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
334 Broome Street
New York, NY 10002
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland
Photo documentation: Peter Tresnan