As part of the 41st EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art, a new work by Eoghan Ryan Carceral Jigs, (2025) was presented at STARLING.
The video installation features children’s television tropes, scenes of musical rehearsal, 3D puppetry, and linguistic tongue twisters traced across documentary interviews, archival footage, and recent protest recordings to expose mutations, contradictions, and shifting rhythms within Irish nationalism today. Employing filmed material from operational holiday camps, the video excavated how the re-use of architectures of containment—for example, those outsourced by the Irish state to facilitate direct provision—often complicates and confuses nationalist identification. Carceral Jigs invited viewers to consider how control is choreographed and performed— through culture, policy, media, and the built environment—and how this spectacle of belonging is often maintained and malformed by denying it to others. |
|
|
Eoghan Ryan‘s work engages video installation, performance, puppetry, text and collage to explore the intricacies of how power is communicated through mediated culture. His process involves long periods of filming and editing; documenting a specific person, place, object, or song and through this developing fable-like takes on the collective and the personal as institutions. His complete video installations and performances often question how personal proximity shapes our understanding of ourselves and others within the structural and socio-political constraints of cultural inheritance, identity construction and belief systems.
This project was developed as part of EVA Internationals guest programme, curated by Eszter Szakács and the EVA team. EVA International is Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. EVA leads in the commissioning and curating of contemporary art by Irish and international artists, culminating in a programme of artistic encounters, exhibitions, and education projects, that takes place every two years across venues in Limerick city and beyond. More about the 41st EVA International here. |
|
|