This mixed-media installation and performance took the form of a spaceship’s control panel. It evoked complex and alien technologies of the near future, and explored subjects related to techno-masculinities, Silicone Valley-esque complexities, and fetishes of the future.

Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory

This work combined performance and installation. In the artist’s words, his performative installations ‘allude to a dominating struggle to control, or, more precisely, one’s inability to challenge a self-engineered environment’.

The People's Museum of Limerick, Coach House

Remunerated Person to Stay in the Trunk of a Car

This performance was staged during the inauguration of EV+A in front of the main venue. A vehicle was parked in the gallery doorway, then someone was hired for £30 and placed in its boot. The artist said of this performance: ‘This work poses an extreme situation which quashes the mythologies of the benefits of work, here construed in minimal fashion as merely hiring a body. The work entails a worker assigning his or her body to the interests of the other contractual party.’

Limerick City Gallery of Art

This work consisted of a monologue, delivered by a person in a tiger costume, about the economic landscape of Ireland. The text was written by by Ciáran O’Driscoll and performed by Patrick Keaveney.

Sarsfield Credit Union

Much of Sierra’s work deals with issues of social inequality and the ethics of consent. Taking place adjacent to Limerick’s central police station, this performance was designed as a smoking barricade of burning tyres and three overturned cars that had been stolen and were acquired in a requisitioned goods depot.

Glentworth Street

A series of music performances were scheduled at peak hours to provide an ‘empathic space’ for social welfare users, who can be counted in their hundreds at the busiest times. These performances proposed a surreal experience which created a period of enjoyment and relaxation for those waiting in queues.

Department of Social Protection

The work consisted of a series of workshops, a night of live performances and a limited edition publication. The workshops, conducted with young people from the Limerick Youth Service, responded to themes of generational resistance. The project culminated in the night of performance featuring projected visuals, spoken word and collaborative live music, produced by participants from Limerick’s past and present psychedelic scenes.

The Limerick Theatre and Performance Hub 

The artist restaged a performance initially presented in Beijing, in which two pigs – one with Chinese characters written on its skin and the other with letters from the Latin alphabet – copulated in front of a live audience.

Thomas Street

This three-hour performance involved the artist applying layers of cosmetics to her face to the point of excess. Typically an act of beautification, the act of applying make-up became a disorderly act of grotesque transformation. Like much of Phillips’ work, 

was a critical response to the conventions of female beauty and the objectification of women in modern consumerist society.

Bedford Row

Byrne is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and event curation. Underlying much of the performance work is the practice of life modelling, of which he has extensive experience. In performance he tests the materiality of his body.

Cruises Street

Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eight Amendment, 2018.

Members of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment enacted a street procession in Limerick and presented an exhibition, archive and information hub including work by Sarah Cullen, Rachel Fallon, Alison Laredo, Alice Maher, Breda Mayock, and Áine Phillips.

O’Connell Street

Limerick Cookbook: social recipes and alchemic attempts

The artists proposed the formation of a cookbook through an experiment in cooking. The recipes would be the result of their excursions around the city, during which they proposed to cook for and with families and individuals in their own homes.

The Hunt Museum

The artist positioned 12 snare drums and 24 drummers in a circle. He walked around the circle, asking participants to drum more softly when he was further away and louder as he came closer. Carrying a light metre and stopwatch, he constantly measured the light, and adjusted his speed according to it.

Five lines of gunpowder fuses were laid out on the river’s surface and ignited from downstream. The fire travelled against the current through the five middle arches of Thomond Bridge. 

River Shannon

The river remembers us: We are people of the river

This performative walk and talk was inspired by the historical connections between the Shannon river in Limerick and the Columbia, which runs through Spokane, the artist’s native home. 

A performance, mixed-media installation and audio work.

The Granary

This collaboration combined different aspects of live performance, creating dialogues between music, dance and movement, and performance art. Performances were created using live and recorded sampling, sensors, vocals, text, music, movement, theatrical elements, and visual art.

St. John’s Church

This sculpture referenced a priest from the Yajurveda (an ancient Vedic Sanskrit text) who performs a fire oblation before an altar, which is  transformed into a cosmic entity and spiritual centre.

In this mixed-media installation, the veils were made out of dried banana-tree trunks, which the audience was invited to touch and make close contact with. 

Performance has been a key aspect of contemporary visual art in recent decades, with artists drawing on the broader traditions of dance, music, and theatre in ways integral to their own practices. 

Many artists chose to work in performance for political reasons – precisely because it makes no claims to permanence and is resistant to the commodification of more traditional art forms. For the same reasons, performance artworks don’t translate easily into history, existing after the event as photo documentation or memories or even rumours. 

Listed here are a selection of venues and sites, with corresponding performance artworks that have taken place at these locations over a span of 40 years. 

Performances

Locations

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