The cover of the first issue of Circa, November / December 1981; full contents here

In May 1981, a poster was circulated in Northern Ireland which was headed 'Do you really have a future in art'. It was the brainchild of Art and Research Exchange, a new artists grouping in Belfast who wished to reinvigorate what they saw as a languishing visual-arts scene in Northern Ireland.  A few meetings and a few months later, the first issue of Circa appeared, a direct result of ARE's initiative.

Circa quickly gained the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and then of the Arts Council of Ireland. Thematically, the early years of the magazine revolve very broadly around issues of identity - eg, Belinda Loftus on 'Mother Ireland and the troubles: artist, model, reality' in the first issue, or a panel discussion of the book Ireland, a week in the life of a nation in issue 30. However, a pattern is also set up of great diversity in what is written about, from lofts in New York to ennui in Craigavon. As Medb Ruane notes in her review in 2002 of the first 99 issues of Circa, there is a drift from some sort of essentialist approach to art in Ireland to issues-based art to a postmodernist relativism and globalism: "Younger generations less concerned with ideologies of race and nation, right or left, were more interested and able to develop practice in a global frame where attitudes could be played with and transformed." Very roughly speaking, the 2000 - 2010 has seen the rise of the artist-critic-curator amalgam, a trend reflected not only in the writing but also in the art written about, where a reflexive relativism is now taken for granted.

In 1992, Circa's editorial office moved to Dublin. Circa's online presence has grown very significantly over the past ten years, to the point that online 'publication' levels in 2009 approximately equalled those in the magazine itself. Traffic levels reach up to 1,000 or more unique visitors per day, and at times Circa has ranked #1 for a Google search on 'art magazine'.

The growth in online readership created a dilemma in terms of content - the informality of the web appeared to require more informal writing, but it also took energy away from the printed magazine.

Due to funding cuts and a very difficult financial environment, Circa suspended publication in 2010, to concentrate on its online presence. In October 2010 Circa published its first fully online issue, based around criticism and criticality.