Part One: Exhibitions | TULCA 2025

 

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Documentation of Exhibition Programme | TULCA 2025

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo.

The 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts was presented across multiple venues in Galway city and beyond in November 2025.

View full festival documentation

This year’s TULCA is one of many contemporary art programmes that attempt to engage with our current global crisis, and its partitioning of us from our communities, our ecosystems, our inherited knowledge systems, and from even a shared understanding of ‘we’. 

The island of Ireland has, in the last few years, been host to a series of cultural interventions that aim to confront this from multiple angles; whether that’s by examining the border as a core agent of separation, forming strategies for collectivity through international connections, or by entangling the nation with its colonial history, which is transposed like a spectre in our contemporary lives. Strange lands still bear common ground emerges from a desire to add weight to voices calling for an urgent, direct, and fractal strategy toward new ways of relating in our shared world.

In Conversations Across Place, Francis Whorral Campbell writes: “It is no longer possible to pretend that there are ‘other’ places and times untouched by the devastation at hand.” Taking this as a provocation, the festival asks us to question the value of separating the alien from the familiar. It also invites us to consider, with full awareness of our intertwined world, how we might move in concert with the land, the sea, the stranger, the creature, the here, and the elsewhere.

Mapping acts as a thematic framework and strategy for exhibition making. This work shown focuses on reorientation; unsettling an assumed stance and turning again toward others, in order to renegotiate how we inhabit the world together. The artists featured are from Ireland and abroad, and often work within broad collaborations, with their work too foregrounding themes of interconnectivity, encounter, desire, and negotiation. It unfolds across sites in Galway, through its airwaves, and in a satellite exhibition in New York.

The festival programme featured new commissions, artistic contributions, and exhibitions by Saoirse Amira Anis, Mourad Ben Amor, Susannah Bolton, Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Marie Farrington, Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan, Caoimhín Gaffney, Mair Hughes, Francis Jones, Emily Joy, Jericho Mars, Bint Mbareh, Hussein Mitha, Kate Morrell, Thais Muniz, Tom O’Dea, Seán O’Riordan, Enya Moore and Kate O’Shea, PATHOS, Abel Shah, Durre Shahwar, Peter Tresnan, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, and Jess Zamora-Turner.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is supported by The Arts Council, Galway City Council, and Galway County Council.

Part One: Exhibitions

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

TULCA Gallery
Hynes Building, St Augustine St

View exhibition

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

Galway Arts Centre
47 Dominick St Lower

View exhibition

Chris Zhongtian Yuan

126 Gallery
15 St Bridget's Place

View exhibition

Kate Morrell

University Gallery
Quadrangle, University of Galway

View exhibition

Marie Farrington

James Mitchell Geology Museum
Quadrangle, University of Galway

View exhibition

Abel Shah

Zoology & Marine Biology Museum
University of Galway

View exhibition

Thaís Muniz

ATU Wellpark Road Library
ATU Wellpark Road

View exhibition

Peter Tresnan
Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil
Caoimhín Gaffney
Ayanna Legros
Melissa Middleberg
Thaís Muniz
Devin Osorio

334 Broome Street
New York, NY 10002

View exhibition

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

Image: Seán O'Riordan, Installation view of Bad Tendencies, 2025, GOOD FOR ALL NIGHT, 2023, and Fool I, 2023. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Mair Hughes, Installation view of A Field Guide to the Offa's Dyke/Canllaw Maes i Gladwdd Offa, 2025. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Bojana Jankovic & Nessa Finnegan, Installation view of Shared Migrants (Archive), 2024 | Image: Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Installation view of All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss (2021-22), Single-channel video, 16mm film transferred to HD video, 21 mins 52 secs. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Kate Morrell, Installation view of ...Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal), 2020, HD video, 35 mins 42 secs. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Marie Farrington, Installation view of A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, 2025. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Abel Shah, Installation view of Shift, Tilt, 2025, Zoology Museum. Photo: Ros Kavanagh | Image: Thais Muniz, Installation view of Radical Imagination, 2024, ATU Library. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. Image: 334 Broome St Gallery. Photo: Peter Tresnan

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh

 

TULCA at Dublin Art Book Fair 2025

 

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts took part in Dublin Art Book Fair 2025, presenting the festival’s latest publication, Strange lands still bear common ground, produced on the occasion of the 23rd edition of TULCA and curated by Beulah Ezeugo.

Held at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin Art Book Fair is Ireland’s leading platform for contemporary artist books and independent publishing, bringing together artists, designers, and publishers from Ireland and internationally.

TULCA Publishing presented Strange lands still bear common ground, a publication that complements and extends the festival programme through essays, artworks, and artist contributions by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Francis Jones, Jericho Mars, Hussein Mitha, Enya Moore & Kate O’Shea, PATHOS, and Durre Shahwar.

The fair formed part of the wider 2025 programme curated by Dr Selina Guinness, alongside talks, launches, workshops, and events celebrating artist-led publishing and independent cultural production.

 
Source: https://www.templebargallery.com/exhibitio...

New Publication: Strange lands still bear common ground

 

New Publication: Strange lands still bear common ground

Our latest publication, Strange lands still bear common ground, is available to order. Produced for the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, the book extends the 2025 programme with new essays, artworks, and contributions from Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Francis Jones, Jericho Mars, Hussein Mitha, Enya Moore & Kate O’Shea, PATHOS, and Durre Shahwar.

Featured contributions include:
A Collection of Ocean Waifs - Enya Moore, Kate O’Shea
Construction - Francis Jones
An Ireland of the West - Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil
PATHOS Guiding Principles - Ailbhe McDaid, Julie Morrissy, Leah Smith
Reorientating Borders Into - Durre Shahwar
The Wretched of the City (excerpt) - Hussein Mitha
Imagine for a moment that it is spring - Jericho Mars

Publication Details:
Publisher: TULCA Publishing, Galway
Publication date: November 2025
Copyeditor: Joanne Laws
Design: Pure Designs
ISBN: 9781838228453
Printed on 120gsm / 80gsm Offset / Vanguard Cobalt Blue
Price: €15.00

Order Here

Also available to purchase from:

TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building (until 23 Nov 2025)
Galway Arts Centre (until 23 Nov 2025)
Dublin Art Book Fair 2025 (4-14 Dec 2025)
Just Art It
TULCA Shop

Images: Mary McGraw, 2025

 

INTERVIEW: Clodagh Assata Boyce interviews Beulah Ezeugo

 

CLODAGH ASSATA BOYCE INTERVIEWS BEULAH EZEUGO, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2025.

Clodagh Assata Boyce: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2025 is titled Strange lands still bear common ground. Can you explain why you chose this title?

Beulah Ezeugo: I chose this title because I enjoy a statement that can gather its own kind of energy. I also enjoy the trend of past editions of TULCA that lean into the poetic by using longer, slightly awkward titles. When a phrase is repeated enough, it can act like a shared refrain that shapes a shared language for that moment in time. This feels suitable for something as quick and celebratory as a festival.

Caoimhín Gaffney, And you leave the rest of yourself behind, 2024, medium format photograph, 103 x 86 cm; photograph by Caoimhín Gaffney, courtesy of TULCA Festival.

The words in this title carry ideas that conjure very specific definitions that shift based on where you ask and who is speaking: the strange, the common, the land. When I am in Galway, the presence of the Atlantic feels significant. So, conceptualising the festival began with thoughts about Galway’s mercantile past, but also with the discourses taking place around migration now. Both of which make me wonder how arrival is felt on an island – a place that can feel protected by distance yet also vulnerable to outside forces.

Earlier on, I came across an image of a medieval Burmese Map of the World. It depicts a teardrop-shaped island rising from the ocean, with smaller islands drifting below, detached from the mainland. Where the image shows up online it is captioned something along the lines of ‘The Himalayas are shown by a horizontal green line: above is the magical land of seven lakes and Mount Meru; below is where strangers come from.’ It suggested that to know the world is to expect strangeness, and that this encounter is not only inevitable but also vital. We meet the world through others, and in that sense, we are all strangers to someone else.

CAB: This exhibition sets out to chart new ways of relation. Can you tell us a little bit about how this cartographical approach has shaped your curatorial and exhibition-building choices?

BE: Maps and borders hold a decisive place in contemporary art. For this exhibition, I was drawn to their paradoxes. Maps have long served as instruments of colonial power, but they can also act as anti-colonial tools, capable of encrypting, concealing, and revealing the limits of hegemonic knowledge.

In the curatorial process, I approached exhibition-making as a form of map-making: a search for pathways, a desire to document encounters, a projection of curiosity and intention across discrete spaces, and a pursuit of familiarity with the unknown alongside a willingness to be transformed by it. The exhibition follows this impulse, inviting audiences to navigate the worlds presented by the artists with openness and attentiveness.

Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan, an entry from the Shared Migrants (Archive), 2025; image courtesy of the artists and TULCA Festival.

The festival also borrows from cartographic methods to define its guiding themes. Much of the work begins from a specific historical or cultural vantagepoint and then from there, documents situated encounters with land, the sea, the creature, the stranger, and so on. So, re-orientation became a central theme and is understood as the act of unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of encounter and contact.

CAB: How do you see the role of ‘the other’ and what is the role of art in shifting that?

BE: By evoking the idea of ‘the other’ I am evoking the ways of knowing and experiences that have been pushed aside or ignored by the dominant systems of power. The margin can also be an advantageous position. If every margin is someone else’s centre, then the task is to keep shifting our point of view toward the many centres that exist, noticing what becomes marginal from each new vantage point. Much of the work in the festival is a relational encounter with a powerful external presence, whether another person, another state, a non- human species, a mythical or spiritual figure. At times, the work itself shifts perspective from the margins, moving through overlooked or excluded positions to open new ways of seeing and being.

Although art has the capacity to propose new considerations and ways of seeing, at the same time, it’s difficult to think of how exactly contemporary art makes significant shifts. I am aware that a festival, no matter how ambitious, cannot do that much. What it can do is create proximity and enable an artist or an audience into intimate relations with an idea, and then hopefully spark the impulse to act in a different way.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan, 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; image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

CAB: What can audiences expect from this year’s festival?

BE: The festival includes a performance, artist talks, various exhibitions in Galway and one in New York, a book, and several audio works shared online and broadcasted over radio. There are many films in the programme that move fluidly across different geographies, as well as cultural and historic points. I am particularly excited to share Kate Morrell’s film ...Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal) (2021), which explores ‘guaquería’, a type of political resistance that involves excavating the earth to loot archaeological treasures and indigenous cultural property.

I also look forward to the festival’s ephemerality. Many of the works are ongoing or exist as part of a larger continuum, so work in different states of completion will be able to converge and momentarily come into conversation with others. Marie Farrington’s Diagonal Acts (2025) appears here in its fourth, site-specific iteration, engaging with Galway’s Geology Museum and the knowledge embedded within it. There is also new work by Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan that brings together a living archive, related to crossing Ireland’s north-south border – a project that will continue to evolve during the festival and beyond.

BE: The publication extends the festival’s core questions around contact and proximity. It brings together several writers who explore the politics of place through poetry, prose, and experimental forms. Some of the writers involved in the festival also contribute to the publication, for example, the broader themes around Ireland’s revolutionary potential, presented in Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil’s film, Mirror States (2025), are extended through the publication in a more intimate register. Other contributors share writing that is rooted in research as well as personal experience, which reflect on how lived histories and places intersect. The publication includes responses to a range of environments, with particular attention to architectural and natural landscapes.

CAB: To what extent does international collaboration play a critical role this year?

BE: Through the open call, the festival emphasised collaboration and cross-border exchange – not to showcase a particular kind of work, but to create conditions for a certain type of exchange. In much art-making, the focus is on the final outcome or exhibited work, so the life of thinking and making, including the negotiations and the frictions that led to it, often remains invisible. Artists who work collaboratively are especially compelling because of their ability to establish through shared systems that support this way of working. Considering global interconnectedness felt particularly important, in order to invite reflection on the kinds of relationships that sustain solidarity and those that do not.

Mair Hughes, Spoil Shelter, 2024, image from The Borderlands / Y Gororau project; photograph by Mair Hughes, courtesy of TULCA Festival.

Mair Hughes, who has been exploring dual identity through excavations along the Welsh border, began with a solo project but invited collaborators Emily Joy and Durre Shahwar, who are now contributing artists in their own right. Peter Tresnan, a painter based in New York, has created a project which explores diasporic identity, drawing connections between Galway and New York. This has led to a secondary outpost of TULCA; an exhibition at 334 Broome Street in New York, organised by Peter, which will feature his work alongside contributions from other TULCA artists, and local artists working within similar themes.

Clodagh Assata Boyce is a Dublin-based independent curator and artist, who is influenced by the radical traditions of Black feminist thought.

Beulah Ezeugo is curator of the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, which takes place across venues in Galway City from 7-23 November 2025.

 
Source: https://visualartistsireland.com/festival-...