed within political, economic, cultural and social aspects. How is identity shaped through the place one lives in? How can a city be characterized through architecture, sound, found material and the surfaces of traces?
The exhibition negotiates the validity of a portrait of a city and its inhabitants
The broad selection of 36 artists from 15 countries, deal with these topics showing both the urgency of the issues and their individual approach to them. A lot of new and extensive projects are especially developed for “OPEN e v+ a 2009 / Reading the City.”
The different venues and their specific history can be read as signifiers of different aspects of Limerick’s past and present: the historical buildings of the Limerick City Gallery of Art as the former City Library and Museum, the Hunt Museum as the former Custom House, as well as the modernist architecture of the old Limerick School of Art and Design on George’s Quay and the postmodern City Hall. They indicate the central social tasks of cultural accumulation, education, learning and administration.
For more information, please call e v + a at +353 (0) 61 318240 or +353 (0) 87 9477042 and visit www.eva.ie and info@eva.ie
