EV+A 2000 Limerick, Ireland **
Limerick, nettled by its portrayal in Angela's Ashes - never mind its Irish moniker, Stab City - can be proud of its 23-year-old annual open-submission art show, EV+A, which sprawls from the City Gallery through shops, disused buildings, walls, pubs, churches, even the horrorspace of a dentist's surgery.
Every second year, EV+A brings in an international curator. This year, it is Spaniard Rosa Martinez, whose choices are buzzy, immediate and often photographic, with a distinct feminist slant.
The show is centred on City Gallery, where Mona Hatoum has two quietly glowering pieces - an industrial-steel flesh-slicer of a cot, with a rubber replica collapsed in the opposite corner.
Ghada Amer's paintings feature outlines of pornographic stills, exquisitely embroidered into the canvas. Meanwhile Pipilotti Rist's Selfless in the Bath of Lava ironically seduces you from a tiny video screen, bursting through a floorboard.
A personal favourite is Veronica Nicholson's paean to disappearing landscapes: overlit, high-colour photographs of road-killed foxes, stoats, rabbits, starlings - all frozen in flight over grass, plantains, hawthorn and dandelion puffs. Elsewhere, Maria Doyle's ragged paper tapestries of traumatised dream-drawings won one of four money prizes.
The highlight of the opening was Chinese artist Xu Bing's "performance" in a car park: two big shaved pigs, snorting around a fragrant pen strewn with newspapers. The male was marked with random gobbledygook in a western typeface; the sow with Chinese characters.
The idea was that the pair would copulate, as illustrated by a nearby video monitor which showed a male pig dragged screeching - in flagrante delicto - by a galloping sow.
Egged on by this, arty folk brayed at the pigs to complete the graphic metaphor of west-fucks-east. However, violently shying together, all the pigs did was drop some heavy black turds. It was all deeply disturbing.
To navigate EV+A is to experience the labyrinthine city, as in the baffling, kitschy shrine-on-a-ladder art-piece in the old Franciscan church on Henry Street.
One piece that stuck with me is Alan Keane's "found" school desktops, etched with such profundities as "Helen smells", "Bleeding rectums" and "Audrey Hepburn".
Other graffiti seems contradictory: "Ulster will fight" and "Fuck Bobby Sands" alongside "Up the PLO" - but at least it gouges some inarticulate vernacular into the walls of the white cube.
EV+A runs till June 4. Info: Limerick City Gallery 00 353 61 - 310633
***** Unmissable
**** Recommended
*** Enjoyable
** Mediocre
* Terrible
