EVA International is delighted to announce the curatorial team for the 41st EVA International—Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. The appointments include Eszter Szakács as Curator of the Guest Programme, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter as Selectors of EVA’s Platform Commissions initiative, and members of the EVA team led by EVA Director Matt Packer. The 41st EVA International is due to take place across Limerick city, Ireland from August 29 to October 26, 2025.
In a statement of her appointment, Szakács writes: “I am honoured to be appointed as Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International. My proposal is grounded in the practice of sharing and working together horizontally, to facilitate a process of reciprocal exchanges. I am excited to work in a newly collaborative way with EVA International, from exhibition-making, through infrastructure-building, to circular modes of hosting. I believe that such a collaboration with EVA—and interconnected circles of artists, practitioners, and thinkers—is an opportunity to forge a new path for what an international biennial can mean in 2025.”
Taking place alongside the Guest Programme is EVA Platform Commissions initiative—an open call opportunity for new works by artists based in Ireland. Selected by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter, Platform Commissions for the 41st EVA International will focus on expanded ideas of “access” as both an artistic and operational horizon within arts production and its public dissemination. Selected commissions will be announced in summer 2024.
Biographies
Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam, where she is taking part in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. In 2023 Szakács curated the research-cum-solo exhibition Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We Are Together at de Appel in Amsterdam. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, she co-edited Solidarity Must Be Defended, the recently published anthology of visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realised and failed, during the Cold War. Szakács as part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest were recipients of the Goethe Medal award (2023) and lumbung members and participants at documenta fifteen (2022). Szakács was a curatorial team member in OFF-Biennale’s second (2017) and third edition (2021) and a member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest—part of the East-Central European independent network tranzit/org—where, among others, she curated the Budapest premier of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2018), co-curated the exhibition Imagining Conceptual Art: László Beke’s 1971 Collection in an International Context (tranzitdisplay, Prague, 2017), co-edited the online international journal Mezosfera (2016–2020), and the collaborative Curatorial Dictionary (2012–2018), which was also a participant in the travelling exhibition Publishing Against the Grain (2017–2023), organised by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais is a curator and writer and the author of the free online resource Access Toolkit for Artworkers. She was the curator of 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and curated Speech Sounds as Curator-in-Residence of VISUAL Carlow. As a writer she has written for publications including Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal and Girls Like Us. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, KW Institute, Konstfack University, Royal College of Art and Arts and Disability Ireland.
Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer who performs. Recent works are commissioned for Book Works (2024), BEK (2024), PRIMARY (2023), Counterflows and Cafe OTO (2022) and Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3 (2020). Essays on artworks and autistic modes of being are published by MOSTYN, Llandudno (2021), Double Negative (2022) and Fingal County Council (2023) as part of artist Sarah Browne’s edited collection Echo’s Bones: a parallel play. Roy is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University, and they are represented by A plus A gallery, Venice.
Press
For press information, images or interview requests please contact Kitty Malton (kitty[at]sam-talbot.com) at Sam Talbot.
Acknowledgement
EVA International is funded by Arts Council Ireland and Limerick City and County Council.
