Ireland

ROMANTIC IRELAND comprises a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an immersive sculpture. Set on the site of an unfinished earth build, the video stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The pavilion soundtrack is an operatic work composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe, depicting the scene of an eviction.
Eimear Walshe’s work traces the legacies of late nineteenth-century land contestation in Ireland. Made in the shadow of the ongoing housing crisis in Ireland, the Irish Pavilion becomes, variously, a building site of possibility, a wrestling ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonisms, a space of tender care, and a structure made into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction. The exhibition forces encounters between historic moments, and draws out their parallel power dynamics and affective registers; their forms of labour, conflict and pleasure; the entangled histories of sexuality, property and the state.