Announcement | TULCA 2026 Programme
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the full programme for its 24th edition, Veruca Salt, curated by Sinéad Keogh and taking place across Galway from 6–22 November 2026.
Marking fifty years since punk emerged as a disruptive cultural force, Veruca Salt considers what it means to know who you are and know what you want.
Curated by Sinéad Keogh, Veruca Salt approaches punk not as a fixed historical style, but as a living method: a way of working outside conventional structures, questioning received values, and making space through DIY culture, collective action and self-determination. The programme brings together artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and community organisations whose work is shaped by independence, experimentation and a refusal to accept prescribed roles.
Women-led and countercultural perspectives run throughout the festival. Historical and archival strands connect the first wave of punk and Irish alternative culture with contemporary practices that address gender, identity, sexuality, bodily autonomy, domestic power, disability and political expression. Rather than treating rebellion as an aesthetic in itself, Veruca Salt asks what punk’s insistence on agency, solidarity and reinvention can offer in the present.
The 2026 programme brings together Peter Bradley, Diana Chambers, Pauline Cummins, Dolorosa de la Cruz, Vivienne Dick, Paula Fitzsimons, Rachel Garfield, Saidhbhín Gibson, Guggi, Russell Hart, Seiko Hayase, Shota Kotake, Del LaGrace Volcano, Breda Lynch, Evgeniya Martirosyan, Johnny McMahon, Kate McSharry, Enoch Miekutima Matondo, Katie Moore, Pratibha Parmar, Sara R Phillips, Ciara Rodgers and Madhuri Singh, alongside musicians 50 Foot Woman, Ria Rua and Molly Vulpyne and her band, DJs Phil RetroSpector and Core Minimal, and community partners AkiDwA, Domestic Violence Response Galway and Galway Traveller Movement.
Across five galleries and a wider programme of events in Galway, the festival includes exhibitions, film screenings, live performance, sound, writing, artist talks, workshops and community-led projects. Established and emerging practitioners are presented alongside local organisations and collaborators, creating connections between individual artistic practices and collective experience.
The exhibition programme takes place across TULCA Gallery, An Post Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Galway City Museum. TULCA Gallery presents work and archival material by Vivienne Dick, Dolorosa de la Cruz, Johnny McMahon, Garry O’Neill and Sara R Phillips, alongside material from the RTÉ Archive. An Post Gallery brings together Seiko Hayase, Kate McSharry, Evgeniya Martirosyan, Enoch Miekutima Matondo, Paula Fitzsimons and Russell Hart, together with a project by Domestic Violence Response Galway.
At Galway Arts Centre, the programme includes Peter Bradley, Diana Chambers, Rachel Garfield, Saidhbhín Gibson, Guggi, Shota Kotake, Breda Lynch, Katie Moore, Ciara Rodgers and Del LaGrace Volcano. Domestic Violence Response Galway will also present a project at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, while Galway City Museum presents commissions involving Madhuri Singh and Galway Traveller Movement’s Nora Mongan.
The wider public programme moves across film, performance, music, talks, workshops and community-led events. Highlights include Women-Led Punk Night at Róisín Dubh on 10 November, featuring 50 Foot Woman, Ria Rua and Molly Vulpyne and her band; a screening of Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage at EYE Cinema; Pauline Cummins’ Looking for Frances Cox – A Performance Lecture at the James Mitchell Geology Museum; and a screening featuring Guggi at TULCA Gallery.
A series of talks at ATU Galway includes Sinéad Keogh with Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Vivienne Dick, Rachel Garfield and Breda Lynch. The programme also includes Del LaGrace Volcano as part of Arts in Action, Ruth Griffin’s Feminist Rebellion Through Dress at Galway City Museum, workshops and events with Domestic Violence Response Galway and AkiDwA, alongside readings, tours and participatory events across the festival.
TULCA 2026 will officially open at An Post Gallery, 18 William Street, Galway, on Friday 6 November from 7–9pm, alongside the launch of the festival’s new publication. The opening includes a live reading by Sara R Phillips of Incident in Another Time, followed by the official TULCA Launch Party at Electric Galway from 9pm, with DJ sets by Phil RetroSpector and Core Minimal.
Following the official launch on Friday 6 November, all five TULCA exhibition galleries will open to the public from Saturday 7 November and remain open throughout the festival.
The accompanying TULCA 2026 publication brings together contributions by Wigdan Gasmalla, Guggi, Declan Long, Catherine Marshall, Anne O’Brien, Kathy O’Donoghue, Garry O’Neill and Elizabeth Power, and will launch with the festival on 6 November.
Veruca Salt is a programme about conviction: the decision to speak, make, organise and define oneself on one’s own terms. It positions art as a space for refusal and disruption, but also for care, recognition and the creation of new forms of belonging.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland
Full programme: www.tulca.ie
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is principally funded by the Arts Council, Galway City Council and Galway County Council.
Festival partners and supporters include An Post, Galway Arts Centre, Galway City Museum, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, University of Galway, Atlantic Technological University, Róisín Dubh and Electric Galway.