Utopia and other lands in Limerick

Visual arts:Hou Hanru, the curator of this year's EV+A show, Too Early for Vacation, was born in China in 1963 and currently splits his time between Paris and San Francisco, writes Aidan Dunne

Last year he curated the Istanbul Biennale and the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. All of which, one presumes, gives him great insight into the current boom in contemporary Chinese art and the art world's global networks.

It also makes him a canny choice on the part of EV+A's organisers: why not get someone on the inside to deliver the latest international trends to Limerick? EV+A is, of course, small in scale compared to Hanru's other projects. He was free to invite artists of his own choosing, and also to select works on the basis of proposals submitted by artists. He seems to have been generous and fair on both counts. There is a strongly local flavour to EV+A in the best sense, in that artists are encouraged to look at the setting and make work with it in mind, rather than merely parachuting pieces in. So Japanese artist Taro Shinoda, for example, rather than dispatching a crate, arrived and spent around three weeks augmenting his work, Three Moons, Three Cities, to include Limerick. Shinoda filmed telescopic footage of the moon in the night sky above Limerick, which thus joins Tokyo and Istanbul as the third location in a beautiful, meditative installation featuring three projected sequences in a darkened room in Cathedral Place. Shinoda's work is relatively ambitious in scale and design, though not in terms of the huge logistics that are a hallmark of new Chinese art. It is as if Chinese artists do things on a huge scale, and in multiple forms, because they relish the opportunity to do so.

There is not that much evidence of this trend in EV+A, perhaps because Hanru's sensibility doesn't tend in that direction, and perhaps because the budget doesn't either. But something of its flavour comes across in the international collaborative installation by the group Xijing Men, made up of Chen Shaoxiong, Ozawa Tsuyoshi and Gimhongsok.

The work ostensibly promotes an olympic games, as held in the apocryphal city of Xijing. Various posters, banners and memorabilia celebrate the Xijing olympiad. The intent seems satirical, but also utopian. In staged interviews, people are canvassed for their views on Xijing, and we get an idea of it as a cherished potential place, somewhere better and more desirable, we infer, than the actual location of the real Olympics.

A utopian impulse is evident in other works as well, including Ozawa Tsuyoshi's futon mountain, which we are invited, shoeless, to climb. Still shoeless, we can lie down and watch the light play across Ruth LeGear's Tear Drops in Wonderscape, composed of myriad phials of real tears poised above us.

Nina Höchtl's Utopiafeatures a photograph of a shuttered and distinctly seedy-looking shop bearing the title. What, she asked a number of people by postcard, would you do with the space? The handwritten responses on view are surprisingly prosaic.

Not quite utopian, but fascinating in the way it visualises our need to create islands of cultural identity, Fiona Hackett's series of photographs of embassy interiors, Extraterritorial Spaces, is an exemplary project.

FOR EVERY UTOPIA there's a dystopia, and they are plentifully represented in EV+A. At King John's Castle, Seamus Farrell has counterpointed the historical ruin with a contemporary ruin of a redbrick terraced house, with some of its accessories and furnishings embedded in its walls like archaeological remains buried in the earth. It's a striking, forlorn piece. Dara McGrath's poised photographs of Parisian suburbs depict an impeccable but oddly inhuman domain in which ideas of containment and control are subtly expressed. Adrian Paci's video leaves us with the comically poignant image of passengers to nowhere packed on to the stairway of an aircraft that isn't there.

Alan Bulfin's Killing Hur, an effective exploration of a popular culture of casual cruelty (filmed, a note mentions, on his sister's mobile phone), takes on themes relating to happy slapping and YouTube. At the same venue, the Belltable, Comic Battle, by Common Culture (David Campbell, Mark Durden and Ian Brown), is a strange, disturbing video installation featuring three stand-up comics working their way through a range of material while ostensibly competing against each other for the audience's attention. It's downbeat and compelling.

In an impressively well-produced video, reminiscent of the work of Gerard Byrne, David O'Kane imagines a sombre, wordy meeting between Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien. Since all speak in their native tongues, a dictionary or two might be handy.

Taking radically different approaches, both Ailbhe Greaney and Mairead McClean look at themes relating to home, distance, separation and memory. Where Greaney talks about now, McClean looks back. Greaney's photographs are outstanding, though, at least as presented in the City Gallery, she has not quite figured out a way of presenting them in a structured narrative form. Less would certainly be more.

McClean's installation is terrific. Apparently utilising the abandoned office furniture of the erstwhile motor tax office on Lower Mallow Street, she distributes a collection of mini-DVD players through a darkened interior. Her piece, bell(a)exchange, inventively uses an earlier era of telephony as a metaphor in an exploration of personal histories and experiences.

Ni Haifeng's expertly made porcelain sculptures, in which ephemeral, mass- manufactured items are refashioned as decorative art objects, are infiltrated into one of the Hunt Museum's porcelain cabinets.

There is hardly any painting in the show, and not all of what there is merits inclusion, but on the evidence of his own smallish exhibition, James Gormley's work looks worth seeing more of. So too is that of Terry Markey, who has a way with wooden planking and video. His nest-like Broken Icarusis particularly good.

Not everything in EV+A is convincing, but as a curator Hanru achieves a pretty good average, delivering a great deal of work that merits sustained attention but doesn't make us work too hard.

EV+A 2008: Too Early for Vacation is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art and nine other venues in Limerick until May 25; www.eva.ie