The 40th EVA International will take place across various sites and spaces in Limerick from 31 August – 29 October 2023. Responding to the theme of Citizenship, the 40th edition will feature a ‘Guest Programme’ curated by Sebastian Cichocki, presented alongside new artist commissions as part of EVA’s Platform Commissions and Partnership Project initiatives.
In a statement of his appointment, Cichocki writes: “My proposition for the Guest Programme of the 40th EVA International is driven by an old dream of overcoming artistic autonomy by fusing art, politics and everyday life. We are facing the irreversibility of climate crisis and its morbid consequences: fossil fuel wars, mass migration, energy terrorism, loss of biodiversity, and a general deficit of hope for the future. I believe that EVA should be a component of a larger mobilisation of art thinkers and practitioners, exploring different ways of living and working together, offering an alternative to doubt and the sense that it is already too late to do anything. There is an urgency to experiment with models of facilitating and exhibiting artistic phenomena that cannot be easily maintained by traditional exhibition practice or site-specific commissioned art. I am proud and excited to follow the path of my predecessors, friends and colleagues, Merve Elveren, Inti Guerrero, Koyo Kouoh, Bassam El Baroni, Annie Fletcher, Zdenka Badovinac and other visionary curators who have worked in Limerick since EVA was established in 1977.”
Cichocki’s Guest Programme will be presented alongside EVA’s Platform Commissions and Partnership Project initiatives that will together comprise the 40th EVA International programme.
EVA’s Director, Matt Packer, writes of Cichocki’s appointment: “I am honoured that Sebastian Cichocki has accepted the invitation to extend his unique curatorial proposition to Limerick; an approach which values art’s role in agitating, activating, and responding to global uncertainty and real-world concerns. I look forward to what he might bring to Ireland, and what the cultural and political context of Ireland might offer his curatorial vision in return.”
Sebastian Cichocki is the Chief Curator and Head of Research at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN), where he was a member of curatorial teams of Who Will Write the History of Tears: Artists on Women’s Rights (2021), Primary Forms (2021-ongoing), The Penumbral Age: Art in the Times of Planetary Crisis (2020), Never Again: Art against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries (2019), Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times (2016) and other exhibition and research programmes. Selected exhibitions by Cichocki include also The Postartistic Congress (Sokołowsko, The Konteksty Festival 2021, with Marianna Dobkowska), the Polish pavilions at the 52nd (Monika Sosnowska 1:1) and 54th Biennale of Art in Venice (Yael Bartana ...and Europe will Be Stunned, with Galit Eilat), The Bródno Biennale (2018, convened with Paweł Althamer and Goshka Macuga), Rainbow in the Dark: On the Joy and Torment of Faith, Konstmuseum Malmö (2015, with Galit Eilat). Sebastian Cichocki is a curator at The Forum for Future of Culture at the Powszechny Theatre, Warsaw, a platform for feminist, ecological and antifascist activism and culture, and The Consortium for Postartistic Practices / The Office for Postartistic Services – networks of art workers contributing to the pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian political struggles. Sebastian Cichocki is also a member of The Sunflower – Solidarity Community Center in Warsaw, an aid, culture and counter-propaganda initiative for those who suffered from Russia’s invasion on Ukraine.
Sebastian Cichocki has published extensively and lectured at various venues, including Dhaka Art Summit, the Kochi Biennale, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Kunsthalle Wien, Gwangju Biennale, The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, The University of Malta. He is a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, MoMA, New York.
