This year's 'EV+A' exhibition includes some beautiful work. But is its art as accessible as it should be, asks Aidan Dunne

This time each year Limerick wakes from uneasy dreams of controversial murder trials and gangland feuds and finds itself cast in a different light entirely, bracketed with Venice, São Paulo, Basel and Frankfurt, one of a roll-call of international art venues. EV+A is on nothing like the same scale, and wields nothing like as much art-world muscle as the huge fairs and biennials, but since the mid-1990s it has been punching well above its weight, doing amazing things on modest resources.

The exhibition is chosen by one curator a year, an outsider to the Irish scene who arrives as a "vertical invader" and selects work from open submission. But there is also a biennial aspect: Invited EV+A. Every second year it's open to the curator to invite artists to exhibit. This year Zdenka Badovinac, director of Slovenia's Museum of Modern Art, is curating; she has selected and invited about 50 artists to participate.

She has called her show EV+A 2004: Imagine Limerick. "Coming from Slovenia," she explains, "I think we have something in common with Limerick. I mean we would be regarded as in a sense marginal, but we would share a wish to be known. So part of the concept of the exhibition is a comment on how unknown places want to be promoted, to be known. Today, because of the Internet, we have the illusion of knowing everything about everywhere, but it's not true. Also, there is something positive about a marginal position: you can take advantage of being in a space that is not absolutely defined yet; it allows you a space for creativity. "

Within this general concept are three thematic variations, anchored to each of the show's three main venues: Limerick City Gallery of Art, City Hall and the Church Gallery at the School of Art and Design. In the first: "Imagine reality. We can recognise the reality of the city." Literally so, in that some of the work documents the city of Limerick. That includes the photographs of the Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter. But she sought out locations of urban anonymity, nondescript street scenes of concrete and shutters that could as easily be Los Angeles as Limerick. Much of the work explores the idea of place in more diverse ways.

Katrina Maguire's video installation is a remarkable slice of personal history as a man sips whiskey and recalls an earlier era of cinema-going. A video projection by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir records a non-event, a - rather good - musical concert that was banned by the Israeli authorities.

Anri Sala's long tracking shot through devastated city streets (either that or they too are building a Luas) is atmospheric and becomes surreal as we register the way the apartment blocks are painted as though by Mondrian, becoming grids of bright colour. In fact the mayor used the colour coding as a way of marking which buildings had been altered without planning permission. The evocation of utopian abstraction is striking in the context.

Not relating to place but an imagined reality in the sense of being composed of documentary fragments, Fiona Tan's News From The Near Future features some spellbinding footage of ships at sea, flooding and other watery subjects. In fact water is the thread linking sequences culled from a film archive. Is Tan anticipating environmental catastrophe? It's hard to say, but hers is probably the most visually beautiful piece in the show.

There is work at Limerick City Gallery of Art that doesn't particularly accord with Badovinac's concept, but it is none the worse for that. Another striking piece, Emilia and Ilya Kabakov's installation of a vast banqueting table with a single apple at its centre, strays thematically but is very effective.

At the art school's Church Gallery, Badovinac addresses "Imagine traditions", in which she sets out to counter the simplistic view of traditional as being bad and modern as being good. Reinventing tradition is an alternative title for much of what we see here. Included are the Slovene group Irwin, whose projects include the re-enactment of pioneering performance and other ephemeral arts events. "Many of these events were hardly documented. So Irwin have restaged them and recorded them to a very high standard. They include a witty homage to the Slovene's fondly regarded national symbol, Triglav Mountain. Triglav translates as three-headed, and three artists duly create their own three-headed peak, like a pantomime horse, in a city square.

Other pieces address religious tradition (Maja Bajevic), domestic ritual (Christine Mackey's painstakingly embellished jam jars) and convention, the latter in the form of Sarah Browne's ambitious project of refurbishing and making gifts of sofas, with individually designed and tailored upholstery fabric. There is hardly any painting in Badovinac's selection, and Paul McAree's is ironic, a black-and-white restatement of fragments of an archetypal, Paul Henry-like Irish landscape. One problem about such pastiche is that you have to be able to paint, and McAree's slapdash efforts just make his sources look good.

The weakest link in the three-part thematic chain is City Hall, where it feels as if not enough thought has been given to the appearance of what is on display. Here, Badovinac says, "Imagine signs", which include alphabets and other systems. But the visual texture of what's on offer is very thin indeed.

By now it's traditional that EV+A colonises the streets. Johanna Kandl will be making a street painting of Jesus evicting the traders from the temple in Cruises Street. Volkmar Klien and Edward Lead will be tracking the movements of strategically abandoned lighters throughout the city. At Halla Ide, on Thomas Street, a three-screen video projection by Phil Collins is premièred. It is a pointed restaging of the dance marathon that forms the climax of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

Maxine Mason's Keep On, at the Potato Market, incorporates a dance floor and a soundtrack she has deejayed herself. There's a free "newspaper", Popular Geometry, by Anton Vidolke and Julieta Aranda, which frames a lively debate on modernist sculpture, including Sean Scully's Wall Of Light at Limerick University.

The participation of Slattery's pub is also de rigueur. This time round it's subtle. Michael Klein has introduced a flicker into its fluorescent sign.

The Belltable hosts Young EV+A. Three artists worked with the Young Travellers Development Group, St Mary's Youth Project and the Southside Youth Initiative. One of the highlights of EV+A overall is Amy O'Riordan's photographic work with a group of participating girls. In her images she encourages and enables them to express their own sense of style, and there is a tremendous flair and assertiveness to the results.

As with other international exhibitions, it is legitimate to ask who EV+A is for, particularly given that it so specifically targets the wider fabric of the city. Who, that is, beyond the confines of the art world, which, for all its sociopolitical rhetoric, its apparent appetite for "issues", can be amazingly self-absorbed.

Asked whether she thinks the work in the exhibition is accessible to anyone, any casual visitor, Badovinac initially says yes, of course, but then adds: "That is why we have written explanations beside each exhibit. It's very important that there are descriptions, because contemporary art is not so understandable for people who are not used to it." Which is a way of saying: Always read the label.

• EV+A 2004: Imagine Limerick is at Limerick City Gallery of Art and other venues until May 23rd. See www.eva.ie