About

This website is the inaugural project of the Never Look Back initiative, serving as a digital resource that maps EVA’s history across the 160+ sites, spaces and venues used for the presentation of contemporary art in successive EVA editions. From offices, shops, bars, museums, ex-industrial units, and public spaces – EVA’s use of the city reflects the changing ambition of the visual arts to integrate itself into the broader social environment, while also reflecting the evolution and development of the urban fabric itself.

The ‘temporary’ nature of EVA – works installed for public presentation, then de-installed some weeks later – has ensured a restless rotation of curatorial propositions and artworks.  It’s an approach that favours art’s role in the dynamics of the present, as opposed to the permanent, the monumental, the everlasting. Yet this same approach has resulted in EVA’s history being almost invisible and without material evidence. Despite a history of contemporary art in Limerick – a history of internationally acclaimed artists and curators; unparalleled in an Irish context – the streets and public spaces of the city seen remarkably absent of this history. Never Look Back seeks to build a history of contemporary art in Limerick from other things; from the memories of those people and places that made it happen.

At the core of the website is a series of profiles – one for each of the venues used in EVA’s history. This profile includes notes related to the history of the venue (where known), alongside details of the artwork or curatorial project that took place. In some cases, venues have been used across multiple editions and are still functioning today. In other cases, venues have changed ownership and changed use; in a few cases, no longer there at all.

The information supplied in these pages has been designed to provide an entry-level slice of this history, drawn from a number of sources listed below in addition to EVA’s own archives. This remains inexhaustive, however. Over the coming years, we hope to build on the resource with further testimony and historical account from a diverse range of sources, creating what we hope will be a ‘polyvocal’ resource and archive that can alternately function […]

A function of the website is a series of ‘pathways’ that provide various ways of thinking-through or traversing this history through a particular thematic focus or specialism.