126 Gallery
15 St. Brigit’s Place, Galway
Mon-Sun, 12-6pm
Welcome to the 20th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Clare Gormley under the title The World Was All Before Them.
Constructed in a moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty, this year's festival addresses the notion of futurity and asks what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.
Taking its title from the final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which recounts Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and into a new, unknown world, the festival seeks to take stock of our current moment and imagine what lies ahead, as we too find ourselves on a precipice: of ecological destruction, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, global pandemics, wars and technological over-saturation. Surely, there has never been such an urgent time to challenge the structures of our current existence, and to seek out visions of future worlds worth living in.
Disrupting traditional western, capitalistic, theistic tendencies to imagine the future as either utopian or dystopian, the festival will instead conjure a vision of the future as inextricably tied to the world we live in now: its inequities, as well as its possibilities. As such, it is less invested in depicting the world we might create, than in questioning how it is we might make our existing world a more liveable place.
The intention is to map a more expansive, non-binary, open-ended and fluid conception of what might lie ahead, through an engagement with a form of futurity rooted in a politics of livability, not escapism or mastery.
By-passing and critiquing the notion that technology alone might save us, this edition of TULCA seeks out practices which engage, among other things; civics, alliances, poetics, politics, bodies, dance, movement, language, decoloniality, sociality, connectivity, collectively and the quotidian acts of everyday existence as among the tools of future world-making.
Christopher Steenson
Christopher Steenson is an artist based between the north and south of Ireland. With a background in psychology and the sonic environment, his work uses sound, analogue photography, writing and digital media to forge ways of ‘listening to the future’.
Drawing upon the open methodologies of John Cage, and the idea of ‘correspondences’ proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold, Steenson’s sound-based artworks attempt to operate as a collaborative process, emerging as a field of potentialities between listeners and (speculative) environments. Often taking the form of installations, public interventions and broadcasts, these artworks use the conventions of radio and transmission-based infrastructure to locate audiences within a ‘dreamtime’ – a space in which pasts, presents, and futures are negotiated on a continuum.
Recent presentations include: ‘Soft Rains Will Come’ at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art (2022), curated by Emma Lucy O’Brien and Benjamin Stafford; ‘Translations’ at Project DivFuse, London (2022), ‘Connemara Landscape’ for Sonorities sound biennale, Belfast (2022); the group exhibition ‘Urgencies’ at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2021), curated by Locky Morris and Catherine Hemelryk; and the national public sound artwork On Chorus (2020).
Soft Rains Will Come
Operating as a live radio broadcast, Soft Rains Will Come (2022) transmits itself as an ‘imaginary landscape’ within the gallery. Amongst the static and squawks of communication, an unknown voice broadcasts itself to twelve transistor radios. This acousmêtre is an eavesdropper and an oracle, outlining a speculative future of the earth, as it transforms under an erratically changing climate. Like the weather itself, this sound work exists as an entropic system, constructing and recombining itself endlessly. Past and present fragments of sound are perpetually rearranged, to make predictions of an anxious future.
Venue: 126 Gallery, 15 St. Bridgets Place, Galway
Accessibility: venue is wheelchair accessible
Parking: free
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie