The Longest Shadow Ever Cast

Presented as a satellite installation and event series, The Longest Shadow Ever Cast takes place at 334 Broome Street, New York, extending TULCA 2025’s exploration of shared histories and shifting terrains, and features a sister exhibition that houses the second part of Peter Tresnan’s diptych, with the first part on display at Galway Arts Centre. It is accompanied by an event programme organised by Tresnan, which gathers works by local artists and TULCA contributors. Over the weekend, the programme will include a reception, an artist talk, and a screening series reflecting on memory, distance, and the Irish diasporic experience.

This year’s edition of TULCA began with, and was inspired by, the undated and anonymously drawn Burmese Map of the World, a speculative artefact shaped by traces of Medieval European cartography. It depicts a teardrop-shaped island rising from the ocean, with smaller islands drifting below, detached from the mainland. A horizontal green line marks the Himalayas: above lies the mythical land of seven lakes and Mount Meru; below, abstracted colourful forms mark the land the mapmaker believed strangers came from. Like other ancient maps, it casts the periphery as both dangerous and alluring, and implies that the unknown can also signify the opening up of possibilities.

Strange lands still bear common ground responds both to this image and to the reverberations of our global crisis of capital, which displaces people and fragments worlds. It partitions us from communities, ecosystems, and inherited knowledge systems, leaving us adrift and ambivalent toward those who arrive from elsewhere. So, reorientation serves as the festival’s guiding theme, and is understood as the act of unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of contact.

This year, TULCA engages artists whose practices move across personal, physical, and psychic boundaries. Much of the work documents situated encounters with land, the sea, the creature, the stranger, the here and the elsewhere. The programme aims to create space to reconsider inherited structures of power, drawing attention to the residues that surface at points of intense contact and to the possibilities that arise when conventional ways of separating and categorising are unsettled.

The festival presents a programme of artworks, film screenings, and live performances by artists and collaborators from Ireland and beyond. It unfolds across sites in Galway, extends through the airwaves, and reaches further still with a satellite venue in New York.

Programme of Events

Friday 4 November 2025
- Walkthrough 6-8pm

Saturday 15 November 2025
- Community Artmaking 12-2pm
- Film Screening 2-3pm | Presentation of three films by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Caoimhín Gaffney, and Thaís Muniz
- Artist Talk 4-5pm | Melissa Middleberg, Devin Osorio, and Peter Tresnan
- Reception 6-8pm | Refreshments provided by Bedell Cellars

Sunday 16 November 2025
- Community Artmaking 12-2pm
- Artist Talk 2-3pm | Ayanna Legros and Peter Tresnan
- Film Screening 4-5pm | Presentation of three films by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Caoimhín Gaffney, and Thaís Muniz

Photo documentation: Peter Tresnan

TULCA Education: Language Tours
TULCA Gallery
Hynes Building, St Augustine Street, Galway, H91 R6WF
11–16 November & 18–23 November 2025, 12–6pm

TULCA Education presents a series of Language Tours offering visitors the opportunity to experience the exhibition through different languages.

Each tour will be delivered by a member of the TULCA Education team and live translated by a native speaker. Depending on the group, translation may be directed to individuals within a larger tour or offered to the entire group.

Languages available: Irish, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Prior booking is essential to ensure translator availability.
To book a Language Tour, contact education@tulca.ie

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Image: Laura Giffin Photography, 2023

Across all TULCA Galleries

11-16 November 2025
18-23 November 2025
12-6 pm

The Education Team is pleased to announce the availability of pre-booked Audio Description Tours for TULCA 2025. Participants will have the opportunity to select any artwork they wish to have described by the TULCA Education Team, comprising Aoife Natsumi Frehan (Education Coordinator) and Kate McSharry (Education Officer). Following the audio description of the artworks, a guided discussion will take place, during which participants will be encouraged to share their experiences and insights regarding the works.

Audio Description tours are available upon booking any day during TULCA 2025. The tour duration is 45 minutes. Please note that Advance Booking is Essential for this tour, and bookings must be confirmed 24 hours prior to the start time of the tour. 

To make a booking, please contact Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Education Coordinator, at education@tulca.ie

Access: The TULCA Education team is based in the TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building during the festival.

• Tours can be arranged for other TULCA Galleries (each venue has its own capacity and accessibility).

• Visit our Access Page for more info.

• We are committed to ensuring all tours are accessible.

• Please inform us of any specific access needs when booking.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Image: Laura Giffin Photography, 2022

TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan leads a special gallery tour designed for families and younger visitors. This informal session offers an opportunity for children and adults to explore the artworks together through guided discussion and shared observation.

Families, friends, and young visitors of all ages are welcome. Adults are encouraged to join the conversation alongside the young people they bring.

Please note: all young visitors must be accompanied by an adult at all times. Young people under 18 cannot be left unattended in the gallery.

To book a place, contact: education@tulca.ie

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Across all TULCA Galleries

11-16 November 2025
18-23 November 2025
9am - 4pm

The TULCA Education Team is pleased to offer a series of gallery tours tailored for academic groups as part of TULCA 2025. These tours are designed for universities, colleges, post-primary schools, and primary schools, offering an opportunity for students and educators to engage with contemporary art in a meaningful and structured way.

Using Visual Thinking Strategies, the tours facilitate inclusive, learner-centred discussions that prioritize viewer interpretations over traditional information delivery. This approach encourages critical thinking and rich conversations, sparked by the shared experience of exploring art.

For academic groups, worksheets will be provided, tailored to different educational levels. These will include reflective exercises and practical activities that can be taken back to the classroom.

Group bookings for academic institutions are available during weekdays, with tours running every hour from 9am to 4pm. The tour duration is 45 minutes. Advanced booking is required.

Capacity: No minimum, maximum 40 per group (subject to venue capacity)
Age: Late primary school level and above

Bookings: To make a booking, please contact Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Education Coordinator, at education@tulca.ie

Access: The TULCA Education team is based in the TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building during the festival.

• Tours can be arranged for other TULCA Galleries (each venue has its own capacity and accessibility).

• Visit our Access Page for more info.

• We are committed to ensuring all tours are accessible.

• Please inform us of any specific access needs when booking.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Photo: NCAD visit to the TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building. Photo: Laura Griffin, 2022

Across all TULCA Galleries

11-16 November 2025
18-23 November 2025
9am - 4pm

The TULCA Education Team welcomes community groups to participate in our gallery tours as part of TULCA 2025. These tours are open to local residents, cultural organisations, youth groups, and other non-academic participants who are interested in engaging with contemporary art.

These tours are participant-led, fostering open discussions that focus on personal interpretation of the artworks, the spaces they inhabit, and the artists intentions. No prior knowledge of art is required. If your group has a specific theme or focus, please let us know when booking, and we will incorporate it into the discussion.

Group bookings for community organisations are available every day of the festival, with tours running every hour from 9am to 4pm. The tour duration is 45 minutes. Advanced booking is required.

Capacity: No minimum, maximum 40 per group (subject to venue capacity)
Age: Late primary school level and above.

Bookings: To make a booking, please contact Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Education Coordinator, at education@tulca.ie

Access: The TULCA Education team is based in the TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building during the festival.

• Tours can be arranged for other TULCA Galleries (each venue has its own capacity and accessibility).

• Visit our Access Page for more info.

• We are committed to ensuring all tours are accessible.

• Please inform us of any specific access needs when booking.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Photo: Gallery Tour with Oranmore Secondary School, Photo: Ros Kavanagh, 2024

Kate Morrell

…Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal) centres around conversations with four Bogotána women, documenting their private collections of pre-Columbian ceramics, displayed within domestic settings and embedded within the interior architecture of their homes.

The term ‘guaqueria’ – the act of looting archaeological sites – has been used in Colombia since the mid-19th century. Illicit excavations by guaqueros serve the existence of many public museums and private collections in Bogotá. Within the film, this kind of looting is posited as political resistance, working in opposition to nationalist, colonial and Western-oriented approaches to archaeology and museum collecting practices.

Colombia exists at a crossroads of cultural exchange, where colonial histories and indigenous knowledge systems create complex interdependencies. With recent laws put into place by the Ministry of Culture that state that private collections must be declared, the women, identities withheld, articulate varied rationales for keeping commoditised objects in circulation. Alternative reasoning for guaquería is proposed, challenging ways ‘licit’ and ‘illicit’ collecting practices are defined.

The film incorporates museum archive footage from the 1980s–90s along with newly shot video and photography, interlacing the public and private, blurring ‘expert’ knowledge with non-scientific and personal language. Conversations are only partially translated into English. These English translations can also be seen in digital prints shown alongside the film. Through this process of part-translation, the filmmaker engages new experimental and ethical ways to navigate the tensions around being seen and heard versus reserving a right to remain untranslated.

Kate Morrell is an artist living and working in London. For the past 15 years she has worked with archives, collections and libraries to develop projects that identify and respond to under-researched or overlooked histories. This work questions the conventional logics that serve and organise collections. By doing this, it invites critical re-readings of the hierarchies and structures of power which are given voice in their presentation.

With a background in artist bookmaking, her practice is situated in the expanded field of publishing. She works primarily with print media – with sculpture, drawing and video as extensions of that.

She has developed diverse methods for working with collections of different scales and contexts. Projects include: documenting illegal, private collections of pre-Columbian ceramics, kept by housewives in Bogotá; research within the Jacquetta Hawkes Archive at the University of Bradford on the life and work of the British archaeologist; and a residency at a remote Swiss library, residing alongside ‘shelving robots’ in this innovative, futuristic archive.

...Y el barro se hizo eterno
(...And the Mud Became Eternal), 2020
HD cideo colour/b&w, 16:9. Spanish dialogue and English (part-)translation, 35:42’

Access notes
The film includes the voices of several women: the four collectors, a collector’s daughter, the translator, and the filmmaker. Conversations are held in Spanish and part-translated to English using half-screen subtitles on the right of the screen. The change of speaker is indicated by a colour change in the half-screen subtitle. Selected parts of the conversation are left untranslated and this is indicated via standard subtitles.

Download Transcript (PDF)

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Chris Zhongtian Yuan

In this exhibition of film, sculpture and drawing, Chris Zhongtian Yuan recomposes vernacular sonic, spatial and archival materials to build connections between seemingly distant geographies. Yuan’s film, All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, is structured as a dialogue between two exiled individuals who are about to reincarnate into the next life. Traversing moving image, animation, and archival footage, the viewer catches glimpses of bodily presence as the figures proceed through the forest, striking up intimate conversations that reveal family legends, collective histories, love tales and folklore.

The film interweaves personal and historical narratives, and uses a composition of free jazz, vocal improvisations, and popular music to reveal the ghostly connections between Chinese, West African and Caribbean diasporas. The dialogue between the two characters appears only on screen, as the film is led by a sonic narrative - a score composed and performed in collaboration with trumpeter Kevin G. Davy. Alongside the film, seven clay sculptures and a large-scale drawing trace transnational sounds and texts. Embracing affect and storytelling, Yuan’s work explores the intimacy between sound and narrative and place.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan (b. 1988, China) is an artist based in London. Working with video, sound, performance, sculpture and installation, their work builds around the notion of ‘Punk filmmaking’, considering space, relation and context. Yuan often deploys improvisation techniques drawn from a wide range of music, including punk, jazz and noise. As such, resistance becomes a nuanced, playful and collective act across cultures and places. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings include: Current Plans, Hong Kong (2025); Triangolo, Cremona (2025); Surplus Space, Wuhan (2024); Reading International, Reading (2023); Macalline Art Center, Beijing (2023); V.O Curations, London (2022); The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2021); 1815, K11, Wuhan (2020). Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions and screenings include: Shanghai Biennale (2025); MAC Panama (2025); Kunsthal Rotterdam (2025); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2025); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2024); Somerset House, London (2024, 2022, 2021); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); OCAT Institute, Beijing (2021, 2020); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); Videoex, Zurich (2021); Documentary Exhibition of Fine Art Triennale, Wuhan (2020); Venice Architecture Biennale Greek Pavilion, Venice (2018) among others.

All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss, 2023
16mm film transferred to HD video, 21:52’

Island Is a Hole in My Heart; Haunted Island No. 5; Ghost Track No. 3; Through the Dirty Pane Glass Window; Wild West Awaits the Vulnerable; Through the Dirty Pane Glass Window no. 2; Ghost Track No. 6
Glazed Ceramics

Songs for the Loved Ones
Digital drawing on Japanese synthetic fibre paper

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Marie Farrington

For TULCA, Marie Farrington presents A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, a sculptural installation at the James Mitchell Geology Museum. Installed across the museum’s central aisle, the work reflects on gaps, fragments, edges, and thresholds within archaeology, geology, sculpture, and staged display. Incorporating artefacts from the university’s geological collection and local sediment samples from Dog’s Bay, the sculptural works register, respond to, and incorporate their site and context, reflecting on the conditions of their own visibility.

The collection of objects offers an overview of the processes and material outcomes of Marie’s unfolding cross-site project Diagonal Acts, with new cast works directly responding to the museum’s Victorian display cabinets. These cast objects explore the relationship between glass and visibility through arrangements that use framing, layering and transparency as vehicles for thinking about co-creative relationships.

Diagonal Acts explores the body’s boundaries in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives. The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre/Archaeology’ (Shanks/Pearson, 2001), exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage. Through iterative material interventions and opportunities for activation, Diagonal Acts excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and borders reworked, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.

A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, 2025
Wax, glass, anthracite, steel, volcanic olivine sand, bio-resin, soapstone, and local sediment samples

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Abel Shah

Collaborating since 2017, Abel Shah is an artist duo consisting of Alex Bell and Giulia Shah. Language and translation are core subjects in their practice - questioning the dissemination of knowledge and seeking alternative modes of communication. Through a poetic approach, they construct objects, texts, images, and sound that often manifest as multi-media installations, and build frameworks for dialogue and collaboration.

The relationships between image-object, physical-virtual, verbal-nonverbal, past-future, regeneration-decay are highly significant in their practice, reflecting the ongoing exchange and multitude of experiences that exist when making art as a non-singular artist. These are not thought of in binary or opposition, but as a constellation or dialectic diagram — where the tensions and flux of invisible structures/voids/the-in-betweeen blur notions of hierarchy and obstruct linear readability.

As a duo, collaboration and the idea of the host—holding space for others’ thoughts—are constantly present in their ways of working. Since 2018, they have been running Residency 11:11 from their home in London, a queer-run initiative reflecting their ambitions to find alternative forms of exchange. Their work has been shown at Tate Modern, Gallery Eenwerk, The Newbridge Project and The Corinium Museum.

Shift, Tilt, 2025
Oak frame, glass, steel embossing on paper, volcanic sand (collected by the artist’s mother from Basilicata, in southern Italy and sent by post to London)

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Saoirse Amira Anis
Mourad Ben Amor
Bojana Jankovic & Nessa Finnegan
Tom O’Dea
Abel Shah
Peter Tresnan

Strange lands still bear common ground reflects on movement and connection. Drawing on ancient cartographic practices and Galway’s maritime history, the festival asks what it means to be an island with fluid ties to the wider world, especially at a time when people and communities are increasingly displaced and fragmented. This year’s programme brings together artists who position themselves and their practices within a relational context and whose work invites reflection on proximity and exchange. Each of the works shown are grounded in situated encounters with distinct cities, cultures, creatures, and landscapes. They draw attention to the residues that surface at points of intense contact, and propose new possibilities that might emerge when familiar boundaries are unsettled.

Saoirse Amira Anis

symphony for a fraying body is a body of work borne from a fascination with both siphonophores (aquatic creatures whose existence depends on complex, interdependent networks of multiple organisms) and mythological shapeshifters such as Aïcha Kandicha, a Moroccan river-dwelling djinn. The film follows The Creature, a costumed, fugitive entity who meanders through rock pools, waterfalls, and seafronts, crossing land and water to eventually return euphorically to the sea. Madder-root-dyed, hand-made ropes, initially created for The Creature’s costume, are reconfigured to create a frame for the film. Footage of the dyeing and rope-making process sits alongside images of colour seeping into water, as the tendrils of the dress trail across the ground and sway in rhythm with The Creature’s movements. A percussive soundtrack swells and stills with melodies and repetitive rhythms inspired by Gnawa and Celtic music, echoing the artist’s own heritage. Through myth, movement, and the sea, the work traces fugitivity, rage, and gestures of solidarity with non-human others.

symphony for a fraying body, 2023
Digital Film

tendrils of a fraying body, 2023
Wool, cotton, polyester, madder-root, and cowrie shells

Madder-root cushion, 2025
Madder-root, cotton, and polyester

Mourad Ben Amor

The road, the house, the key, the animals, Bamssi. Images with the urgency of an Instagram story create a dialogue within the family across the sea: Mourad and Fairuz, Tunisia and abroad. You have to go to the roof to see something of the surroundings: the railway behind the house. Away from the house, away from home. Street dogs and cats in front of the house. Without a house, without a home. The sound of the train carries a disturbing longing. The image of the sea opens up a dangerous desire. To stay. To dream. Time passes both slowly and quickly when the possibility of new life disrupts the routine.

Bamssi, 2024
Video, colour, 16:9

Made in a dialogue with Fairuz Ghammam.

Bojana Jankovic & Nessa Finnegan

Shared Migrants (Archive) documents what it feels like to be a migrant on the island of Ireland. The community co-created archive collects migrant words, reflections, drawings, and scribbles reflecting on interactions with the ‘Irish border’, understood as both a physical line and a regime of exclusion - from territories but also rights and histories. Sidelining the digital data collection practised by mechanisms of border control and using methods of counter-mapping, the project centres migrant knowledge: instead of collecting ‘facts’ about migrants, the Shared Migrants (Archive) considers and documents how the border feels for migrants on the island. Shared Migrants (Archive) is open for new contributions throughout TULCA.

Shared Migrants (Archive), 2024
Mixed media

Tom O’Dea

In Dog Liberation Archives, Tom O’Dea assembles material to form a speculative archive of dog liberation struggles of the early 20th century and their influence on contemporary animal–human relations. Central to the work is documentary material relating to the activities of the Dog Liberation Organisation (DLO), a para-fictional militant group devoted to “the creation of a new social order of species interrelations based on the liberation of dogs and other species from human control.” The installation includes the DLO Canis Major Flag and an archive of material tracing the activities of the DLO in Galway city in the early 20th century. These records are positioned alongside historical and contemporary reflections that voice differing perspectives on the politics of dog-human relations.

Dog Liberation Archives forms the basis of O’Dea’s developing series, Companion, which examines human relationships with other forms of being and matter. The series challenges anthropocentric definitions of “life” that rely on human-centred notions of language, sentience, individuality, and reproduction. The works reflect on the role of the voice in political action, and what it means to speak with, speak to and speak for another.

Abel Shah

Collaborating since 2017, Abel Shah is an artist duo consisting of Alex Bell and Giulia Shah. Language and translation are core subjects in their practice - questioning the dissemination of knowledge and seeking alternative modes of communication. Through a poetic approach, they construct objects, texts, images, and sound that often manifest as multi-media installations, and build frameworks for dialogue and collaboration.

The relationships between image-object, physical-virtual, verbal-nonverbal, past-future, regeneration-decay are highly significant in their practice, reflecting the ongoing exchange and multitude of experiences that exist when making art as a non-singular artist. These are not thought of in binary or opposition, but as a constellation or dialectic diagram — where the tensions and flux of invisible structures/voids/the-in-betweeen blur notions of hierarchy and obstruct linear readability.

As a duo, collaboration and the idea of the host—holding space for others’ thoughts—are constantly present in their ways of working. Since 2018, they have been running Residency 11:11 from their home in London, a queer-run initiative reflecting their ambitions to find alternative forms of exchange. Their work has been shown at Tate Modern, Gallery Eenwerk, The Newbridge Project and The Corinium Museum.

Start: focus, refocus, zoom in, zoom out, release, push, pull, inside, out, (re)presentation, trans-form, time, explode—implode, soft, hard, liquid, contain, spill, spit, mouth(s), adapt… again

Tilt, Shift, 2025
Oak frame, glass, surgical plaster, photo-etching, soup ground aquatint, oil lift, and hard ground on steel

Peter Tresnan

The Longest Shadow Ever Cast is a diptych presenting a singular figure emerging from the ocean. Their gaze is a puddle of emotions set against a vibrant sky and dark clouds, while their body moves purposefully toward the viewer. The vertically arranged diptych is divided horizontally: the upper half rendered in oil on linen, and the lower half an abstracted figurative drawing combining charcoal, acrylics, and spray paint on tulle. Across these media, the figure remains whole, uniting the two canvases. The paintings sit along an axis oriented 254° west-southwest, facing toward New York City. Their doubles are currently in New York, displayed at 334 Broome Gallery, facing Galway at 106° east-northeast. Together, the two diptychs form the poles of a transatlantic cross-section, enclosing a nearly 5,000-kilometre void between the two sites. Opposite the diptych, a single-channel video explores decolonial action and queer joy through the fluidity of bodies in movement, gesture, aggression, and sexuality.

The Longest Shadow Ever Cast, 2025
Oil on linen; acrylic, charcoal, spray paint on tulle

Ebbing, 2025
Digital video, 9.49’

Ebbing, 2025
Audio, 9.49’

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil
Caoimhín Gaffney
Mair Hughes
Emily Joy
Seán O’Riordan
Durre Shahwar
Jess Zamora-Turner

Strange lands still bear common ground reflects on movement and connection. Drawing on ancient cartographic practices and Galway’s maritime history, the festival asks what it means to be an island with fluid ties to the wider world, especially at a time when people and communities are increasingly displaced and fragmented. This year’s programme brings together artists who position themselves and their practices within a relational context and whose work invites reflection on proximity and exchange. Each of the works shown are grounded in situated encounters with distinct cities, cultures, creatures, and landscapes. They draw attention to the residues that surface at points of intense contact, and propose new possibilities that might emerge when familiar boundaries are unsettled.

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil

In the two-channel video installation, Mirror States, two disparate islands with intertwined histories are put in mirrored reflection. In the late early twentieth century, Cuba was described in Irish and American revolutionary and political circles as ‘The Ireland of the West’. Cuba, as it was then, was proposed as the model state from which a new Ireland could be imagined. The two islands also shared an exchange of revolutionary leaders: Ireland gave Cuba its charismatic grandson, Che Guevara Lynch. In return, Cuba gave Ireland the unusually sombre and austere Eamon De Valera.

Cuba largely fulfilled the socialist dream of its uprising, with large plazas celebrating the country’s heroes. Dublin, in contrast, never developed a similar visual language of commemoration of its revolutionary triumph. The heroes of Ireland’s rising are hidden in small statues down exhaust-fumed back streets, hardly noticed, their dreams forgotten. Both islands seem to have forgotten their once common ground of political potential and comparison. Both islands now also share a strange secret United States Military Base in the west: Shannon Airport and Guantanamo Bay. The film, composed of footage shot between Havana and Dublin from 2022 to 2025 and interwoven with found material and online archives, asks what might be rediscovered when two histories, sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, are brought into dialogue once more.

Mirror States, 2025
Digital Film

Caoimhín Gaffney

The works on view are drawn from All at Once Collapsing Together, a series of medium-format photographs that act as mirrors to the healing that the natural environment can offer. Text fragments, infused with climate anxiety, interrupt and reframe these scenes as fleeting and fragile. The series poses questions from an unnamed protagonist who considers the potential of the natural world as a site for recovery from trauma. Strands of queer thought are threaded through the series, unsettling conventions of nature writing and intertwining with fantasies of destruction and transformation. Together, these elements invite reflection on the traces we leave on the earth, and on the porous boundaries between body, environment, and disintegration.

And you leave the rest of yourself behind, 2024
A drop below the surface, 2024
16, 23, 36, 2024
Bright sun and cold shadows, 2024
A concentration of time: Pentaptych, 2024
All giclée printed on Hahnemühle archival photo rag paper

Mair Hughes, Emily Joy and Durre Shawar

The Borderlands/Y Gororau is a project led by Mair Hughes. The project explores the potency, plurality and value of Welsh borderland landscapes, and personal experiences of dual identity and Welshness. Emily Joy, Mair Hughes, and Durre Shahwar create work which reflects on sites across the Welsh borderlands, bringing together collaborative research and individual responses through their practice in writing, photography, sculpture and site-specific exploration.

Mair Hughes

A Field Guide to the Offa’s Dyke delves into the artist’s experience of growing up in the Welsh borders with dual Welsh-English identity. The installation explores the psychogeography of the dyke in the present time, alongside speculative reimaginings of the borderlands and dual identities as a space of creative potential as well as ambiguity. The installation draws on the form of Offa’s dyke, an ancient border earthwork which marks a distinct physical line across the Welsh borderland landscape. The Dyke was constructed in an uneven shape, with the bank much higher on the Welsh side, to allow long views into the landscape. The wool textile piece reimagines a slogan painted on a farmhouse inhabited by members of the artist’s family. The new version, in Welsh, reads ‘Nid ni oddi wrth frenhinoedd, na brenhinoedd oddi wrthym ni’, which means ‘Not We From Kings, Nor From Us Kings’. The audio reflects on visits to sites on the dyke, combined with reflections on family and the borderlands.

Emily Joy

A printed image on linen hangs from a wooden dowel. The fabric is mostly charcoal-black with two vignette-type images sitting side by side like spy holes. Each image shows a view of one side of the riverbank of the river Wye, where the border between England and Wales falls, with a pair of hands holding a taut rope as if engaged in a tug-of-war or pulling something up from the river. A small matte-black ceramic shuttle in the shape of a salmon lies on a stack of cream calico folded into a rectangle. The shuttle, used for weaving, contains a bobbin of hand-spun cream coloured wool, which emerges from the stomach of the salmon shuttle and flows out onto the floor. A matte-black ceramic salmon hangs from a long rope. Inside the hollow body of the salmon is a small white bag of granulated ferrous oxide. The ceramic surface of the salmon is smudged with small areas of river mud and fragments of plants where it was submerged in the River Wye.

Durre Shahwar

Reorientating Borders Into is a series of research images which respond to the Welsh borderlands and reflect on how place, power, and storytelling intersect. These images were captured on different walks across the Welsh/English border in South Wales, ranging from Wintour’s Leap, Offa’s Dyke path, and the River Wye. They speak to shifting boundaries and marking and unmarking different terrains. The fragmented texts and images seek to reflect the re-orienting and renegotiation of the idea of borders and borderlands.

Reorientating Borders Into, 2025
C-type photographic prints with satin and matt finishes

Seán O’Riordan

Within this exhibition, Seán O’Riordan presents large-scale sculptures that invite reflection on how the aesthetics of entry and exchange shape social worlds. The installation bring together hand-sculpted ceramics, wooden frameworks, and cardboard structures. Across their surfaces, fragments of text and figures in relief appear, co-opting the visual languages of commerce and ornament. Two coin-shaped sculptures, GOOD FOR ALL NIGHT and Fool I, transform symbols of exchange into sites of relation. Drawing from the histories of tokens and objects that once mediated entry into queer social spaces, such as bathhouses, cinemas, and clubs, the works trace how access has often operated through codes rather than sanctioned economies. Bad Tendencies, a freestanding wall structure that hovers between façade and threshold, supports a series of terracotta panels functioning as signage and wayfinding elements. Informed by queer histories of coded and discreet communication, these panels do not orient so much as guide viewers into deliberate ambiguity. In doing so, they also leave space for revision through misreading, opening possibilities for new vocabularies, within which alternative forms of value and recognition might emerge.

Jess Zamora-Turner

Jess Zamora-Turner’s practice is informed by years of seed stewardship and textile work on the Polish-German border, where she tends a small plot of non-speculative land, cultivating Andean foods and displaced seed varieties. Here, her work is presented as archives of distinct geographies, their cultural histories and their ecological landscapes – which she encourages us to see not as commodities but as companions. Three Sisters is a hand-quilted textile sculpture made from salvaged domestic fabrics and a delicate antique blouse. Embedded into its seams are heirloom seeds of corn, beans, and squash, the three main crops of various indigenous people in the so-called ‘Americas’. The quilt is an object of ancestral memory, named after a traditional companion planting method where the three seeds are planted together and sustain each other as they grow.

Large-scale quilt, Pisagua Blanket, is a soft and deeply personal commemoration of a site of immense violence. In 1973, the artist’s father was abducted and tortured in Pisagua before being exiled to Europe for nearly a decade. The work is an offering of repair and innumerable hours of handwork for a memory that remains largely unacknowledged in the national body. Postomia is a large textile hanging made in collaboration with the Postomia River in northwest Poland. Used bed sheets were submerged in the riverbed, absorbing sediment, agricultural runoff, sewage, and other seasonal flows. The resulting stains and markings reflect both the river’s organic life and its entanglement with ecological degradation.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

A Collection of Ocean Waifs | Enya Moore & Kate O’Shea

A Collection of Ocean Waifs is an audio collaboration between Enya Moore, Kate O’Shea, Ron Bradfield Jnr, and Padraig Stevens. Through sound and spoken word, the work explores the legacies of The Wild Goose: A Collection of Ocean Waifs (1867), a handwritten newspaper created by Irish political prisoners aboard the Hougoumont - a ship that departed Portsmouth, England, and sailed to Walyalup (Fremantle, Western Australia). Produced and shared while crossing oceans, The Wild Goose not only occupied a space between colonial borders - it created a new one. The legacies of British imperialism and colonisation have forged complex, interdependent networks between colonised places that remain under-examined. Among these, the historical and cultural ties between Ireland and Australia are one of many deserving of exploration. This audio work draws on the story of The Wild Goose to bring together voices from both Ireland and Australia, creating a reflective space to consider how ‘strange’ lands may share common ground.

Enya Moore and Kate O'Shea are a collaborative duo that have cultivated an enduring artistic and research partnership that spans decades. Kate, usually based in Cork, Ireland, is currently undertaking an artist residency in Walyalup (Fremantle, Western Australia). Her creative practice includes printmaking, publishing under Durty Books, the newspaper Gravity Express (with Vagabond Reviews). Enya, based in Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia), is a researcher, educator, and writer. Her work explores networks of solidarity, and cultural ecosystems as well as anti-colonial histories. Enya is a lecturer in design at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning in the University of Sydney, where Kate has collaborated with her in the Masters in Design programme. Over the years, they have continuously expanded their artistic and intellectual collaboration. In 2020, they co-developed Networks of Solidarity, a four-part online series bridging Gadigal Country and Dublin 8. Their recent projects include Social Space (Broken Fields Collective, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2023), Art, What Is It Good For? (South Tipperary Arts Centre, 2023), and Broken Fields Micro Exhibition (46 Grand Parade, Cork, 2023).

Sound Editor: Alan Meaney

A Collection of Ocean Waifs was created by Enya Moore, Kate O'Shea, Ron Bradfield Jnr and Padraig Stevens who are based on and between Galway (Ireland), Walyalup (Fremantle) and Gadigal Country (Sydney).

It was created on and between the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people of the Noongar nation. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of these lands and waterways and extend our respect to their Elders, past and present.

Biographies

Padraig Stevens is a songwriter and musician who lives in Co. Galway

Ron Bradfield Jnr is a Bard, Jawi man of the saltwater peoples around Djarindjin, Western Australia. Born in Mooniemia (Northampton), he grew up in Jambinu (Geraldton), but now calls Walyalup (Fremantle) his home. As the CYO of Yarns R Us, Ron supports artists, arts professionals, arts organisations and institutions across Australia and overseas and is currently the Community Engagement Facilitator, with the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University. As a storyteller and artist, Ron tells and makes stories that unpick his own personal experiences surviving our society and what it is to be ‘Australian’. As the eldest son of a Stolen Generations mother, Ron presents stories of himself as a child, as an adult and as an ex-serving member of the Australian Defence Force. Tapping into the physical memories of a time past through the use of familiar objects and Australian culture markers, Ron retells his stories, challenging today’s Australians about how they remember the places they grew up in and the experiences they had, well away from the reality of Aboriginal and Islander peoples.

References (in order of appearance in audio)

Stevens, P. (2025). We Sail Away [Song].

Flood, J., & O’Reilly, J. B. (1867). The Wild Goose: A collection of ocean waifs [Newspaper]. Published on the Hougoumont ship.

Stevens, P. (2025). How Strange Lands Still Bear Common Ground [Song]

Robinson, T. (2008) Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, New York Review of Books.

Flood, J., & O’Reilly, J. B. (1867). The Wild Goose: A collection of ocean waifs [Newspaper]. Published on the Hougoumont ship. John Flood papers, comprising seven issues of the ship newspaper The Wild Goose, 1867, and Flood’s conditional pardon, 1871, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Moore, E. (2025) Jumpcuts Essay, Jumpcuts: an exhibition by Kate O’Shea and Aideen O’Donavan, Moores Building Art Space, Fremantle, WA.

Kavanagh, S. (2025). Making spaces [Song].

Sullivan, C. W., III. (2002). Fenian diary of Denis B. Cashman: The Hougomont diary of Denis B. Cashman. Wolfhound Press.

O’Byrne, M. (2025, November 4). The Catalpa Escape Podcast Series (Episode 7) [Audio podcast]. In M. Barker (Ed.), Fremantle Shipping News. https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2025/11/04/the-catalpa-escape-podcast-series-episode-7

Butterly, C. (2025). “The flotillas reminded us all that the only sane response to a dystopian world is to have radical imagination.” Hot Press. https://www.hotpress.com/opinion/global-sumud-flotilla-the-flotillas-reminded-us-all-that- the-only-sane-response-to-a-dystopian-world-is-to-have-radical-imagination-23114753

McGrath, W. (1969). Convict ship newspaper, ‘The Wilde Goose’, re-discovered. Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 74(219), 20–31. Cork Historical and Archaeological Society.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Image: Rubbing of a plaque from the memorial The Wild Goose, in Rockingham, Western Australia. The plaque was unveiled on 29 March 2014 to commemorate the newspaper created by Irish political prisoners transported aboard the Hougoumont to Freemantle, Australia.