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.

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

Kate Morrell

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, looting is posited as political resistance, working in opposition to nationalist, colonial and Western-oriented approaches to archaeology and museum collecting practices.

The film 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. We hear them speak of shifting value systems, rights and protections; engaging with urgent debates around cultural restitution and repatriation.

With (relatively recent) government laws put into place by the Ministry of Culture, prohibiting the export and transfer of cultural assets and stating that private collections must be declared; the women – identities withheld – articulate varied rationale for keeping commoditised objects (ceramics and gold) in circulation.

The film incorporates museum archive footage from 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 held in Spanish and part-translated to English to agitate further translation tensions and withholding of new knowledge.

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)’ is a short film developed during a 10 month British Council scholarship in Bogotá, Colombia.

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.

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

Image: Film still from ...Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal), 2020, HD video, 35 mins 42 secs

Chris Zhongtian Yuan

All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss is structured as a dialogue between two individuals in entangled intimacy and bodily distance - one reveals personal stories and ancestral tales; another one singing and telling family stories of sickness and war that circulates in the transnational family tree.

Through interweaving personal and historical narratives, the film wants to reveal the ghostly connections amongst Chinese, West African and Caribbean diasporas through a composition of free jazz, vocal improvisations and popular music. The music is composed and performed in collaboration with trumpeter Kevin G. Davy.

Alongside the film, seven unique clay sculptures casting fragments from the film; as well as a large-scale, A0 drawing which meticulously traces transnational sounds and texts which radically reposition geographies of the world.

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.

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

Image: Film still from All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss (2021-22), Single-channel video, 16mm film transferred to HD video, 21 mins 52 secs

Marie Farrington

For TULCA, Marie Farrington presents A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, a site-responsive sculptural installation at the James Mitchell Geology Museum, University of Galway.

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 Victorian display cabinets in the museum.

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.

Installed across the central aisle of the museum, A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, reflects on gaps, fragments, edges and thresholds within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged display. 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 boundaries of the body 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.

Marie Farrington’s practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her work makes formal reference to field sampling, built heritage, and histories of display.

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

Image: Marie Farrington, Acts [catch/sift], 2025, mild steel; photograph by Brian Cregan courtesy the artist and Kunstverein Aughrim

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.

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

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. Photo: Jonathan Sammon

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Image: Mair Hughes, Installation view of A Field Guide to the Offa's Dyke/Canllaw Maes i Gladwdd Offa, 2025. TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Thaís Muniz

Radical Imagination is a multilayered screen-printed textile sculpture that constructs a visual manifesto advocating for play in adulthood and a negotiated relationship with nature as vital revolutionary acts.

The sculpture is part of Muniz’s ongoing body of work, New Atlantic Triangulations, which uses embodied cosmovisions, shaped by her Yoruba and Bantu heritage and her experience as a Brazilian woman with Irish citizenship, to explore themes of displacement, joy, and mental health. It proposes new languages, new worlds, and shared spaces of reimagination.

Inspired by the weekly communal ritual of kite runners in the Itapuã area of Salvador, Brazil, Radical Imagination highlights threats posed by private development and ecological displacement to the Abaeté area, an Afro-Indigenous sacred territory where joy and spiritual practices have thrived for centuries. This context informs the inclusion of the ecosocialist concept of Degrowth at the top of the piece, positioned above a central diagram in the form of a kite.

The reverse side integrates Druidic symbols of Sky, Land, and Sea, alongside the phrase “Play Is A Revolutionary Act”, a credo inspired by the joyful resistance of the kite runners and the scholarship of Robin D.G. Kelley. This side posits that the creativity and freedom inherent in play are essential to dreaming and building a new society. The work culminates in its foundational declaration: “Radical Imagination Cannot Be Tamed.”

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

Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Regina Jose Galindo

In the 2013 video Tierra, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo stands naked in a field, while over half an hour, a large earthmoving excavator razes the land around her. There is a stark visual contrast between the machine’s huge, armoured bulk, and the artist’s stark, vulnerable body. Eventually, Galindo is left on an island of grass surrounded by a large trench.

Galindo’s gesture acts as a reminder that the gaze of colonialism forms and enforces categories like ‘land’ and ‘gender’ to identify them as expendable and abusable resources. She describes how, in Tierra, ‘around me there is nothing but chaos and theft, but I remain on my feet, ready to fight, ready to defend the land that roots me.’ At the time of Galindo’s performance, the former president of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was standing trial for crimes against humanity that included genocidal sexual violence against Maya Ixil people.

Critic Michelle Santiago Cortés writes that Tierra ‘asks us to consider how our bodies are marked by gender, race, and class; and how, in our own lives, we play the role of the excavator or the person behind the camera, or we stand in the artist’s own two feet... Body and land are what situate us, Galindo reminds us. Without them, we are nobody and nowhere.’

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo: Installation still from Tierra, 2023, colour video with sound, 33 min 30 sec. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Stephen Brandes

Stephen Brandes is well known for an artistic language that meshes together unlikely characters, from both historical and fictional worlds, into spiraling and ever-absurd narratives.
In recent times, Deirdre and Ken from popular soap opera Coronation Street, Ancient Greece’s chief philosopher Socrates, and Catherine Leary, the Kerry immigrant wrongly blamed for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, have all been drawn into his orbit.

Plans are afoot for a new drama, with permissions now almost in place for an intervention inside the courtyard of the University of Galway’s hallowed Quadrangle building. While wandering around the campus, Brandes came across a large architectural sculpture, seemingly removed from its original location and placed innocuously, despite its scale, on the edge of a small access road. Representing the Royal Coat of Arms, a lion, unicorn and ornamental shield all feature. We learnt that the piece was commissioned for the portico
of Galway City Courthouse under British rule. During the War of Independence, it was removed to the university for ‘safekeeping’ (Galway had form for toppling statues at that time; a decades-long campaign to get rid of Lord Dunkellin’s bronze in Eyre Square saw him pulled off his pedestal, dragged through the streets, given a mock funeral and dumped into the Corrib River, surrounded by cheering crowds in 1922). The university, founded by Queen Victoria’s Royal Charter in 1845, was seen as a refuge to prevent the potential public toppling of a symbol of law.

In Brandes’ vision, the piece takes centre stage; a relic of a bygone age now moving nervously into the future, joined by a group of taxidermy animals, including some found on display around the campus. It’s hard to know if these characters are friends of the crown or are there to lampoon it.

David Beattie

David Beattie’s artwork often examines mythology, folklore and oral history in the age of digital reproduction and algorithmic narratives. Erratic invites the viewer to ‘activate’ a printed photograph of a rock through the use of augmented reality and a smartphone.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Stuart Whipps

Stuart Whipps’ new performance and installation, The Leviathan of Parsonstown, shares its title with the name given to the historic telescope that sits in the ornate grounds of Birr Castle in Offaly. Built in 1845, it remained the largest telescope in the world for seventy two years, drawing visitors to see the previously-unknown spirals of faraway galaxies. Its creation was driven by the tremendous personal wealth of Mary Parsons, the wife of its patron, William Parsons. Whipps’ points out the materials that made one of Ireland’s greatest scientific wonders possible - ‘Parsons saw the potential in using speculum metal, an alloy made from copper and tin, as the material for the reflective mirror - in order to learn about the stars above our heads, we must first extract metals from the rocks and mud that sit beneath our feet.’

Continued research for Whipps has led to the James Mitchell Geology Museum, founded in 1852 at the University of Galway with thousands of rock, mineral and fossil specimens, along with the remains of a larger natural history museum once on campus. Still appearing as a nineteenth century room with few modern updates, it referred to by many as a ‘museum of a museum’. Given full access to the collection throughout 2024, Whipps has worked closely with the site, artefacts and the generosity, endless knowledge and enthusiasm of curator John Murray, teasing out a new performance artwork on November 2 and a subtle rearrangement of objects and labelling in the museum. Whipps recently wrote. “It’s about the shaping of the world in all of the scales and timeframes that suggests. I’m interested in the scramble for knowledge and understanding, the extraction of precious metals and minerals, the construction of buildings and monuments and the idiosyncratic characters and stories that drive it all along. The work will almost certainly never be finished.”

The Leviathan of Parsonstown is additionally supported by Birmingham City University.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Image: Installation view of The Leviathan of Parsonstown exhibition, James Mitchell Geology Museum, University of Galway, 2024. Photo: Stuart Whipps

John Carson
Temporary Services
Half Letter Press
Breakdown Break Down Press
Public Collectors
Michael Holly
Lily Van Oost

John Carson
A collection of artworks by John Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, feature throughout TULCA. From his life in Belfast in the 1970s, before years spent in Los Angeles, London and today Pittsburgh, Carson’s enthusiastic endeavours appear as a form of storytelling peppered with insightful wit and humour.

In Carson Street, a new 2024 video debuted at TULCA, he investigates why one of the main thoroughfares in Pittsburgh, where he now lives, bears his surname. Describing his piece as a mockumentary, his enquiries find him engaging in kerbside conversations, visits with local residents and businesses, then exploring historical archives, consulting experts, and eventually departing for Philadelphia to pursue a promising lead, one inevitably associated with and entangled into colonial structures of place and its people.

Temporary Services / Half Letter Press / Breakdown Break Down Press / Public Collectors
A presentation of several dozen books and assorted printed matter, placed on bookshelves borrowed from Galway City Library, explore the activities of Marc Fisher and Brett Bloom. Both cofounders of Temporary Services in Chicago in 1998, the initiative explores potential for creating new networks, encounters and social interaction, with a keen focus on DIY publishing that can undermine conventional politics of art. Charting the representation and role of artists in the public realm, questioning exhibition models, and the sustainability of publishing are some key themes in this continuing venture. In 2006’s seminal ‘Against Competition’, Fisher foresaw the rise of collaborative artist practice as seen in many places today, dispelling ‘the pervasive and corrosive problem of competition that exists and is created between artists by a market-driven art system’.

Fisher and Bloom have branched out into more adventures. Half Letter Press acts as a publishing imprint and online store, with a particular remit to supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels. Fisher’s Public Collectors has since 2007 encouraged greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artefacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Bloom’s Breakdown Break Down press focuses on ecological issues.

Michael Holly
Holly’s presence at TULCA weaves in and out of fellow artists in the exhibition, offering insights into their creative paths and intrinsic relationships to landscape and nature. Holly follows Seanie Barron collecting timber in the Limerick countryside, to be transformed into walking sticks. In one scene, Barron turns to the camera with a piece of knotted wood and proclaims its likeliness to a faraway galaxy. Lily of the Valley, realised in collaboration with Mieke Vanmechelen, digs deep into the memories, documents and artworks that today remain of Lily Van Oost’s legacy, including the archival unearthing of her Brian Boru’s Coat, a gift she made to the National Museum of Ireland after receiving Irish citizenship in 1986.

Lily Van Oost
After relocating from Antwerp to Ireland in the 1970s, artist Lily Van Oost (1932–97) worked from a cottage studio nestled into the remote Black Valley in Kerry. For several decades she produced an esoteric and extensive body of artworks evoking the intrinsic relationship between feminism, inhabitation and nature. Considered a provocateur of both Irish society and its art scene, she once proposed knitting a straightjacket for Margaret Thatcher.

Various contributions to her legacy are presented at Galway Art Centre, where she once exhibited in 1995. A selection of drawings, documents and photographs from the collection of poet and writer Grace Wells feature. She came to live with Van Oost in the early 1990s after seeing a man in London wearing one of her weaved coats, which Wells remembers as a ‘web of three-dimensional appendages that might have been mountains or running water or human forms - into the fabric of that coat she sewed the bleat of sheep, and the sound of the wind blown over black lakes.’ Brian Bowler loans a large textile work, featuring a self-portrait of Van Oost. Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelen’s film Lily of the Valley narrates Van Oost’s feminist and environmental beliefs, while a selection of 35mm analogue slides from her contribution to the seminal Women Artists Action Group (WAAG) have been digitally restored and presented, courtesy of the National Irish Visual Arts Library, NIVAL.

Artworks and documents courtesy of Brian Bowler; Michael Holly & Mieke Vanmechelen; National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL), NCAD, Dublin; Grace Wells.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Jorge Satorre

Mexican artist Jorge Satorre lived on Sherkin Island in West Cork for five months in 2005. Known as a storyteller of repute, with an interest in how personal histories and encounters come together to shape the world we share, he realised several artworks involving the local community.

In Windows Blow Out, Satorre makes reference to an artwork of the same name by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Known for his conceptual critiques of architecture and the built environment, in 1976 Matta-Clark, as part of his contribution to an exhibition entitled ’Idea as a Model’ at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, fired shots from an airgun at the windows of the gallery space. The broken panes of glass were replaced before the exhibition opening. Satorre notes that his 2005 video “consisted in recovering, almost theatrically, this referential piece through the construction of three windows, made to measure, to be installed in an old abandoned house near the town of Skibbereen.”

Barry’s Van Tour is another artwork made during Satorre’s Sherkin stay, and still remembered on the island today:

The main character in this work is Barry, a young fisherman popular on the island, who died prematurely in 2002. Since the day of his death his van remained parked where he left it, with his fishing utensils, his coffee mug and the keys still inside it. Back then, it was common to find abandoned cars around the island, a new situation explained by the economic boom the country was experiencing. It was often simpler to buy a new car than taking it outside the island to be repaired.

In the previous years, Barry’s relatives and the community had prevented its removal from the island. Therefore, the van had become the oldest abandoned vehicle in Sherkin. Its sudden loss of functionality and the special meaning that the van had acquired in the eyes of the community turned the vehicle into a spontaneous meaningful local monument. Two or three months after my arrival I found out that a decision had been finally made for the van to be taken to a scrapyard on account of its dilapidated condition. However, Barry’s family, knowing that I had taken interest in the vehicle, asked if I wanted to do something special with it before its destruction.

I proposed to organise a team made up of friends and relatives of Barry in which each one of them contributed with something: his brother helped with a small cargo ferry, one of his friends brought a crane, another one offered his mechanical workshop and a few of them contributed recording with their video cameras. Together with their resources, we organised the removal of the van from its location to the workshop in Skibbereen.

For about a month, basic repairs were carried out on the engine and the chassis, new brakes were fitted and the tires were changed so it could start running and return to its original site on the island without having to be towed. A few days later the van was taken to the scrapyard.

In The Indirect Gaze, Satorre spent time gathering information and visiting sites where prehistoric megaliths were destroyed without a remaining trace. A 35mm slide projection details a perambulation of places in The Netherlands, parts of northern Spain, and Pays de la Loire in France.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

Bryony Dunne

Bryony Dunne’s recent films and sculptures act as complex mediations on man’s conquest of nature and desire for domination and superiority. Her 2022 feature film, Surrender Your Horns, considers the true story of the smuggling of rhino horns, stolen from Irish and British museums, to be ground down for traditional Eastern medicine and consumed to supposedly enhance masculine virility. In Dunne’s hands, a man undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a rhino- headed man, and documentary footage merges with Theatre of the Absurd-style performance.

Her new sculptures, collectively entitled Drifting, were realised during a residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in The Netherlands in late 2023. Emerging from Topographia Hibernica – an account of the plentiful flora, fauna and barbaric people of Ireland, produced in the year 1188, soon after the Anglo-Norman invasion – a narrative begins to unravel. With the medieval desire to explain everything as a unified system, descriptions in the book believed that the barnacle goose, a bird, was born from the goose barnacle, a crustacean. Both species have visual similarities: the mouth of the crustacean opening and closing could be imagined as a bird’s beak looking for food. Dunne’s sculptures reimagine this correlation, while also transposing this story into a further appearance of goose barnacles. In 2015, thousands of these crustaceans attached themselves onto Elon Musk’s failed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as seen when it was recovered from the sea off Cornwall.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

John Carson

A collection of artworks by John Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, feature throughout TULCA. From his life in Belfast in the 1970s, before years spent in Los Angeles, London and today Pittsburgh, Carson’s enthusiastic endeavours appear as a form of storytelling peppered with insightful wit and humour.

At Galway’s Tourist Office, his 1978 poster-style artwork I’d Walk From Cork To Larne To See The Forty Shades Of Green is placed amongst brochures and guide maps, presenting a subtle variation on the famous phrase. Based on a 1959 song by Johnny Cash, Carson journeyed by foot from south to north over fourteen days, photographing the colour green along the way. Instead of the sickly-sweet romance evoked in Cash’s lyrics, Carson’s green pragmatically extends to the colour of industrial buildings, an often-mundane roadside landscape, and the combat trousers of British troops stationed on the border, all part of Ireland during that time.

Video documentatiom: Jonathan Sammon

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty

A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan.

This long-term project traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. A Collection of Disarticulated Bones examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

This research is supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2024, A Collection of Disarticulated Bones toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre (Virginia Technical University).

Three short documentary-style films feature speakers from the north and west of Ireland, all sharing stories of community action, collective vision and the struggle to authentically remember and commemorate traumatic events.

Forty-five Seconds (HD video, 10’54”)
On 31 March 1993, two gardaí were driving around on late-night patrol in a small west of Ireland town when they witnessed strange lights in the sky above them. At the time, their story was taken seriously, given their social standing, and was reported in Irish media. Now retired from the force, and driving luxury vintage cars for weddings, one of the Gardaí tells his story while driving the artists to the location of the sighting.

This work reflects on how stories are told and the impact of American culture on the popular imagination in Ireland. Touching on tourism, alien invasion, bird migration and military aviation, it hints towards the fear subconsciously felt by some in the Global North that a technologically advanced alien society could come and steal land and resources, mimicking historical colonial expansion.

Part of the People (HD video, 9’50”)
The Old Library in Trinity College Dublin is, for the first time in its 300-year history, empty of books. This
is in order to facilitate refurbishment designed to protect the collection from environmental hazards, particularly dust. Visited last year by nearly 780,000 people, the collection is at risk from particulate matter caused by increased tourist numbers as well as motor traffic, building deterioration, and dust from
the leather binding of the books themselves.

In 1890, thirteen human skulls were stolen from Inisbofin, an island off the west coast of Ireland, by Trinity College researchers engaged in the discredited Victorian practice of craniometry, or skull measuring. After a long campaign by islanders, the skulls were returned and interred on the island in 2023, potentially setting a precedent for the return of other controversial artefacts in the college collection.

Brick by Brick (HD video, 12’17”)
The Ulster American Folk Park is an open air museum in Co. Tyrone which uses reconstructed Irish and American buildings, interpreted by live costumed guides, to tell the story of historical Ulster migration to rural America. One dwelling in the museum’s collection stands out from the others: a large red brick house built in 1825 in Tennessee by Francis Rogan, an Irish American Catholic plantation owner and enslaver. The museum acquired the house in the 1990s and had it dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic, each brick carefully numbered. During reconstruction, conservators discovered some bricks that held imperfections: marks left by people present when the clay bricks were drying outside. Those bricks were carefully removed for further study and preservation. One bore a handprint, and the other a bare footprint, likely belonging to a child approximately seven or eight years old who lived on the plantation two centuries ago. As the Rogan family had no children of their own at that time, it is plausible to suggest that the marks were left by an enslaved child.

We imagine these imprints as stowaways. Once hidden within the walls of this house, they have travelled across land and water to reveal themselves in present-day Ireland. The moulds, now museum artefacts, represent the connection between ourselves, our diaspora and the legacies of institutional racism that continue to afflict society. Narrated by Curator of Emigration, Liam Corry, the video is structured as a palindrome with repetitive shots of anonymous bricks building and unbuilding. We are interested in the moment of transformation: when the house is not a house but a hoard of objects, suspended in space. We picture these bricks unfurling, spinning in a great circle and coagulating again as an image of a house, rebuilt in each moment of encounter.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

Seanie Barron

For decades, Seanie Barron has carved and shaped wood in a workshop at the rear of his house on Plunkett Road in Askeaton town. His creations, made with simple hand tools and an intuitive approach, are borne out of his understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him. He roams around Askeaton, looking for the right branch in a field or underneath a bush to then shape into a walking stick. These often take on surreal forms referencing seahorses, weasels, dancers, extraterrestrials, dolphins, foxes or swimmers. Many double as whistles, or incorporate found objects such as coins, bullets or animal bones. Driftwood often found by the Shannon Estuary morphs into film characters, shipwrecks or talismanic sculptures that accompany him inside his studio.

Barron’s art has had a private trajectory, fermenting secretly for many years before being revealed in a flourish. After featuring in his first exhibition a decade ago in the tourist office in Askeaton, his work has been seen in galleries and museums in London, Dublin and Helsinki. Irish daytime radio has proclaimed his art as ‘the next big thing for Irish hipsters once they finish growing their beards.’ Fashion photographers today arrive on his doorstep, making portfolios of images, printed far away in Paris and Barcelona. He often tours around Ireland, enthralling audiences with stories related to his art and life. At a packed village hall on Inishbofin island, he once explained his philosophy on keeping active, claiming that ‘there are two things that can kill you in this life: the electric chair and the armchair!’

Barron literally takes it all in his stride, choosing a new walking stick from his collection each day to go on his evening walk. He shares his vast knowledge of the west Limerick terrain with visiting artists, acquired after a lifetime of roaming around Askeaton, into and through hedges and bushes. Half close your eyes, take a journey with him, walk through arboreal countryside, feel the grain of the timber in your hand, and hold the handle of the stick to the ground that reconnects it back again to its earthiness... it’s the spark that created the universe!

Seanie Barron’s artworks can be seen at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop on High Street, and all walking sticks are for sale.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

David Beattie

David Beattie’s Tokens is a new artwork commissioned for TULCA, produced from redundant car parts and exploring the value of waste material in a carbon-based society. A series of small spherical sculptures are the result of Beattie’s smelting and extraction of precious metals from catalytic converters in automobiles. Tokens also gently refers to the site of its exhibition, at the archaeological remains of The Hall of the Red Earl in Galway. It was discovered during excavations in the 1990s that the medieval structure was reused as a furnace for iron smelting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Beattie notes: ‘Promoted as an efficient way of reducing air pollutants in vehicles, catalytic converters contain precious metals that are resold to extract the value of these metals. Having been heavily processed initially to manufacture the original catalytic converter, the “scrap” car part is then later put through another round of extractive processes to obtain miniscule amounts of rare metals.’ Criminal gangs are often reported stealing catalytic converters before setting up makeshift smelting operations to distil their bounty. Corporate industry even attempted to claim responsible action around the topic. In 2014, Reuters released a story with the headline ‘£100,000 each year from dust swept off streets.’ It reported that every day, catalytic converters in cars spit out minute particles of platinum and palladium that end up in road sweepings gathered by waste recyclers, like industrial conglomerate Veolia. They claimed to have started filtering out these precious metals from the 40,000 tonnes of dust it treats per year. ‘We have a surface mine on our city streets,’ Estelle Brachlianoff, head of Veolia UK and Ireland, told reporters. The story was later debunked as a greenwashing exercise. Beattie reflects that, ‘In a constant state of becoming something else, these minerals highlight the commodification of natural resources, and the environmental impact of mineral extraction.’

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Seanie Barron
David Beattie
Peter Fend & Finn Van Gelderen
Michael Holly
Catriona Leahy
Aine Phillips
Niamh Schmidtke

Seanie Barron

For decades, Seanie Barron has carved and shaped wood in a workshop at the rear of his house on Plunkett Road in Askeaton town. His creations, made with basic hand tools and an intuitive approach, are borne out of his understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him. He roams around rural Limerick, looking for branches to shape into walking sticks that take on surreal forms. Many can be used as whistles, or incorporate found objects such as coins, nuts, bullets or animal bones. Driftwood morphs into talismanic sculptures who accompany him on his creative journey.

David Beattie

David Beattie’s Shifting Forms is an exploration in the use of mimicry in the ongoing development and pursuit of artificial intelligence, seen with an ultra violet fly zapper, robotic vacuum cleaner and collection of carnivorous plants together in a domestic mise-en-scène of Beattie’s making. Remnants is an interactive artwork that examines mythology, folklore and oral history in the age of digital reproduction and algorithmic narratives - Beattie conducted extensive fieldwork around sites of ancient ritual at Grange stone circle in Limerick.
In navigating the resulting 3D digital scan, an accompanying story about the site generated by AI continually interrupts, resets and changes, seemingly unable to grasp the extent and richness of the world we live in.

Peter Fend & Finn Van Gelderen

Peter Fend and Ocean Earth have for almost five decades proposed speculative and visionary ecological projects that rethink the relationships between art, power and the planet. Throughout the globe and often acting like a travelling salesman of sorts, Fend has constantly advocated that a new kind of geographical ‘reform’ needs to occur - removing existing administrative and country borders and instead consolidate territories solely in terms of the shape of individual water basins. In the case of Ireland, each river from its source to mouth would become their own individual fiefdom, linking locality closer to the flow of water as a nurturing force and creating more environmental resilience.

Fend and Ocean Earth featured as part of ARC, a public art programme in Dublin in 2003, organised by Jenny Haughton and seminal public art agency Artworking, and realised as part of percent-for-art funding for Dublin’s new waste water treatment plant on the East Wall. Filmmaker Finn van Gelderen accompanied Fend during the commission, and an excerpt of the resulting film is presented alongside various documents from that time.

Michael Holly

Michael Holly’s videos at TULCA weave in and out of fellow artists in the exhibition, offering an insight into their creative paths and intrinsic relationships to landscape and nature. In 2021, Holly followed Barron collecting timber to be transformed into walking sticks. In one scene, Barron turns to the camera with a piece of knotted wood and joyously proclaims its likeness to a faraway galaxy. More of Seanie Barron’s artworks can be seen at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop on High Street, and all walking sticks are for sale.

Catriona Leahy

Catriona Leahy’s digital animation and photographic lightbox series continues her ongoing investigations into the degradation of bogs of the Irish Midlands. State-sponsored strip mining, or ‘peat harvesting’ as it was commonly known in Ireland until the recent cessation of decades of operation, has left behind a post-industrial landscape, and Leahy is one of many contemporary artists in Ireland drawn to its complexities and potential for regenerative thought. Reflecting in a recent interview with Marc O’Sullivan in The Irish Examiner, she writes that she has come to think of the bog as ‘a huge archive, a repository of memory. It harbours a lot of mythologies and histories and traumas, of our own colonial past, and the tensions that arise out of that.’

Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene is a 3D-animated scan of surface area of bog from which peat has been mechanically extracted. The resulting image reveals a form that bears uncanny resemblance to an amphitheatre, albeit a broken, fragmented, one. Leahy’s writings correlate these similarities into speculative understanding:

“As an ancient civic space, the amphitheatre was a place of assembly. However, long before the manmade construction of these historic monumental stone formations, these sites for public assembly (or Things as they were known in the early Germanic Period) were landscape-based forums where important community matters were discussed. Over time, Things moved indoors, became more centralised; land surveying and subsequent land-enclosure slowly did away with the commons, which was a central prerequisite for Thing assemblies/Thing parliaments for discussing things-that-matter.

Here, my Bog Thing aims to reimagine our contemporary political forums where policy is proposed, discussed and ratified, as a kind of landscape parliament – one that represents and brings into the fold the other-than-human entities that we share our planet with. Rather than the bog as Terra Nullius – a nobody’s land – can we reimagine the bog as a space for all species, including human – a dynamic great ecology over which no single group or species holds jurisdiction?”

Aine Phillips

Internationally known for four decades of performance and video artwork that constantly challenge the patriarchal structures of society, Áine Phillips’ video and sculpture installation The Secret is modest in its appearance; on a gallery floor, a small monitor is found lying on its back inside a cardboard box, with packaging placed in its vicinity.

Inside, a short silent video records a secluded road behind Dublin’s giant IKEA superstore, where discarded furniture and junk are seen in the shadow of the retail giant. Phillips notes of the scene, ‘This is the concealed and hidden secret of the consumers promise: the brief life span of our material lives. Our dreams turn to dust. Everything returns to the earth.’

Niamh Schmidtke

Niamh Schmidtke explores the political and moral complications of ‘being green,’ asking what kind of voices might rise from listening and speaking to today’s ecological impasse.

Drafting communication, drafting climate, drafting futures is a fictional email exchange between the wind, represented as Aos Sí (the supernatural race in Celtic mythology considered true spirits of nature) and a multinational corporation of Schmidtke’s making, the Green Department of Protections. The pros and cons of constructing a wind farm on Draftia, a windy country at the edge of the continent, bare a resemblance to the literary genre of magic realism, as made popular by authors such as Italo Calvino.

Yet, Schmidtke notes that Drafting Communication... mimics email correspondence and policy they researched while on an artist residency at the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg.

‘X’ Mapping, a large floor sculpture, portrays a future human settlement set off the Irish coastline. Taking available data sets of CO2 emissions from government statistics offices in Ireland and the UK since the 1990s, Schmidtke configured each into graph-like ceramic shapes, before placing them as a landscape that replicates the dioramas of city planners, or even architectural fantasy.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

126 Gallery

15 St Bridget’s Place, Galway
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sun 12-6pm

Sean Burns
Sean Burns is an artist and writer. He is the director of the film Dorothy Towers and the co-founder of QSP, an independent publishing imprint. He lives in London, where he is an assistant editor of Frieze.

Dorothy Towers, 2022
A film about the legendary Clydesdale and Cleveland Towers, two residential blocks in the centre of Birmingham, UK. Completed in 1971 as a social housing development and located adjacent to the city’s Gay Village, the towers’ proximity to the community means they have long been a haven for LGBTQ+ people. It features testimonials from current and past residents and explores ideas of queer kinship and inheritance alongside experiences of HIV in the 1980s and ’90s. Owain Harrison’s accompanying text, A Cornucopia of Experience, merges the factual history of Dorothy Towers with a fictional narrative based on first-hand testimonials.

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: 126 Gallery is a step-free venue and has accessible toilet facilities. The film is captioned and there is seating provided.

Image: Ros Kavanagh
Video edit: Jonathan Sammon

University Gallery

The Quadrangle, University of Galway
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sun 12-6pm

Jenny Brady
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 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
Video edit: Jonathan Sammon

University Hospital Galway

University Hospital Galway, Newcastle Rd
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sat 10-5pm | Sun 12-6pm

Anna Roberts-Gevalt
Anna Roberts-Gevalt is a restless artist, making work with composition, traditional music, sculpture, and community organising around disability justice in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. Their longtime folk duo Anna & Elizabeth was heralded as “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do” by The New Yorker. They performed at Carnegie Hall, the Newport Folk Festival, the Hirshhorn Museum, Big Ears Festival (where she was guest curator of traditional music), and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. 

Ridgewood Sick Center, 2023
The Ridgewood Sick Centre podcast can be accessed via a QR code in the hospital or through the TULCA Podcast platform.

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: On the ground floor of the University Hospital Galway, a step-free venue. Accessible bathroom available. There is accessible parking available on the hospital grounds.

Image: Ros Kavanagh
Video: Jonathan Sammon

Outset Gallery

The Cornstore, Middle St
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Tues 12-5pm | Wed-Sat 10-5pm | Sun 12-5.30pm

Bog Cottage
Bog Cottage is an artist collective originally conceived as a formalised response to art-making in the west of Ireland. Born from a yearning for queer community and spaces, Bog Cottage first started as friends hanging out making clay, friends doing DIY and opening a queer cafe. Bog Cottage is a response to the question of where do we go for a drink? Where do we go to make out and dance? Where do the queers go? 

Faery Fort, 2023
An installation and a place of respite to be enveloped by its softness and protection. A mobile with ceramic charms encircles the room, a curtain of flora dangling in the air. Inside this charmed territory tufted rugs snake along the floor; chains of wool inviting your touch. Two benches are at the heart of the room - an invitation to rest, and invitation to take time. The faery fortress is a space to meet, to sit, a reprieve from life outside the curtains.

Includes a sound piece by Renn Miano, entitled Red Lentil and poetry by Ainslie Templeton.

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: Outset Gallery can be accessed step-free via the Cornstore entrance. The door is narrow and cannot accommodate all assistive devices. The gallery is divided by a number of steps, leading to the remainder of the installation. There is seating provided. Three accessible parking spots located on St Augustine St opposite the TULCA Gallery. TULCA Gallery has accessible toilet facilities, which can be found nearby on St Augustine St.

Image: Ros Kavanagh

Galway Arts Centre

47 Dominick St Lower, Galway
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sat 10-5pm | Sun 12-6pm

Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha
Sarah Browne
P. Staff

Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha
Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha is an artist, singer and researcher based in Dublin. Through the mediums of sound, text, painting, performance and radio broadcast her practice interrogates the enactment of colonial ideologies and state institutions upon the body. This research is informed by archival investigation, queer and post-colonial theory and performance studies. Her most recent research has been focused on a critical analysis on the performance of keening in Ireland. This resulted in her master's dissertation titled Gairm Caointeoireacht / Keening’s Convocation: A Queering of the Temporalised Body. Her practice has been intently focused on these three strands of research: interrogating methods of revealing the minor figure in Irish history; the somatic knowledge of the voice in relation to colonial violence and ecclesiastical policing, and the impact of sound recording technology on Irish oral traditions. Recent work includes the audio piece Now You’re Talking! (2021), the performance and text Echo's Disarticulation (2022), and the radio piece An áit nach siúlann an t-uisce (2022) for the experimental music festival Alternating Current by Dublin Digital Radio. The early stages of this research regularly informs her monthly radio show ‘Lowlands / Ísealchríoch’ on Dublin Digital Radio.

bless every foot that walks its portals through, 2023
An audio and painting installation which responds to the history and site of Ballinasloe District Asylum (Saint Brigid’s Hospital). Taking its title from a prayer to Saint Brigid, the work explores notions of healing and solitude in the context of political trauma. The audio essay and paintings explore the nature of mental well being and fortitude in the context of imperial rule and the subsequent Free State policy of mass incarceration during the 20th century.

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
Echo’s Bones (2022) is a collaborative film-making project by Sarah Browne with autistic young people in North County Dublin, Ireland. 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. As a project, Echo’s Bones questions why such neurodivergent or disabled styles of communication may be treated poorly in everyday situations, but valued as artistically exciting in others. Autism in the project is not a deficit, a disorder, or a problem to be fixed. It is a condition of sensitivity and divergence from what’s socially and cinematically measured as ‘normal’. As a condition, it is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, and art, and world could be like. 

The presentation at TULCA includes the film (26:14 minutes, open captions) and extracts of the ‘sensory score’ used in its creation.

Echo’s Bones by Sarah Browne is commissioned by Fingal County Council through Infrastructure 2017-2021, and funded by the Per Cent for Art Scheme.

P. Staff
P. Staff is an English-born artist who works in Los Angeles and London, studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009) and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Staff is in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LUMA Arles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf.

Weedkiller, 2017
A video work that focuses on the intersection of gender, illness and contamination. Inspired by the artist-writer Catherine Lord´s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004), an account of her experience of cancer. At the centre of the video is a monologue, adapted from Lord’s book, in which an actress reflects upon the devastating effects of chemotherapy. In the latter part of the video, the artist Jamie Crew delivers a lip-synched performance of a version of To Be in Love (1999) by Masters at Work. Each performer in Weed Killer is trans. By examining cancer and trans experience, Staff explores how biomedical technologies have fundamentally transformed the social construction of our bodies.

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: On the first floor of Galway Art Centre, which can only be accessed through two flights of stairs. There is a single accessible parking space on Dominick Street located across the road from Galway Arts Centre outside Rouge Café. The time film is captioned. Seating is provided.

Images: Ros Kavanagh
Video: Jonathan Sammon

TULCA 2023 | honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise | 3-19 November 2023

Taking its title from the description of an Irish folk cure, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise responds to the evolving experiences of disability and home in the West of Ireland. Reflecting on the legacy of institutions such as St Brigid’s Hospital and how ideas of health and medicine can shape landscapes and communities. The festival is dedicated to Ballinasloe born artist J.J. Beegan, who made drawings recalling home while living at Netherne Mental Hospital in Surrey, England.

You will find sounds, prints, films, quilts, sculptures, performances, social spaces and paintings throughout Galway city and county. There are prints that express the experience of disability with ironic wit and soundscapes that dream of the sounds we wish we could hear from our sick beds.

There are films dedicated to loved ones through memories of illness and music, and the longing and access barriers of returning home as a disabled person. Quilts weave archives of disabled artists and others that celebrate queer artists and scholars whose lives were pathologised or touched by medicine, while performances draw the colonial connections between prison islands in Ireland, Scotland and the Bay of Bengal.

Paintings visit sites of medical incarceration and we spend time with a group of young people who reimagine these sites through a neurodiverse lens. There are stories of how chemotherapy changes how we see ourselves, and others that transport us to a surrealist hospital for women that delves into the comedy and self-discovery of malady.  

We are brought to tower blocks in Birmingham as havens of queer life and witness the inhabitants' history with HIV and AIDS. We will also share in the intimacy of a memory test for dementia through the retelling of Iranian resistance films. Other spaces are transformed into Faery Forts that create spaces of softness and play, re-enchanting a familiar landscape and sculptures built upon the support and collaboration necessary to create.


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

TULCA Gallery

Hynes Building, St Augustine St
4-19 November 2023
Mon-Sun, 12-6pm

Bridget O'Gorman
Holly Márie Parnell
Jamila Prowse
Paul Roy
Philipp Gufler
Rouzbeh Shadpey

Bridget O’Gorman | Support | Work, 2023
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.

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.

Holly Márie Parnell | Cabbage, 2023
Holly Márie Parnell is an Irish/Canadian artist based between Wexford and Glasgow. Working in film and expanded cinema, her practice explores the ways we impart meaning and value through layers of authority and language. The work is built from personal encounters and is motivated by the subtle yet powerful truths of embodied knowledge and lived experience.

An intimate film made in collaboration with the filmmaker’s family, Cabbage reframes language, illuminating relationships of care at its centre. Bureaucratic violence, which can appear as gentle and bland, is contrasted with lived experience: the film centralises her brother’s writing (who is non-verbal and non-mobile) using eye tracking technology, and her mothers reflections to explore layers of power, and how to reclaim it within an ableist paradigm. The film takes place in the months leading up to an international move from Canada back home to Ireland – a country they had to leave a decade prior due to severe cuts in disability services.

Jamila Prowse | Crip Quilt, 2023
Jamila Prowse is an artist and writer, propelled by curiosity and a desire to understand herself through making. Informed by her lived experience of disability, mixed-race ancestry and the loss of her father at a young age; her work is research-driven and indebted to Black feminist and crip scholars. Self-taught, Jamila is drawn to experimenting with a multitude of mediums in order to process her grief and radical hope.

A large-scale patchwork textile quilt translating the individual and collective experience of disabled artists. With quotations, thoughts and experiences of disabled artists from National Disability Art Collection and Archive, five new collated oral histories with disabled artists of colour and the artist’s own lived experience; each square in the patchwork relays an experience in a disabled artist’s journey.

Paul Roy
Paul Roy is a visual artist originally from Dublin, now living in Westmeath. He received a first-class honours MA in Art in the Contemporary World in 2020, and has a background in painting, printmaking and animation. His current work reflects on how the onset of serious illness can impact upon an arts practice, altering both the subject matter and the physical approach to the processes of making art. This includes how his own personal experience of long-term ill health has informed every aspect of my creative process.

Ten monoprints that incorporate hand written text as their means of communicating their subject. The process engenders them with a loose and soft line quality and a relaxed aspect to their overall appearance, wherein it is often possible to see the results of the actions of the artist's hands directly within the image.

Philipp Gufler
Philipp Gufler explores matters of queer imagery, questioning the Western historiography, in which heterosexuality and a binary gender system define the social norm. In his artistic practice he uses various media, including silkscreen-printing on fabrics and mirrors, artist books, performances, and video installations. Since 2013 he has been an active member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München.

A series of hanging quilts, from an ongoing series of silkscreen prints that references artists, scholars and places of queer life that have found little or no place in written accounts and the historical canon. This series includes Lorenza Böttner, Lana Kaiser, Daniel Paul Schreber and Charlotte Woolf.

Rouzbeh Shadpey | Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. His work explores (anti)colonial pathophysiologies of illness and weariness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of diagnosis. Rouzbeh's musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر , combines avant-garde electronics, scraped guitar, spoken word, and Iranian sonics. Rouzbeh has exhibited and performed at TULCA, documenta fifteen, Mosaic Rooms, Centre Clark, MUTEK, Suoni Per Il Popolo, and more. His writing has been published in a variety of artistic and para-academic journals. He lives between Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and Berlin.

A video-essay that seeks to restore dignity to the act of forgetting. The video-essay juxtaposes footage from the artist's grandmother—who remains silent in the face of a medical memory test being administered to her by an acousmatic narrator—with borrowed footage from two essay films which challenge state sanctioned regimes of remembering: the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), and the Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and writer Ahmed Bouanani’s Mémoire 14 (1967). Weaving together the falsely dichotomized registers of biological memory and collective history, Forgetting is the Sun recontextualizes Farrokhzad and Bouanani’s defiance of state sanctioned remembrance through the lens of individual forgetting—and its resistance to medical capture.

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. 

Images: Ros Kavanagh
Video: Jonathan Sammon

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

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

Galway Arts Centre
47 Dominick St Lower, Galway
Mon-Sat, 10-5pm / 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.

Caroline Jane Harris
Elise Rasmussen
Judith Dean
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Nicoline van Harskamp
Tabitha Soren

Caroline Jane Harris
Caroline Jane Harris (b. 1987, UK) lives and works in London. Her work hybridises traditional, historic techniques with digital technologies to pursue questions around materiality and perception in the Information Age. Intending to serve peace through meditative acts, her artworks go against the grain of speed and automation as an antidote to our fast-paced world. 

Through manual processes, she forges a relationship between paper, interventions and the audience. With a scalpel she intricately cuts-out digital prints in ‘bitmap’ matrixes, embedding minute traces of the artist’s hand, turning two-dimensional prints into three-dimensional layered pictures that index both the human and non-human actors involved in the process.

Chosen subjects are images sourced – from personal archives, online videos, websites, found books and analogue photographs – to collapse and construe time, dimensions and media. The works offer up an arena for a slow, exploratory engagement to examine contemporary habits of seeing through critical acts of looking.

Elise Rasmussen
Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working with lens-based media. Her work for TULCA, in the Valley of the Moon investigates the paradoxes of scientific developments and ecological innovations, linking together rare mineral deposits in Chile’s Atacama Desert, food production, chemical warfare and the environmental toll of green energy. The work centres around current trends in electronic and electric vehicle industries and how this green revolution is fed by natural resources from fragile ecosystems, such as the Atacama; a site that has a long legacy of being exploited for its mineral wealth. The piece comments on what is gained and lost in the name of technological progress, questions who benefits from our current systems, and contemplates the many complexities of the climate crisis and the use of finite resources in our global world.

Judith Dean
Judith Dean works across installation, sculpture, performance, video, online projects, and more recently painting to negotiate the pictorial space as site. Experimenting with painting for several years, in 2017 Dean began practising with Chinese brushes and with her non-writing hand started attempting to write the image through painting, addressing singularity, framing and authorship, balancing figuration and abstraction, playing with divergent perspectives, blind alleys, dead ends, shifting horizons.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed
New York-based artist, writer, and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed is known for work that takes an experimental approach to narrating Black experience. Working across a range of media, Rasheed often conceives exhibitions as pedagogical experiences with the power to explore conflicting histories, hidden narratives, archives, memory, and public space.

Working across a range of media, forms and contexts, Rasheed takes an experimental approach to the arrangement of letters, words, sentences, shapes, tones and textures. Her work frequently engages with the poetry, politics and pleasures of approximation as well as (mis)recognition, translation, privacy and dirty data.

A believer in the generative qualities of unfinished work, Rasheed creates iterative and provisional projects. These include publications, poetry, prints, digital archives, lecture-performances, library interventions, performance scores and sprawling, ‘architecturally-scaled’ xerox-based collages.

Nicoline van Harskamp
Nicoline van Harskamp is an artist based in the Netherlands, whose work considers acts of language and solidarity. She is the Professor for Performative Art at the University of Fine Arts in Münster, Germany.

Her work, Contagious Speech is a video installation about the altered roles of proximity and virtuality in spoken exchange, and the possible effects of this on language variety and language dominance. The coronavirus pandemic, with its sudden transition from ‘contaminating’ face-to-face speech, to streamed online speech, seems to have sped up this process. What effects does talking to a screen have on our voices? Are we the owner of our voices when we’re online? Why don’t automated voices breathe? 

Contagious Speech is comprised of a video essay based on interviews with, among others, Natural Language Processing experts, speech therapists, voice-over artists, an ICU medic, a gospel singer and a beat-box artist.

Tabitha Soren
Tabitha Soren (b. 1967, Texas) is an artist whose work is concerned with contemporary photographic culture and the intersection of psychology, culture, politics and the body. Her work, Surface Tension (2013-2021) isolates one of the most intimate layers of our daily experience: the place where our warm animal bodies collide with the machine’s cold and boundless knowledge of the world.

Created by shooting the grime, oil and debris that accumulates on her iPad with a large format camera, the vigorous and expressive gestures on the surface of Soren’s images reflect the conflict between reality and fiction, and between our embodied selves and our online, mediated lives.

Soren is a Peabody Award winning journalist who worked with MTV, CNN, ABC News, and NBC News before shifting her visual arts practice from 30 video frames a second for television to single frame photographs.

Venue: Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street Lower, Galway
Accessibility: ground floor is 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