Artist in Focus: Eoghan Ryan
Artist on LI-MA's radar
At LI-MA, artists are at the heart of everything we do. Therefore, each season, we put the spotlight on an artist and their body of work. This autumn we invite you to reflect on the work of Eoghan Ryan.
Since 2022, LI-MA has distributed the work of Irish artist Eoghan Ryan, which moves across video installation, performance, puppetry, text, and collage to explore how power is communicated through mediated culture.
New in the LI-MA Collection: Carceral Jigs (2025), 27’13”
The latest addition to our collection is Carceral Jigs, a video installation in which children’s television tropes, musical rehearsal, 3D puppetry, and tongue twisters are traced across interviews, archival footage, and protest recordings to expose the contradictions inherent within Irish nationalism. Using material from operational holiday camps, such as those outsourced by the Irish state for direct provision, complicates nationalist identification, and how belonging is maintained through its denial to others.
Screenings of Carceral Jigs
- 9 December 2026, LI-MA Presents: New Art on Screen. LAB111, Amsterdam, NL.
- 21 June 2026, Docs Ireland. Short Film Selection, Belfast, UK.
- 31 May 2026, state of us. de Appel, Amsterdam, NL.
- 20–26 March 2026, 21st Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. Berwick, UK.
- August–November 2025, It Takes a Village. Ireland’s Biennale, Limerick, IE.
Themes & Process
Eoghan Ryan’s practice is concerned with how power reaches us through the media and everyday language, and how new possibilities can emerge from both small and significant gestures. He is often concerned with questions of nationalism and borders, and who is included and excluded.
He works slowly, filming and editing over long periods of time around a single person, place, or object. From this he creates fables about the collective and the personal as institutions, from states of being to nation states. News reports, archival footage, and newspaper clippings are cut against interviews, puppetry, and literature, and the edits are often rhythmically driven – through drums, irregular verse, or tongue twisters. His works often set disparate materials against themselves.
Other Works in the LI-MA Collection
Circle A (2024), 29’18”
Circle A departs from a heavily edited conversation between five strangers in an art bookshop, circulating around the term Anarchy and its imaginary and real functions. It is cut with footage from the Las Fallas Festival in Valencia, a five-day celebration of fire and pyrotechnics, interjections from the social theorist and author of the 1995 book ‘Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism’ Murray Bookchin, and hundreds of newspaper clippings sent to Ryan by his father. The film is a thought experiment on how to undo a system.
Doggerel (2023), 13’57”
Taking its name from the middle English term for comic, badly written verse, Doggerel reanimates Oskar Matzerath, the protagonist of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, who decides at three to stop growing. Oskar stands by his own grave, composing irregular rhyming verse and playing his drum, as the edit cuts between a miniature Europe and the conflicts borders create, paralleling the tragedies of past nationalism to today’s contested migration and border enforcement.
A Sod State (2022), 22’03”
A Sod State plays on “sod”, meaning wet, fertile turf, British slang for a troublesome person, and, in “sod all”, nothing. The work posits pre- and post-Brexit “troubles” in Northern Ireland as repetitive political theatre, mixing news footage of riots and burning police cars with interviews and an animated puppet in a pig mask. Ryan here reflects on protest against authoritarian politics and the media’s depiction of violence.
More about the Artist
Born in Dublin in 1987, Ryan lives and works between Amsterdam and Brussels. He studied at National College of Art and Design, completed his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2019–2021). In 2023 he received the Media Art Grant of the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, which culminated in his solo exhibition Against the Day there in early 2024. The same year, artist Mire Lee selected him for ArtReview’s Future Greats 2024.
His work has been shown at EVA International (Limerick), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), The Complex (Dublin), Centrale Fies (Dro), BFI London Film Festival, ICA London, the Busan Biennale 2022, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kunstverein Freiburg, South London Gallery and Serralves Museum (Porto).
Header: Eoghan Ryan, A Sod State (2021/2022). In collection: LI-MA.
