Portley’s Bar

1 Broad St, LimerickGoogle Maps

This late 19th-century red-bricked building is located opposite Baal’s Bridge and the Abbey River.
Portley’s bar opened here in 2003 and is well known for its regular live music sessions.
This site was one of 12 listed venues for the 28th edition of EVA in 2004, curated by Zdenka Badovinac (b. 1958, Slovenia) and titled Imagine Limerick.
It was number of bars in Limerick that were used for a project titled Traces of Fire (2004) by artists Volkmar Klien (b. 1971, Austria) and Ed Lear (b. 1971, UK). Traces of Fire was a city-wide tracking project, in which cigarette lighters with tracking devices were surreptitiously left to be picked up by members of the public. The artists monitored the movements of the lighters across the city, creating a map of the city that was then exhibited in City Hall, Merchants Quay.