Columban Hall
Sea Road, 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.
Anouk Kruithof
Anouk Kruithof’s multilayered, trans-disciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, artist-books, text, performance, video, animation, websites and (social) interventions in the public domain.
Kruithof’s work is an exploration of contemporary life. By continually navigating between the digital and physical sphere, she investigates a collective state of mind that is not solely grounded in the material world, but more and more often in the relentless flow of images in an amorphous digital world.
Her work contemplates a world consisting of a relentless stream of edited, constructed, spliced-together images that have lost their credibility; exposing contemporary reality as thoroughly scripted and subject to permanent post-production. Her work depicts the transience and the chaos of this world, which the artist skillfully addresses by mixing urgent societal issues with personal experiences that simultaneously represent this prevalent state in our society today.
Born 1981 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Anouk Kruithof, lives and works between Brussels Belgium, the Netherlands and her wooden house in the Amazon Rainforest in Botopasi Suriname. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as: Musuem Tinguely Basel, MoMA New York and MoMA San Francisco, Museum Folkwang Essen, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, Museum Voorlinden Wassenaar, FOAM Amsterdam, Kunst Haus Wien Vienna, VOO?UIT Ghent, MBAL Le Locle Switzerland, The Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen China; Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, Russia.
Universal Tongue
In the large-scale research project Universal Tongue (2018 - 2021), the Dutch artist Anouk Kruithof analyzes dance as a global cultural phenomenon, through the exploration of videos and clips found on the internet. With her team of fifty-two researchers and assistants, she has been able to compile 8,800 films representing the diversity of cultures through dance. The ongoing loop of moving image erases typical categories of the world order, such as country, continent or culture. Instead, it looks at our era of fluidity, hybridity, and non-stop connectedness, respecting the value of our historical backgrounds, cultural differences, and individuality.
The installation version of the work, consisting of 8 four-hour videos projected simultaneously, has been shown around the world and recently at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. At TULCA, we present the new four-hour monoband video of Universal Tongue.
Image: Installation view in Columban Hall: Universal Tongue, 2022, video-edition 12 + 2 ap, video loop with sound, 4hrs duration. Edit by Ieva Maslinskaitė. Sound by Karoliina Pärnänen. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Venue: Columban Hall, Sea Road, Galway
Accessibility: restricted access, not wheelchair accessible
Parking: pay and display
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie