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

Artist Talk: Sean Lynch

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch lives and works in Askeaton, County Limerick. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Prominent solo exhibitions include City Hall, Melbourne (2023), Edinburgh Art Festival (2021); Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2019); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Rose Art Museum, Boston (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014) and Hugh Lane Gallery (2013). He has held fellowships and been a visiting professor at universities and colleges in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, and is a graduate of the Stadelschule, Frankfurt. In Dublin, he regularly exhibits at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery and in early 2024 presented a two-person collaborative exhibition at The Complex with Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Alongside Michele Horrigan, he works at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an artist-led residency, commissioning and publication initiative situated in the west of Ireland and nomadically since 2006.

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

Join Michele Horrigan for a walk around the Printworks Gallery to hear about the development of the TULCA 2024 programme.

Michele Horrigan

Michele Horrigan is an artist and independent curator. Since 2006 she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick. Over one hundred projects have been realised with a particular interest in contemporary art engaged in site-specific, ecological and social practice. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals.

Since 2014, she is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Michele has curated exhibitions and public programmes at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; EVA International - Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick; Kunstvlaai Biennial for Experimental Art, Amsterdam; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts; Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin and The National Women’s Council of Ireland, amongst others. Exhibitions of her artwork have been presented at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. In addition, her writing, essays and articles have been commissioned for, among others, Mousse Publishing, Winter Papers, Paper Visual Art Journal, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bomb Magazine.

Michele studied art at the University of Ulster, Belfast and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and an active collaborator with New York’s Independent Curators International. In 2022 she was presented a Civic Award by Limerick City & County Council in recognition of her ongoing curatorial work in Askeaton. In 2024 she will present the activities of Askeaton Contemporary Arts at the Curatorial Forum held at EXPO CHICAGO on the theme of Curating and the Commons. She continues to develop artistic and curatorial projects for PUBLICS, Helsinki, Flat Time House in London, Schloss Britz in Berlin, and The Model, Sligo.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Gallery Talk: Peter Fend in conversation with Sean Lynch

Peter Fend and Ocean Earth have over five decades of proposed speculative and visionary ecological projects that rethink the relationships between art, power and the planet. A global figure in contemporary art, Fend sees its potential for radical change with the use of biomass, seaweed, wind and wave power, and his ideas have often led him into friction with the representatives of government agencies, Big Oil and energy suppression. In conversation with artist Sean Lynch, he outlines what role Ireland has to play in these dialogues.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Tour guide Brendan Hynes presents a walking tour of Galway’s industrial heritage, with a focus on its canals and maritime history. Join us for a walking tour exploring Galway's Industrial Heritage. The tour begins at the Galway Tourist Information Centre within the Galway City Museum and winds through the city's streets and canals.

The tour is free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Artist Talk: Michael Holly

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Michael Holly
Bridging the divide between documentary film and the artworld, Michael Holly’s moving image productions appear regularly on Only in Askeaton, an online platform initially developed by Askeaton Contemporary Arts during COVID-19 lockdowns. Exploratory in nature and intensively curious about how art is discussed, made and disseminated in Irish society, his subjects and topics have ranged from curator Lucy Lippard’s 1985 exhibition of Irish art, ‘Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind’, to a profile of writer and artist Adrian Duncan’s decade-long investigation of Bungalow Bliss – a collection of affordable house designs that resulted in thousands of new dwellings appearing in Irish towns and countryside since the 1970s.

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.

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

TULCA Assembly brings together critical voices from Ireland, Europe and the United States, sharing artistic research and asking crucial questions about the role of artmaking, activism and environmental discourse today. Scheduled on Saturday afternoon, 9th November at Market Street’s PorterShed, TULCA Assembly is part of a wider public programme presented as part of TULCA 2024: The Salvage Agency.

At TULCA Assembly, Risteard Ó Domhnaill, one of Ireland’s most renowned documentary filmmakers, speaks about his current research and long term approach to communities and places in conflict with governmental and corporate policies. Irish curator, artist, writer and educator Paul O’Neill is a global voice on the possibilities and energies that exhibition-making and contemporary art practice can achieve - he shares his recent findings. Kate O’Shea’s activist work and publishing activities have constantly found new perspectives for an egalitarian Ireland. Becky Nahom, in her role as Director of Exhibitions at New York’s Independent Curators International, has developed numerous experimental exhibitions that challenge art historical narratives across the globe. Stephanie Smith’s curatorial work in Chicago and elsewhere is acknowledged for commitments to groundbreaking ecological thinking through art. Artist JD Whitman’s involvement in digital preservation of Ireland’s nineteenth century Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates has a special resonance, considering the important collection on exhibit at the University of Galway’s Zoology and Marine Biology Museum. Micol Curatolo highlights her work around borders, cultural work, belonging and identity in Finland, and launches her new edited publication Here, Not. Dialogues on art and the making of here.

TULCA Assembly was produced in association with Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Supported by the Arts Council, Galway City Council and Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Kate O’Shea

Micol Curatolo

Becky Nahom

Stephanie Smith

Risteard O’Domhnaill

JD Whitman

Paul O’Neill

TULCA Assembly Schedule

12.00 - Welcome teas and coffees
12.30 - Introduction by Michele Horrigan to TULCA Assembly
12.40 - Kate O’Shea
13.00 - Micol Curatolo
13.20 - Becky Nahom
13.40 - 30 min lunch break
14.20 - Stephanie Smith
14.40 - Risteard O’Domhnall
15.00 - Coffee break
15.10 - J.D. Whitman
15.30 - Paul O’Neill
15:50 - Closing remarks and panel discussion with time for Q+A
16:30 - Wrap up and Post-Assembly informal/casual conversations

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

Join us for a tour of the Hall of the Red Earl with local historian William Henry. William Henry is a storyteller, historian, and writer with over 25 books to his name. He brings a wealth of knowledge about the history and archaeology of Galway city.

The Hall of the Red Earl is a captivating medieval archaeological site located in the heart of Galway. Managed by Dúchas na Gaillimhe - Galway Civic Trust, this site dates back to the 13th century and is tied to the founding of Galway by the Anglo-Norman De Burgo family. It served as the city’s first municipal building, functioning as a tax office, courthouse, and banquet hall all in one. The hall is named after Richard de Burgo, the Earl of Ulster, who was the grandson of the town's founder.

In the late 15th century, the influential ‘Tribe’ families took control from the De Burgos, leading to the hall’s abandonment and subsequent decline. Over the centuries, it was covered and built over until its remains were rediscovered by Office of Public Works (OPW) archaeologists in 1997 during plans for an office extension next door. The site was recognizable from a renowned c. 1651 Pictorial Map of Galway.

A significant excavation revealed over 11,000 artefacts. The discovery of the Red Earl’s Hall prompted a redesign of the proposed extension to preserve the archaeological site. Today, the hall is enclosed in glass panelling, featuring a viewing gangway with flood-lighting. Interpretive panels explain the site’s significance, and replicas of the artefacts are prominently displayed for visitors.

Galway Civic Trust is a not-for-profit charity. Please consider making a donation here

Artist Talk: Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists living and working in the North-West of Ireland. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance. Their recent work tests the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities and build our capacity for solidarity.

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).

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

Gallery Talk: Seanie Barron

Join us for an informal talk in the Printworks Gallery with exhibiting artist Seanie Barron and TULCA 2024 curator Michele Horrigan.

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!’ Famously, his An Poc Ar Buile performances in annual harvest parades and Saint Patrick’s Day events in the 1970s and 1980s are still remembered, featured here in a press image from the time.

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!

Join Michele Horrigan for a walk around the Printworks Gallery to hear about the development of the TULCA 2024 programme.

Michele Horrigan

Michele Horrigan is an artist and independent curator. Since 2006 she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick. Over one hundred projects have been realised with a particular interest in contemporary art engaged in site-specific, ecological and social practice. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals.

Since 2014, she is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Michele has curated exhibitions and public programmes at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; EVA International - Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick; Kunstvlaai Biennial for Experimental Art, Amsterdam; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts; Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin and The National Women’s Council of Ireland, amongst others. Exhibitions of her artwork have been presented at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. In addition, her writing, essays and articles have been commissioned for, among others, Mousse Publishing, Winter Papers, Paper Visual Art Journal, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bomb Magazine.

Michele studied art at the University of Ulster, Belfast and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and an active collaborator with New York’s Independent Curators International. In 2022 she was presented a Civic Award by Limerick City & County Council in recognition of her ongoing curatorial work in Askeaton. In 2024 she will present the activities of Askeaton Contemporary Arts at the Curatorial Forum held at EXPO CHICAGO on the theme of Curating and the Commons. She continues to develop artistic and curatorial projects for PUBLICS, Helsinki, Flat Time House in London, Schloss Britz in Berlin, and The Model, Sligo.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Artist Insights: Stuart Whipps | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Stuart Whipps
Birmingham-based artist 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 intense curiosity and the tremendous personal wealth of 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 is 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 and a subtle rearrangement of objects and labelling in the museum.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Aine Phillips | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

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.’

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Niamh Moriarty | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists living and working in the North-West of Ireland. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance. Their recent work tests the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities and build our capacity for solidarity.

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).

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: John Carson | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

John Carson
John Carson is a Belfast born artist who has worked in various media to provocatively explore the interface between high and low culture. He has exhibited and performed internationally and has made works for television and radio. He taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London UK from 1991 to 2006 and in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh USA from 2006 to 2022. A collection of artworks by Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, features throughout The Salvage Agency. 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 the Galway Tourist Office near the Spanish Arch, his 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 in 1978.

Screened at the Pálás cinema, the video American Medley embodies a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music – from New York, New York to California Dreaming and more in between.

In Carson Street, a new 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, visiting local residents and businesses, 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.

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Julie Morrissy | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Julie Morrissy
Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, critic, and activist. Morrissy’s poetry-artworks have been exhibited at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, the Museum of Literature Ireland, and acquired for the Ireland State Art Collection. Her first collection Where, the Mile End (2019) is published by Book*hug (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (UK). Her awards include the Holy Show Absolutely Anywhere Residency, MAKE Theatre Residency Award, the ‘Next Generation’ Artist Award and Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She was a contributing participant in playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference 2022. She hosts a sporadic reading series in her home called Pizza Poetry Pub, which has featured international and local writers Dionne Irving, sam sax, Erin Robinsong, Ronan Kelly, and Eamon McGuinness. She is a regular a critic for Poetry Ireland Review and Books Ireland Magazine.

Disappearing Acts is a story-telling circle led by poet Julie Morrissy, drawing on collective cultures of myth, storytelling, and faith healing in Ireland. Participants will be invited to share their own stories and experiences and/or intergenerational stories passed down to them. Following from the engagement with law in her practice, Morrissy will link these ideas to Article 45 of Bunreacht na hÉireann/The Irish Constitution, the only article that is non-enforceable and therefore has no legal teeth. Article 45 sets out the principles of social policy, carrying remnants of pre-independence values around care, agency, collective responsibility and protection, which perhaps vanished into the legal frameworks of the Irish State. Morrissy will lead the circle, bringing together participants’ stories and inputs to explore how the legal text of Article 45 engages with the legacies of myth and healing, while considering how those ideas manifest (or not) in Ireland’s contemporary laws and culture.

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Bryony Dunne | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

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.

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Catriona Leahy | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

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?”

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Curator’s Talk: Michele Horrigan

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Join us to gain insight into the curation of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: The Salvage Agency. Curator Michele Horrigan will discuss the festival's theme and the curatorial principles that have shaped her selection of unique artworks and events.

Michele Horrigan
Michele Horrigan is an artist and independent curator. Since 2006 she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick. Over one hundred projects have been realised with a particular interest in contemporary art engaged in site-specific, ecological and social practice. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals.

Since 2014, she is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Michele has curated exhibitions and public programmes at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; EVA International - Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick; Kunstvlaai Biennial for Experimental Art, Amsterdam; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts; Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin and The National Women’s Council of Ireland, amongst others. Exhibitions of her artwork have been presented at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. In addition, her writing, essays and articles have been commissioned for, among others, Mousse Publishing, Winter Papers, Paper Visual Art Journal, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bomb Magazine.

Michele studied art at the University of Ulster, Belfast and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and an active collaborator with New York’s Independent Curators International. In 2022 she was presented a Civic Award by Limerick City & County Council in recognition of her ongoing curatorial work in Askeaton. In 2024 she presented the activities of Askeaton Contemporary Arts at the Curatorial Forum held at EXPO CHICAGO on the theme of Curating and the Commons. She continues to develop artistic and curatorial projects for PUBLICS, Helsinki, Flat Time House in London, Schloss Britz in Berlin, and The Model, Sligo.

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

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

Abandoned Goods Film Screening with talk by Prof. Clair Wills | Ballinasloe Library

Ballinasloe Library, Society St, Ballinasloe
Friday 17 November 2023
2.30pm - 4.30pm

J.J. Beegan was an artist and sculptor who made drawings repeatedly naming himself, his profession and Ballinasloe, as a long stay patient at Netherne Mental Health Hospital, in East Surrey, England, where he made drawings recalling home.

Screened in Ballinasloe for the first time, Abandoned Goods is a short film that explores the many artists making work in Netherne, including artist and sculptor J.J. Beegan, through archival and 35mm footage. Following the screening there will be a talk by Professor Clair Wills, who will discuss her process of searching for Beegan, and crucially about what happens when we can’t trace people, what then does the evidence amount to.

Abandoned Goods, 2014
Length: 37 mins

Abandoned Goods screened as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. An essay film exploring the journey of one of Britain’s major collections of 'asylum art' containing about 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by about 140 people compelled to live in the Netherne psychiatric hospital in South London. 

Abandoned Goods was awarded the Golden Pardino for the Best International Short Film in the Leopards of Tomorrow Competition at Locarno Film Festival. To date it has also screened at the Hamptons, London BFI Film Festival, Sundance, True/False, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Oberhausen, Festival Internacional de Cine De Huesca, Janela Internacional de Cinema Festival, Bucharest Experimental Film Festival, First Fortnight Film Festival, DocAviv, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and Busan International Short Film Festival.

Edward Lawrenson is a Scottish filmmaker and writer based in London. His films have played at a number of festivals, including Sundance, BFI London Film Festival, Cinéma du réel, True/False, Open City; and cinemas, including the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and London’s ICA. 

Pia Borg is a Maltese/Australian filmmaker. Her non-fiction films that chronicle historical events and psychological phenomena have received numerous prizes, including the Golden Leopard at Locarno Festival for Abandoned Goods (2014) which she co-directed with Ed Lawrenson.

Abandoned Goods was made with the help of Dr David O'Flynn and the Adamson Collection Trust and the support of the Wellcome Trust and the Maudsley Charity.

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, assessed via a lift. Accessible toilet facilities available, and two accessible parking spaces at the back of the library. The film is captioned. Seating is provided.

Video edit: Jonathan Sammon

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

Curator's Tour: Iarlaith Ní Fheorais

TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, St Augustine St
Saturday 11 November 2023
1pm - 2pm

Join Iarlaith Ní Fheorais for a walk around the TULCA Gallery to hear about the development of the TULCA 2023 programme.

Curator: Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais is a curator and writer based between the UK and Ireland. She is an Independent Producer with field:arts, working closely with artists Bridget O’Gorman and Ebun Sodipo. Recently she has curated Speech Sounds as Curator-in-Residence at VISUAL Carlow as part of Carlow Arts Festival and collaborated with Emma Wolf-Haugh on a new film commission for Ulysses 2.2. In previous roles she worked at Tate Modern and Britain as Assistant Curator of Young People’s Programmes and was the co-director of Basic Space from 2016-18.

As a writer she has written on the work of Jesse Darling, Manuel Solano and Lorenza Böttner for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, Arts and Disability Ireland and Goldsmiths University.

Committed to improving access in the arts, she is currently developing an Arts Council England funded access toolkit for curators and producers. She is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design and is currently studying at the Dutch Art Institute.

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.

Image: Ros Kavanagh

Artist Talk: Rouzbeh Shadpey | Pálás

Pálás Cinema, 15 Merchants Rd Lower
Monday 6 November 2023
11am - 1pm

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

Rouzbeh Shadpey
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. His musical practice exists under the moniker GOLPESAR. He is based between Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and Berlin.

Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023
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: 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

Artist Talk: Philipp Gufler

TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, St Augustine St
Saturday 4 November 2023
12.30pm

Join Philipp Gufler for an informal artist talk in the TULCA Gallery to hear about the development of the exhibition on display for TULCA 2023.

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 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 selection includes artist Lorenza Böttner, singer Lana Kaiser, judge Daniel Paul Schreber and physician Charlotte Woolf.

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: Philipp Gufler, Quilt #31 (Lorenza Böttner), 2021. Silk screen print on fabric, zipper, 95x180cm. Courtesy BQ, Berlin, and the artist. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooji, Amsterdam.

Video: Jonathan Sammon

Curator's Talk and Publication Launch: Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
Introduced by Lucy Elvis

Pálás Cinema, 15 Merchants Rd Lower
Friday 27 October 2023
4pm - 6pm

TULCA’s Artist Talks Series continues for this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Gain an insight into the curation of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise. Curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais will provide an overview of the festival theme and the curatorial principles that have guided her programme of unique artworks and events.

Curator Biography
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais Is a curator and writer, currently the curator of the 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. As a writer she has written for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal, Girls Like Us, and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, KW Institute, Konstfack University and Arts and Disability Ireland. Committed to anti-ableism in the arts, she published a free online access toolkit for artworkers in 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: Pálás Cinema  is a step free venue. There are 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. There are three accessible parking spots located on Saint Augustine Street opposite the TULCA Gallery, which is a 4-minute walk from the venue.

Curator's Talk: Iarlaith Ní Fheorais

Life Drawing Room (Room 344), ATU Wellpark Campus, Galway
Monday 23 October 2023
11am - 1pm

TULCA’s Artist Talks Series continues for this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. TULCA continues its long standing partnership with ATU School of Design and Creative Arts to bring you our popular curator’s talk along with talks by three of this year’s exhibiting artists every Monday for 4 weeks starting 23 October 2023. This year’s talks series will be hosted by ATU and Pálás Cinema.

Gain an insight into the curation of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise. Curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais will provide an overview of the festival theme and the curatorial principles that have guided her programme of unique artworks and events.

Curator Biography
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais Is a curator and writer, currently the curator of the 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. As a writer she has written for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal, Girls Like Us, and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, KW Institute, Konstfack University and Arts and Disability Ireland. Committed to anti-ableism in the arts, she published a free online access toolkit for artworkers in 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: ATU Wellpark Campus can be reached by driving, or getting the 401 bus from Eyre Square. ATU Wellpark Campus is wheelchair accessible with accessible toilet facilities.

Images: Mary McGraw
Video edit: Jonathan Sammon

Artist Talk: Emily Speed
Introduced by Mel French

Friday 18 Nov 2022
10am - 11.30am
Pálás Cinema

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

Artist: Emily Speed
Known for her work examining the relationship between the body and architecture, Speed’s practice considers how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and how a person occupies their own psychological space. Working in sculpture, performance and film, Speed's work looks at the relationship between people and buildings and in particular the power dynamics at play in built space. Her work plays with scale and creates layers around the body, often hybrid forms of clothing and architecture. 

Over the last few years, Speed has had solo presentations at Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, TRUCK, Calgary, and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas. She has been commissioned to make performances for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Laumeier Sculpture Park (St Louis) and Edinburgh Art Festival among others and recent exhibitions include: A Woman’s Place at Knole House; Body Builders at Exeter Phoenix Gallery; and The Happenstance, Scotland + Venice at the Architecture Biennale in 2018. Emily Speed lives and works in Cheshire, UK.

Flatland is centred around a film installation, which uses set design, choreography and costume to depict flattened hierarchies within a close-knit community of women. This is accompanied by a second film that focuses on a single performer, signing a text written by author Eley Williams in British Sign Language. 

The work is inspired by Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland, a satire of Victorian society where all existence is limited to two dimensions. In this society men may have any number of sides depending on their status. Women, on the other hand, are thin, straight lines who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. As their pointed ends are considered to be dangerous, they are restricted to separate entrances and must paint one end of their line-body orange as well as swaying continuously to alert others to their presence. 

Echoing Abbott’s novella, the performers in Speed’s film begin line-like and rigid before working together and unfolding to create more colourful, layered and complex shapes through increasingly vibrant movement. This evolution is also realised through costume. The performers wear functional housework garments, such as aprons and tabards that contain hidden elements relating to the set design.

Venue: Pálás Cinema, 15 Lower Merchant's Road, Galway
Accessibility: venue 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

Creative Futures, Creating Futures Seminar

Thursday 17 Nov 2022
4pm - 5.30pm
Hardiman Research Building
University of Galway

Drawing together academics and artists, this seminar explores how creative practitioners and thinkers can work together to prepare for future challenges, imagine future possibilities, and reflect on future forms of art-making, thinking, and living. The session draws together a group from the University of Galway and Queen’s University Belfast, who will engage in discussion and performances related to these topics – including a special improvised performance from the -ence collaborative project.

-ence is a collaborative project between free improviser Paul Stapleton and electronic musician and 1/3 of Belfast electro-pop band Not Squares, Ricki O’Rawe. Their debut album Dissensual Grooves was released on Resist in 2021. Their music sits between the uncertainty and openness of improvisation and the stability of the familiar palate of sounds and structures associated with dance music. A dis-sensual groove is one that appeals to a dancefloor’s desire for rhythm and movement while simultaneously disrupting its expectations, defamiliarising our engagement and slowing down our perceptions. Both Stapleton and O’Rawe are also academics and cultural theorists interested in exploring futurity and radical social change. With this multimodal project, which spans experimental instrument design, live improvisation, critical writing, and recorded music releases, they are going to “make the club strange”.

Speakers:

Dr Orla Lehane is a postdoctoral researcher in Creative Futures in the Moore Institute at the University of Galway. She is interested in the role that arts and arts engagement, in particular storytelling, can play in understandings of security and human rights, and in the reimagining of the political space. Orla’s research has focused on the use of creative interventions by youth violence prevention practitioners and depictions of violence in animated documentaries. She has extensive experience working in the area of arts and human rights education.  

Dr Ricki O’Rawe is a researcher and musician based in Belfast. His research explores the intersections of art with politics and religion in Latin American visual and literary cultures. As a musician he has released two albums (Yeah OK, 2011; Bolts, 2015) with the Belfast/London-based group Not Squares. As an artist he has exhibited in the Naughton Gallery and Platform Arts, most recently in collaboration with Liam Crichton (Echo Chamber, Multiple Locations, 2016).

Dr Maria Roca Lizarazu is postdoctoral researcher in Creative Futures at the Moore Institute/NUI Galway. Her interests include literature and culture in the contemporary German-language context, with a specific focus on Jewish and other minority cultures, cultural memory, (post-)migration, and citizenship. Maria is particularly interested in how arts-based research as well as creative methods can influence and transform social, cultural and political responses to migration, diversity, and citizenship.

Professor Paul Stapleton is an improviser and sound artist originally from Southern California. He performs with a variety of modular metallic sound sculptures, custom made electronics and found objects. Paul is currently based at SARC in Belfast, where he teaches and conducts research in new musical instrument design, music performance, sound design, and critical improvisation studies. He has received critical acclaim for several artistic projects, including his album FAUNA (2013, pfMENTUM) with saxophonist Simon Rose, and for his sound design and composition work as part of the immersive audio theatre piece Reassembled, Slightly Askew (2015).

Venue: Room G011, Moore Institute Seminar Room, Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway
Accessibility: venue 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