A new arts festival that answers a few old questions

Artisit? is an antidote to po-faced arts festivals, a light-on-its-feet showcase for recent art school graduates, writes Aidan Dunne

Do we really need another arts festival? Probably not. But Artisit?, currently running in Galway, is not so much a festival as an antidote to arts festivals, an alternative, light-on-its-feet event encompassing exhibitions, short films, music and discussions. It began with a bang, a happening at Fairgreen involving the art groups MoMS (Mundi, Morri and Skaelur) and Gelitin, and a party. The four-person Gelitin is a bit like an art-pop group on tour, with a high international profile, and hence the exception in Artisit?, the rationale of which is to highlight the work of recent art school graduates.

Organisers Mary Nally and Sharon O'Grady began by thinking small. Managing to attract some funding - modest - they inaugurated Artisit? last year and were sufficiently encouraged to do it again.

Operating on a minuscule budget, they found themselves on a steep learning curve. "This time around," O'Grady observes, "we didn't make the mistakes we made last year. We made different ones." They visited as many graduate shows as they could, throughout Ireland, in London, Glasgow, Paris - and Iceland. An odd rapport has developed between the art scenes in Galway and Reykjavik, thanks largely to the efforts of Aoibheann Mac Namara's Ard Bia Gallery and the fact that, as Nally observes: "If you go to Iceland you just want to go back, it's such an amazing place."

Ard Bia and Galway's other innovative art space, G126, are Artisit? venues. They are also its most orthodox venues. Apart from them, the Nora Barnacle House, a vacant apartment in Henry Street, and Nimmo's at the Spanish Arch have all been pressed into service.

Some fascinating projects feature. Kristina Bengtsson's In Picturesdocuments her efforts to make it into the Guardian magazine's thematic weekly slot featuring readers' photographs. She finally made it under the heading of "Sport" with a photograph of her sister's boyfriend standing in a field with a saddle. That was after a series of rejections, the most intriguing of which comes under the heading of "Easter" and is a photograph of a group of women around a dining table, all wearing tall red hats.

As Bengtsson relates it, she and a friend were in a remote Finnish village at Easter, the only customers in the only restaurant in town. She took out her camera and the waitress told her there was no point in taking pictures there when all the action was in the basement.

Which is where she found the red-capped women. Why the hats? She finally summoned up the courage to ask. "We are the Red Hat Society and this is our annual dinner," she was told.

Paul Greenleaf bought a set of old holiday postcards in a market and set out to re-photograph the locations they featured. His large-scale images have a classical poise and clarity and, in combination with the originals, powerfully and poignantly convey a sense of time elapsed. He also includes the messages written on the postcards as printed captions to his own images, something that works amazingly well, generating complex effects that are much more than the sum of the project's various parts.

Greenleaf has the air of being a fully formed artistic personality, his work mature. That is not the case for much else on view, which is as it should be. A sense of openness and possibility is largely what Artisit? is about. In recent years much work by art graduates embodies an idealistic yearning for a nicer world combined with an alternative, improvisational attitude to technologies and materials.

Maria Karantzi's room-sized installation appears at first glance to be part of this trend, but there is a dark undercurrent to her kinetic devices, for all their playfulness.

Employing workaday objects, including a potted plant, a milk container and a toy train, she sets in motion a world of circular, repetitive actions that appear cumulatively destructive and futile.

Her own energy and inventiveness are arguably set against the mood of entropic decline in an impressively achieved piece of work. Keith Nevin, who has G126 to himself for a very well-installed solo show, operates in this general area as well, making casual-seeming sculptural pieces that set out to capture the feeling of special places apart, spaces for visionary contemplation. He is aiming for something delicate and perfectly pitched, and is not quite there yet.

At Ard Bia, Halldór Ragnarsson also benefits from a beautiful installation. His work consists of the itemisation of Icelandic names, printed freehand or stencilled onto the floor and the wall, combined with a series of drawings loosely allied to named individuals. It is polished and effective, but it seems less conceptually neat than a previous project, mentioned in the gallery's accompanying note, in which he drew or painted every word starting with the letter A in the Icelandic dictionary.

A number of artists show pieces that are tiny in scale and/or quietly inward-looking, which infiltrate the exhibition space while remaining almost invisible, rather than dominating it. Damien O'Connell's miniature spaces in boxes have a forlorn quality. His theme, that of waiting, surfaces in Patricia Murphy's busy, intricate fabric and furniture installations under the title The Waiting Room.

Masako Ueda's printed paper towels adapt the guise of a generic mass-produced product - a towel dispenser - to offer a critique of the technologies of mass production. Fiona Leamy's Matchstickmen, like the Borrowers, fit into our world without us even realising they are there.

That isn't everything in Artisit?, but it does convey much of its flavour. Unfortunately Laura Fitzgerald's brilliant video piece had only a restricted showing at Fairgreen, but then she is someone who we will almost certainly see a great deal more of in the future, and this whole project is largely about the future. Nally and O'Grady have identified an aspect of contemporary art worthy of exploration, and they have upped the ante by not settling for the easy option.

Their multi-national approach makes sense, not least because it is good, and challenging, for younger artists to see their own work in an international context.

• Artisit? runs in Galway until Oct 20 at Ard Bia Gallery, 4 William St; G126, Unit 11, Ballybane Industrial Estate, Tuam Road; 2 Henry St, 8 Bowling Green (The Nora Barnacle House) and Nimmo's, The Spanish Arch. Further information is available at the venues and on www.thisisthenextthing.com