Eszter Szakács appointed as the Guest Programme Curator of the 41st EVA International

EVA International is delighted to announce the appointment of Eszter Szakács as Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International—Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. Szakács joins a curatorial team that includes Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and Roy Claire Potter (Selectors of EVA’s Platform Commissions for the 41st edition) and members of the EVA team led by EVA Director Matt Packer in developing a programme across venues, spaces, and partnerships in Limerick city, due to take place from 29 August to 26 October 2025.

In a statement of her appointment, Szakács writes: ‘I am honoured to be appointed as Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International. My proposal is grounded in the practice of sharing and working together horizontally, to facilitate a process of reciprocal exchanges. I am excited to work in a newly collaborative way with EVA International, from exhibition-making, through infrastructure-building, to circular modes of hosting. I believe that such a collaboration with EVA—and interconnected circles of artists, practitioners, and thinkers—is an opportunity to forge a new path for what an international biennial can mean in 2025.’

Further programme details will be released in the later part of 2024.

Biography:
Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam, where she is taking part in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. In 2023 Szakács curated the research-cum-solo exhibition Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We Are Together at de Appel in Amsterdam. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, she co-edited Solidarity Must Be Defended, the recently published anthology of visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realised and failed, during the Cold War. Szakács as part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest were recipients of the Goethe Medal award (2023) and lumbung members and participants at documenta fifteen (2022). Szakács was a curatorial team member in OFF-Biennale’s second (2017) and third edition (2021) and a member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest—part of the East-Central European independent network tranzit/org—where, among others, she curated the Budapest premier of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2018), co-curated the exhibition Imagining Conceptual Art: László Beke’s 1971 Collection in an International Context (tranzitdisplay, Prague, 2017), co-edited the online international journal Mezosfera (2016–2020), and the collaborative Curatorial Dictionary (2012–2018), which was also a participant in the travelling exhibition Publishing Against the Grain (2017–2023), organised by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.