Announcement: Contributors to TULCA 2025
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the contributors to its 23rd edition, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo.
Festival dates: 7-23 November 2025
Contributors to TULCA 2025
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.
This year’s edition of TULCA began with, and was inspired by, the undated and anonymously drawn Burmese Map of the World, a speculative artefact shaped by traces of Medieval European cartography. It depicts a teardrop-shaped island rising from the ocean, with smaller islands drifting below, detached from the mainland. A horizontal green line marks the Himalayas: above lies the mythical land of seven lakes and Mount Meru; below, abstracted colourful forms mark the land the mapmaker believed strangers came from. Like other ancient maps, it casts the periphery as both dangerous and alluring, and implies that the unknown can also signify the opening up of possibilities.
Strange lands still bear common ground responds both to this image and to the reverberations of our global crisis of capital, which displaces people and fragments worlds. It partitions us from communities, ecosystems, and inherited knowledge systems, leaving us adrift and ambivalent toward those who arrive from elsewhere. So, reorientation serves as the festival’s guiding theme, and is understood as the act of unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of contact.
The festival presents a programme of artworks, film screenings, and live performances by artists and collaborators from Ireland and beyond. It unfolds across sites in Galway, extends through the airwaves, and reaches further still with a satellite venue in New York.
Beulah Ezeugo: ‘This year, TULCA engages artists whose practices move across personal, physical, and psychic boundaries. Much of the work documents situated encounters with land, the sea, the creature, the stranger, the here and the elsewhere. The programme aims to create space to reconsider inherited structures of power, drawing attention to the residues that surface at points of intense contact and to the possibilities that arise when conventional ways of separating and categorising are unsettled.’
The 23rd edition of TULCA will be presented across multiple venues in Galway city from 7–23 November 2025, including the TULCA Gallery at Hynes Building, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-run Gallery, the James Mitchell Geology Museum, University Gallery, the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, ATU Library, the O’Donoghue Centre, ATU Wellpark Road, FLIRT FM, Electric Galway, and 334 Broome Street, New York.
A series of exhibitions, public events, screenings, performances, and encounters will accompany Strange lands still bear common ground, with the full festival programme being announced on Monday, 20 October 2025.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is supported by The Arts Council, Galway City Council, and Galway County Council.
For media inquiries, contact: comms@tulca.ie
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland
Image: Pure Designs