Reviewed:EV+A 2002 Open and Invited, Limerick City Gallery of Art and other venues until June 9th (061-310633)Sometimes, Limerick's international contemporary art exhibition, EV+A, comes with a subtitle. Not this year, but in his introductory essay the show's Thai curator, Apinan Poshyananda, seems to be edging towards one: "Heroes and Holies".

Setting out to select and invite after September 11th, he had some specific ideas in mind, relating to mourning, to cultural and ideological differences and antagonisms, to the increased uncertainty of things. In the event,there are, he observes, themes of heroism and the sacred in much of the work involved.

He also notes that his enduring memories of Limerick, "that damp, sombre town", are of warmth, friendliness and co-operation. EV+A is a huge show, featuring 20 invited and 52 selected artists. Experiencing anything like all of it entails a time-consuming pilgrimage, widely dispersed as it is throughout the city. It is also, though, more than usually accessible in terms of the intelligibility of the work. This may well have to do with Poshyananda's concentration on lens-based art. Photography and video loom large, with a sprinkling of sculptural installation, performance and one or two isolated outposts of painting, notably in the University's Bourn Vincent Gallery, where the best thing is Arno Kramer's ethereally beautiful wall drawing.

In terms of heroism, there is no more obvious statement of heroic iconography than Marina Abramovic's video projection in which, astride a white horse, she holds aloft a huge flag while we hear what is, presumably, the Serbian national anthem solemnly intoned.

Perhaps it helps to know that Abramovic's father was a Serb partisan hero during the second World War, but it becomes clear, in any case, that her performance is not exactly as triumphalist as it might seem. Her white flag and white horse suggest surrender and we could well interpret her work as implying that heroism resides in knowing when to give in.

There is a comparable effect of undercutting a potentially aggressive message in Peter Johansson's extraordinarily, perhaps excessively elaborate installation, a museological presentation of artfully modified neo-Nazi outfits. Martial Cherrier's preening bodybuilders, in his video at the Sportsbar, strike heroic attitudes and, in graphic detail, pump themselves full of steroids. At the same venue, Bernard Smyth, satirising competition, goes for the tap-dancing-while-cigarette-smoking record - and leaves open the distinct possibility that he too may be cheating.

Aine Philips's photograph sees US patriotism and pride as part of a cultural landscape of commodification, while Iftikar Dadi parodies the heroic style of film posters with a title that highlights the fact of conflict rather than the simple partisanship of propaganda. From heroic to holy, or perhaps a bit of both, in Amanda Coogan's Madonna, who proffers a nurturing breast to the world in general.

Location is everything for Paolo Carnavari's Lambretta scooter, parked in an alcove in St Mary's Church. But it looks as if he lost his nerve and drove the message home, so to speak, by giving the scooter cruciform tyre extensions. It didn't need them.

Also perfectly sited in St Mary's, Breda Lynch's exquisitely made doll-like religious figures are slightly eerie messengers from another age. In Torbjorn Rodland's drily humorous photographs, clerics tend to come a cropper. Over at St John's Church, another fine venue, Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O'Brien's Tracks features a mound form - a sacred mountain? - moving very slowly along a track, creating a sense of the uncanny (and reminiscent of Siobhan Hapaska's tumbleweed sculpture).

Profane rather than sacred, Sarah Kenny's video presents a seamy view of the brutal, brutalised subtext of Saturday night on the town. Aileen Kelly's animal circle, a good introduction to the show at the City Gallery, recalls Katherina Fritsch's creepy monumental sculpture, Ratking, albeit in a lighter vein. Martin Healy's blow-ups of sinister children from the movies, while good, look as if they have been excerpted from a larger project.

Kamon Phaosavasdi's two-screen video, which juxtaposes a journey to the sea, images of the sea itself and historical texts about Limerick, has the drive and pace of a good music video.

One of the best and most enigmatic pieces in the show is John Mathews's sepia-tinted video which, with its dreamy atmosphere, its languid mix of nostalgia and desire, seems indebted to the work of Jaki Irvine, but distinctively itself as well. It also comes across as a genuinely collaborative venture, with terrific narrator and music.

Given that we have just gone through our third referendum on abortion, Poshyananda presumably had in mind what he refers to as the Irish obsession with control over women's bodies when he invited the Japanese photographer, Araki to show a group of photographs of women, theatrically trussed up with thick rope and exposed to our gaze.

These images, which come with a caution and an over-18 restriction from the organisers, could plausibly be dismissed as porn with high production values. However, not only are the images obviously beautiful, but, as Poshyananda notes, their subjects look strangely comfortable and assured. An underlying bleakness is endemic to Araki's work, which always seems to refer to an emptiness, a death underlying the extremes and intimacies of the flesh.

Amy O'Riordan's playful photographic tableaux, about empowering the female gaze, feature a cast of Stepford-like young women, in a pictorial strategy most obviously exemplified in a witty reversal of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, in which the sole nude figure is male rather than female. Difficult, though, to imagine what would trigger the equivalent of the outrage that greeted Manet's painting. In another strong series of photographs, Arnolfini's Wife by Kate Byrne, a woman's body is claustrophobically doubled in a mirror and juxtaposed with a raw egg. A startling optical effect in the last frame may be a thematic signifier.

Some of the work in EV+A falls into the contemporary art circuit category of art as entertainment - artainment? - most obviously in works like Chio Jeong Hwa's burly, outsize policemen at City Hall. They do a job and do it well. The calculation here is that accessibility will win an audience, As ever with art, the question of what the audience takes away from the transaction remains, but certainly EV+A deserves an audience.