Artist Talk: Rachel Garfield | ATU Galway City

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2026 programme, Veruca Salt, curated by Sinéad Keogh. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will present four talks throughout October and November 2026.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with participating artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Galway City – Wellpark Road. Admission is free and booking is required.

Rachel Garfield discusses her practice as part of the TULCA 2026 Artist Talks Series. The talk accompanies Rachel Garfield’s presentation at Galway Arts Centre for Veruca Salt.

Rachel Garfield
Garfield is Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art London. She is an award winning artist filmmaker who exhibits regularly at film festivals and galleries. Recently including The Whitechapel Art Gallery London, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, London Short Film Festival, ICA, London, Cal Arts, LA, USA, Ekso Space, Cyprus. She also publishes extensively on art, identity politics, feminism and film and is commissioning editor of peer review journal MIRAJ, (Moving Image Review and Art Journal). Her publications include Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin, LUX, (2022) shortlisted for the Kraszna- Krausz award and Experimental Film making and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s, Bloomsbury (2022) and has curated screenings in New York, Frankfurt, London, Bristol, Dublin, LA and Denver. She is co-editor (with Dr Jenny Chamarette) of the first anthology on Stephen Dwoskin, ‘Stephen Dwoskin Is….A Reappraisal’ (February 2027).

Artist Statement
My work is a personal cinema arising out of the traditions of experimental film, focusing on the lived relationships between people and structures. My experimental mode explores the form and visual textures of video (through different generations of the camera, from lo fi to high-end cameras). Adopting DIY approaches and disjunctive and collage-like aesthetics from punk and post-punk, I aim to transform the impoverished image into a rich, multi-layered enjoyment of the visual. Through the fractured rhythms of editing, juxtapositions of textures (hand-held, fixed shots, blurred and distinct images), and a plasticisation of the image through emphasis on colour and slowed-down film, my work combines found footage and montaging techniques with first person testimony. My use of these elements, my debt to twentieth century montage and the cut-up makes my work visually bold but not slick. I juxtapose this punk approach to production with a feminist-humanist documentary ethos: namely, to discreetly and sensitively bring the viewers’ attention to the difficulties, pressures, schisms and, ultimately, the potential for healing that comes out of negotiating different communities and identities. I am particularly interested in the relationships between insider and outsider perspectives, and how class, race and gender, as well as geography, politics and institutional memory shape and unshape personal identity. My work derives its authority from the chorus of voices it simultaneously assembles and disassembles. As such, my work is a felt archaeology of place and the body, which lays bare the natural awkwardnesses and contradictions of the marginalised, everyday voices of people that I invite to tell their stories with deadpan humour, irreverence and poignancy. In this, these suites of practice, evolving over lengthy time periods, affirm the right to self-inconsistency that is a constitutive part of our lived experience.

Garfield will also discuss her book, Experimental Filmmaking and Feminist Punk Audio Visual Culture in the 1970's and 1980's.

Free, advance booking required

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland

Artist Talk: Vivienne Dick | ATU Galway City

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2026 programme, Veruca Salt, curated by Sinéad Keogh. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will present four talks throughout October and November 2026.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with participating artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Galway City – Wellpark Road. Admission is free and booking is required.

Vivienne Dick discusses her practice as part of the TULCA 2026 Artist Talks Series. The talk accompanies Vivienne Dick’s presentation at TULCA Gallery for Veruca Salt.

Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick works with film, video and photography. Her films are concerned with gender politics, social issues, ecology and possible futures. She makes single and multiscreen work which combine elements of documentary, performance and fiction. Dick began making films in late seventies New York during a period referred to as ‘No Wave’. Later work was made in London, and in recent years, in Ireland. Her work has been shown widely with retrospectives in Queer Porto, Jeu de Paume, Paris, IMMA, Seville, Tate Modern, and Crawford Art Gallery. Recent group shows include Palais de Tokyo, Paris, RCC Letterkenny, Hawaii Contemporary, The Complex Arts Centre, Tate Britain, and IMMA, Dublin. Dick's films have been shown at festivals at the BFI, London, New York Film Festival, Cork, Dublin, FilmX, LA , Berlin, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen and others. New York Our Time, a Reel Art feature documentary, received the Dublin Film Critics Award at DIFF in 2020 and Best Documentary Award at Irish Film Festival, London. A member of Aosdána since 2000, her work is distributed by Lux UK and The Film Makers Coop NYC. Dick is grateful to An Chomhairle Ealaíon for its support.

Artist Statement
I make multi-layered, open-ended work framed from a female perspective and with an interest in gender politics, ecology, music, philosophy and possible futures. My early work is associated with the ‘No Wave’ music and film movement of late seventies New York. I work with film, video and sometimes photography. I make single and multiscreen work which combine elements of documentary, performance and fiction. Later work was made in London, and in recent years, in Ireland. My works shows in cinemas, museums, and galleries. I am a member of Aosdána. The film features punk playing pinball, Beate Nilsen, Ikue Mori, Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Anya Phillips. In Guérillère Talks the filmmaker’s presence is felt through the expressive camera movements which contribute an energy and intensity to this exploration into notions of identity, as performers perform themselves.

Free, advance booking required

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland

Curator's Talk: Sinéad Keogh and Aoife Natsumi Frehan

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2026 programme, Veruca Salt, curated by Sinéad Keogh. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will present four talks throughout October and November 2026.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with participating artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Galway City – Wellpark Road. Admission is free and booking is required.

The opening event features presentations by Sinéad Keogh and TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan. Sinéad will introduce the curatorial framework and programme for Veruca Salt, followed by Aoife Natsumi, who will preview the 2026 Education Programme.

Marking fifty years since punk emerged as a disruptive cultural force, Veruca Salt considers what it means to know who you are and know what you want. The festival approaches punk not as a fixed historical style, but as a living method rooted in DIY culture, collective action and self-determination.

Women-led and countercultural perspectives connect an intergenerational programme of artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and community organisations. Across five galleries and a wider series of events in Galway, Veruca Salt brings together exhibitions, film, performance, sound, writing, talks and workshops. The programme asks what punk’s insistence on agency, solidarity and reinvention can offer now, positioning art as a space for refusal, care and new forms of belonging.

Sinéad Keogh
Sinéad Keogh is a multimedia performance installation artist and curator with an MFA from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Keogh is the founder, director and curator of Soul Noir: Festival of the Dark Arts, a Dublin based festival for the Gothic and alternative arts (2017–2024).

Keogh’s curatorial practice aims to engage audiences with countercultural, underground and alternative voices that are often absent from the mainstream arts scene. Work with artists is approached in a direct and considered manner, alongside expanded programming and community engagement that seeks to broaden access and participation. A strong feminist position is present within this practice, alongside advocacy for artists and audiences who are blind or visually impaired.

Keogh has worked with artists ranging from emerging artists such as Bassam Al-Sabah and Shota Kotake to cult experimental film artist Vivienne Dick to other esteemed, established visual artists such as Alice Maher.

Aoife Natsumi Frehan
Aoife Natsumi Frehan is Education Coordinator at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Aoife Natsumi develops the festival’s education programme across primary, secondary and third-level education, community settings and the wider public. Aoife Natsumi will preview the 2026 Education Programme and introduce its emphasis on slow looking, critical engagement and conversation around contemporary art.

Free, advance booking required.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland

TULCA Education delivered a creative workshop for early years educators, developed in partnership with Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta and supported by GRETB.

Delivered through Irish, the workshop explored practical ways for educators to support children to look at, discuss, display and share their own creative work. The session focused on children’s voice, creative decision-making and simple approaches to curation within early years settings.

Participants worked with TULCA Education resources including prompt cards, display materials and workshop packs designed to support conversation, reflection and creative presentation.

The workshop was developed by TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan, with Irish-language delivery and support from Aoife Trang Hennessy, Jen Hesnan and Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta.

On the final day of the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, audiences are invited to join TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan for a closing reflection at the TULCA Gallery.

This event provides an opportunity to revisit the artworks and themes of Strange lands still bear common ground, offering a chance to reflect on what has resonated throughout the festival. Participants will consider what has lingered, what has shifted, and what continues to unfold.

As TULCA 2025 draws to a close, this open conversation will invite collective reflection on the ideas and impressions that have emerged throughout the exhibition.

No booking required. For any enquiries, please 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: Gallery Tour with ATU, Photo: Laura Griffin, 2022

TULCA Gallery
Hynes Building
St. Augustine Street
Galway H91 R6WF
Saturday 22 Nov 2025
1pm - 2pm

The TULCA Education Team invites participants to an archival language-sharing workshop, Our Dialects. As part of the project Language, Culture, and Art: Engaging Irish Language, TULCA Education has collected an archive of words used to describe the artworks and contributions featured across the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. During this workshop, participants are encouraged to share their own descriptive words in any language, contributing to the growing archive. This is a space for connection, sharing, and understanding, where participants can express themselves in ways that may not have been explored before. 

Focussing on how elements of understanding can get lost in translation we will look at language as a tool to reimagine the possibilities around understanding and acknowledgment.

Contributions will include words in English, Irish, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. All language speakers are welcome to participate in this collective archive of shared experiences.

For any enquiries, please contact: education@tulca.ie

Thursday Lates: TULCA Education Tour: Dogs, Memory, and Myth

In this guided tour led by Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Education Coordinator for TULCA, we explore two works that each centre on human relationships with dogs, but in very different ways.

Artist Tom O'Dea’s Dog Liberation Organisation constructs a fictional radical archive questioning power, obedience, and control through the lens of human–animal relations. Meanwhile, Mourad Ben Amor’s film Bamssi weaves a tender portrait of displacement and longing, where dogs appear as quiet, loyal companions in a Tunisian domestic landscape.

This session is informal and discussion-led, a space to pause with moving image works, reflect together, and engage more deeply with the ideas they raise.

Free, no booking required.

Thursday Lates is funded by Galway City Council and the Department of Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sports as part of the Galway City Night-Time Economy Action Plan.

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

Image: Mourad Ben Amor, still from Bamssi, 2024, video, colour, 26 mins

Artist Talk: Jess Zamora-Turner

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Jess Zamora-Turner is a British-Chilean visual artist and grower based in Berlin. Jess's practice can best be described as patchworking—making materials and histories belong together in ways they weren't meant to. Their emotional and spiritual remaking, unfolds slowly, either through her own hands or by allowing the elements—rain, mud, sunlight—to colour and shape the materials. As the textiles, threads, leaves, flowers and seeds come together to form her sculptures they form alternative sacred landscapes that challenge our political and environmental realities.

Jess frequently collaborates with poets, musicians, cooks, dancers, performers, and filmmakers to activate her works in collective rituals and events. Her practice expands on the tradition of Andean abstraction and experimental dyeing with plants that are foraged or specially grown. Jess is currently in her sixth year seasonally tending a garden on the Polish-German border, where she grows a diverse selection of heirloom plants as well as stewarding and saving at risk seed varieties.

Jess has exhibited at Shahin Zarinbal and Galerie Molitor in Berlin and at Hotel Warszawa Art Fair in Warsaw, Poland. Her collaboration with musicians and dancers, a public performance Zaplatanie was staged in Hasenheide Park in Berlin in 2022. She often leads workshops or communal events, such as herbal smudging workshops at Floating University in Berlin or Public Works Group in London.

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

TULCA Education Workshop: Framed History and Future

Join Aoife Natsumi Frehan, TULCA Education Coordinator for a discussion to deep dive into the work of Marie Farrington in the historic James Mitchell Geology Museum. 

Artist Marie Farrington’s DIAGONAL ACTS uses site-responsive work and participatory gestures to excavate sites of interdisciplinary, convergence and borders reworked. This multi-platform project arose from research into geological and archaeological imaginations. In its encounter, DIAGONAL ACTS explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.

This session is informal and discussion-led, open to the participants to shape the workshop in its trajectory. This is a space to pause, engage with the work more deeply while sharing such experience with others.

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

Photo: Mary McGraw, 2024

Thursday Lates: TULCA Curator’s Tour and Archive Engagement

Join us for a special evening at Galway Arts Centre as part of TULCA’s Thursday Lates series. Curator Beulah Ezeugo will lead a public tour of the full exhibition, sharing insights into works by Tom O'Dea, Saoirse Amira Anis, Peter Tresnan, Mourad Ben Amor, Abel Shah, and the Shared Migrants (Archive) project.

Throughout the evening, the TULCA Education team will also be on hand to support informal engagement with the Shared Migrants (Archive), a participatory installation by Bojana Jankovic and Nessa Finnegan. This is a chance to experience the archive in an open, drop-in format and contribute to a growing body of reflections and stories.

Free, no booking required.

Thursday Lates is funded by Galway City Council and the Department of Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sports as part of the Galway City Night-Time Economy Action Plan.

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

Image: Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan, An entry from the Shared Migrants (Archive). Photo: Nessa Finnegan

Artist Talk: Tom O'Dea

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Artist Tom O’Dea will present a performance lecture combining readings, moving image, and reflection on his work developed for TULCA 2025. This hybrid talk expands on his interest in human relations with animals and artificial intelligence, and the role of power in these relationships.

Tom O’Dea
Tom O’Dea is an artist who works with sculpture, media and social practice to explore how different forms of knowledge impact upon our ways of acting and being the world. His work interrogates the political implications of knowledge production, practices of computation and organisation in contemporary society. His work explores “computation” beyond that which occurs on electronic machines to a series of knowledge practices that are connected to intertwining histories of scientific legitimation, bureaucracy and colonial expansion.

Tom is a studio lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practices in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He is member of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), an art-research group, one of the organisers of Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) and an member of Dublin Digital Radio.

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

Artist Talk: Seán O’Riordan

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Artist Seán O’Riordan will discuss their recent work presented in Strange lands still bear common ground, reflecting on their process, research, and the ideas underpinning their installation for TULCA 2025.

Seán O’Riordan
Seán O’Riordan (b. Galway) works across ceramics, woodwork, textiles, writing, and digital processes to explore the politics of desire, value, and the iconographic histories of consumption. Combining architectural and industrial techniques with found materials and ceramic works, O’Riordan encodes perceptions of value through sexuality and non-dominant language, examining how linguistic, material, and affective economies shape our sense of worth, place, and identity.

Through the subversion of cultural codes, O’Riordan treats sculpture as a tool for semi-fictional worldbuilding. The works interrogate dominant frameworks through large-scale installations and detailed objects that often spill outward as rebellious, sometimes playful, built environments.

Seán is a graduate of NCAD, Dublin (BA Fine Art, 2016), and the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (MFA, 2023). Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at VISUAL Carlow, Engage Art Studios (Galway), W139 (Amsterdam), and Western Carolina University (US).

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

Curator's Talk: Beulah Ezeugo

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

The opening talk of the series features Beulah Ezeugo, curator of Strange lands still bear common ground. Beulah will discuss the curatorial framework behind this year’s exhibition, exploring how the selected artists respond to questions of belonging, shared histories, and the role of collective imagination in fractured times.

Beulah Ezeugo
Beulah Ezeugo is a curator and writer who works between Ireland and the UK. Her practice engages with postcolonial geographies and memory, and expands outward through critical writing, exhibition-making, and public programming. Beulah programmes the lecture series, Race, Rights, and Sovereignty at Glasgow School of Art, and is a cofounder (with Joselle Ntumba) of Éireann and I – a community archive and memory project. 

Recent residencies and awards include Platform Commissions, 41st EVA International (2025), SIRIUS Critic-in-Residence (2024), and 11:11 x Iniva Residency, Stuart Hall Library, London (2024). She was a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2022-24) and recipient of Glasgow International’s Black Curators Collective Bursary (2021). Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, as well as in publications by Douglas Hyde Gallery, Durty Books, and Bloomers Magazine.

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

TULCA Education Coordinator, Aoife Natsumi Frehan, is pleased to invite you to a workshop taking place in the Printworks Gallery for TULCA 2024. Aoife designed this workshop taking inspiration from the installations by artists Niamh Schmidtke and David Beattie. Participants will create a memory map of their own, followed by a guided discussion.

This workshop will explore and examine the similarities and the differences in the way a person associates an object to another through their individual means of organisation.

You will need to bring something you can take some notes with. Ideally a notebook and a pen/pencil or a tablet so you can draw if you feel this is the best way to represent a connection you made between objects.

Capacity: 30
Age: 18+

TULCA Education Coordinator, Aoife Natsumi Frehan, is pleased to invite you to a workshop taking place across two museums at the University of Galway. The workshop has been designed by Aoife, drawing inspiration from her discussions with Stuart Whipps and his artistic practice. Participants will engage in creating a personal memory map in the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, followed by a guided discussion in the Geology Museum, where Stuart’s works are exhibited.

The workshop aims to explore and analyse the similarities and differences in how individuals associate objects, focusing on their unique methods of organisation.

Participants are advised to bring a means for taking notes—ideally a notebook and pen/pencil, or a tablet - to facilitate drawing or note-taking as they identify connections between objects.

Capacity: 15
Age: 18+

The TULCA Education team is excited to offer a child friendly tour outside of academic and group bookings. We use the model of Visual Thinking Strategies to facilitate an inclusive, audience-centred discussion. These would take a conversational format that invites participants to share their interpretation of the work, focusing on hosting a space of discussion. Together, we will celebrate the breadth of conversation that can flourish through the shared experience of looking together. There will be worksheets that can be taken home afterwards, catered to different levels of interest in the arts which include a reflective exercise and a practical element. 

This workshop is suitable for any learners in between 5th class all the way up to Leaving Certificate or equivalent. However, the group will be split if the age difference in the participants is too great.

Artist Talk: Bridget O'Gorman

Pálás Cinema, 15 Merchants Rd Lower
Monday 20 November 2023
11am - 1pm

TULCA’s Artist Talks Series in partnership with ATU presents the final talk of this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts by artist Bridget O’Gorman. This year’s talks series is kindly hosted by Pálás Cinema.

Bridget O’Gorman
Bridget O’Gorman is a visual artist and writer. Using text, live event, video and sculptural installation, her work explores the body as material, considering otherness, the speculative and expanded corporeal experience. Bridget recently reached an impasse in the way that she works due to the deterioration of a permanent spinal injury known as Cauda Equina Syndrome.

Support | Work, 2023
A sculptural installation, forming an ecosystem of balance and precariousness reflecting on what it means to support and be supported and ultimately how we affect one another. The sculptures are large-scale ‘mobiles’: reflecting upon ideas of support and equilibrium, and created using found and fabricated media, using pulleys, parts from mobility aids, and hoists. The sculptures are informed by support and access, but will also be produced through access, made with a support worker.

A commission supported by Arts & Disability Ireland’s Connect+ Award 2023.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland

Access: Step free venue. Accessible toilet facilities located at -2 level. Each screen has wheelchair accessible seats, at the back room of each screen. A complimentary carer seat is provided with these seats. Three accessible parking spots on Saint Augustine Street opposite the TULCA Gallery, a 4-minute walk from the venue. The talk will be live captioned.

Video edit: Jonathan Sammon

Helium Arts Galway Youth Showcase

Porter Shed 1, Bowling Green
Saturday 18 November 2023
2.30pm - 4.30pm

Helium Arts is pleased to present an art showcase by young people with lifelong health conditions that spotlights issues with accessing cultural and public spaces in Galway.

Online Exhibition: 13 November - 1 December 2023, on Helium Arts website and social media.

An accompanying in-person ‘Sharing Day’ for family and friends is taking place at Porter Shed 1, Galway on Saturday, 18 November, 2.30 - 4.30pm.

The Helium Arts Youth Showcase will display artworks by teenagers with lifelong health conditions from Galway and across the region, who have been participating in a programme of Saturday meet ups and art camps, with artist Niamh Gibbons.  Expect to see thought-provoking pieces, including bunting, badges and stamps, among the works on display.

Presented in association with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts with funding support from Galway City Arts Office, Helium Arts, Creative Ireland, Dept of Health, HSE, Arts Council, Dept Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Community Foundation.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland

Access: Step-free venue, accessible toilet facilities, accessible parking at Market St Car Park in front of Porter Shed 1.

Gallery Workshop: Discussion and Reflection

University Gallery, The Quadrangle, University of Galway
Saturday 18th November 2023
12:30pm - 13:30pm

An hour-long session of guided discussion and a reflective exercise will be hosted in the University Gallery. Along with a discussion on the themes of TULCA 2023, we will be delving further into contemplating some works selected by the participants. The background of the artist, artwork, concept and the curatorial decision for the work being selected would be shared, along with the responses that each may give to this work. These sessions will be hosted by TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan, and Kate McSharry, Education Officer.

About the Artist and Work
Jenny Brady is an artist filmmaker based in Dublin, exploring ideas around speech, translation and communication. Her films have been presented with LUX, The New York Film Festival, This Long Century, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MUBI, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, TENT Rotterdam, EMAF, Videonale, Camden International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Images Festival, November Film Festival, the Irish Film Institute, EVA International, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Whitechapel gallery and Tate Liverpool. Her works are distributed by LUX.

Music for Solo Performer, 2022
Part-homage, part-sequel, Music for Solo Performer is a filmic reimagining of composer Alvin Lucier’s work for amplified brainwaves, drawing connections between the 1969 composition, speech synthesis and the passing of the filmmaker’s mother. Brady’s disparate assemblage of found sound and image – including EEG analysis, a Jerry Lewis Telethon and the first pizza ordered via synthesised voice – combines to form a densely concentrated transmission of cinematic pleasure, meditating on the relationship between illness and technology with pathos and care.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland

Access: University Gallery is a basement venue accessed by three steps to reach the ground floor, followed by a flight of stairs or a stair lift to the basement. There is accessible parking located on campus in front of the Quadrangle Building. The nearest accessible bathroom is located at O'Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, a 4 minute walk across the green. The film time has captioned and audio described versions, played on loop. Seating is provided.

Image: Ros Kavanagh

Artist Talk: Sarah Browne | TULCA Gallery

TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, St Augustine St
Monday 13 November 2023
11am - 1pm

TULCA’s Artist Talks Series in partnership with ATU presents the third talk of this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts by artist Sarah Browne.

Sarah Browne
Sarah Browne is an artist concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, and frequent interdisciplinary collaboration.

Echo’s Bones, 2022
A collaborative film-making project made with autistic young people in North County Dublin. The project borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in that landscape of Fingal, where now an old asylum building meets the coastline. Beckett’s plays are populated with people who might move with difficulty, mutter over each other, talk into the dark or not speak at all. The project questions why such neurodivergent or disabled styles of communication may be treated poorly in everyday situations, but valued as artistically exciting in others. It is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, art, and world could be like.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland

Access: A step-free venue, with accessible toilet facilities. There are three accessible parking spots on Saint Augustine Street opposite the TULCA Gallery. The talk will be live captioned.

Image: Sarah Browne, Echo’s Bones, 2022. 4K video with open captions (English language), 22:18 minutes. Film still. Cinematographer Cathy Dunne.

Video edit: Jonathan Sammon