Announcement: Eoin Dara to curate TULCA 2021

TULCA is pleased to announce Eoin Dara as the curator of the 19th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in 2021, under the title:

there’s nothing here but flesh and bone, there’s nothing more

Eoin Dara is an Irish curator living on the east coast of Scotland. He works as Head of Exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts and has recently been collaborating with and learning from artists like Margaret Salmon, P. Staff, Emma Talbot and Alberta Whittle and writers like CAConrad, Quinn Latimer, Christina Sharpe and Isabel Waidner.

In previous work at the MAC in Belfast, Dara curated major exhibition projects such as ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: This Place’, alongside working on new commissions by artists such as Mariah Garnett, Barbara Knezevic, Kara Walker and Johanna Billing. 

He cites the artists, poets and writers above not to align himself with a particular curatorial position, but to name and honour some of the many co-conspirators who have nurtured his thinking and growth over the past decade.

A former student of the University of Edinburgh, Dara is also an alumnus of the ICI Curatorial Intensive programme. He was a director of Catalyst Arts from 2010–2012, a co-founder of the Household curatorial collective, and is a current trustee of Outburst Queer Arts Festival. He has been part of recent juries and selection committees for Glasgow International, LUX, and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

He teaches and lectures occasionally at institutions such as the University of Dundee and Glasgow School of Art, and has contributed recently to public programmes at Frieze London and the Contemporary Art Society. 

“I’m honoured to have been invited to curate the 19th edition of TULCA this autumn, particularly after watching Sarah Browne’s remarkable 2020 programme unfold from afar. It feels exciting and daunting in equal measure to be thinking towards a project like this in the moment we’re still caught in, when even the very near future seems more ungraspable than ever. 

I’m hoping to move slowly and carefully in the coming months to understand how best we might gather together towards the end of this year, and I’m particularly looking forward to hearing from artists in Ireland through the open call aspect of the festival, at a time when I’m not yet able to physically spend time in the country listening and learning in person.” Eoin Dara, TULCA 2021 Curator

“We are delighted to welcome Eoin Dara as curator of TULCA 2021. We look forward to building upon the resilient model developed in 2020 and working with Eoin to develop the programme for the 19th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.” David Finn, TULCA Producer

TULCA 2021: there’s nothing here but flesh and bone, there’s nothing more will run in November 2021 across multiple venues in Galway city and county.

TULCA is now accepting submissions for its Open Call. For information on how to apply, and to read a short curatorial statement from Dara, please click here.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
there’s nothing here but flesh and bone,
there’s nothing more
Curated by Eoin Dara
November 2021
Galway, Ireland

www.tulca.ie

TULCA shares the public outcomes of its 2020 festival programme

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Law is a White Dog (extended)
6 November - 18 December 2020
Curated by Sarah Browne

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2020 programme, The Law is a White Dog, including a podcast series, a book, exhibition, and a series of online talks and workshops. Contributors (artists, poets, lawyers, activists): AM Baggs, Éric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre), Maud Craigie, Máiréad Enright, Forerunner, Michael Holly, Justice for Magdalenes Research, Vukašin Nedeljković, Felispeaks, Charlotte Prodger, Bob Quinn, Sibyl Montague, Kevin Mooney, Julie Morrissy, Rory Pilgrim, Rajinder Singh, Soft Fiction Projects, Anne Tallentire, Saoirse Wall, Eimear Walshe, Suzanne Walsh, Gernot Wieland.

The Law is a White Dog borrowed its title from a book by Colin Dayan, which explores how legal rituals have the power to "make and unmake" persons. Historically, certain categories of person have been invented mainly in order to confine or punish them—the slave, the criminal, the homosexual, the insane—and these categories are further entangled and haunted by classifications based on race. Conceived in the legal imagination in this way, these different classes of person are allocated unequal capacities for reason and for pain, and are distributed different rights to property—whether rights to own one’s own body, or to acquire land. In a west of Ireland context, Dayan’s text offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the landscape, and to consider the interaction of capital with the institutions of Church and State.

As a curatorial proposal, The Law is a White Dog invited artists to refute categorisation, and to invent new languages and forms of expression in order to develop affinities with others. Responses involve forms of memoir, analysis, mourning, fable, film and song. Again and again, an obstacle occurs: the problem of how sensing bodies, as sources of knowledge, conflict with legal and regulatory logics. How do we know the law, and how does the law know us?

Podcasts

Unfolding throughout a historical global pandemic, where movement is restricted, The Law is a White Dog podcast series transports artworks into remote formats that maintain a sense of contact, intimacy and intensity:

• Episode 1: AM Baggs, In My Language

• Episode 2: Saoirse Wall, The Leaf and the Saviour Guy

• Episode 3: Suzanne Walsh, Lazarus Lingua

• Episode 4: Rory Pilgrim, The Undercurrent

• Episode 5: Gernot Wieland, Depression in Animals

• Episode 6: Eimear Walshe, Fuck Box

• Episode 7: Forerunner, the Future and stuff

• Episode 8: Maud Craigie, Indications of Guilt, pt. 1

• Episode 9: Julie Morrissy, Positions Gendered Male in Bunreacht na hÉireann / 1937

• Constitution of Ireland

• Episode 10: Vukašin Nedeljković, Asylum Archive

The podcast series places artists and artworks in dialogue with legal researchers and practitioners, such as from the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, both located at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Podcasts are available on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and Google. Episode transcripts available here.
The podcast series was produced by Orla Higgins and Sarah Browne.

Book

The Law is a White Dog book features an eclectic range of commissioned writing, original research and artwork. This includes poetry by Julie Morrissy, photography by Rajinder Singh, an illustrated essay by Eimear Walshe, and extracts from two intergenerational feminist projects by Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre) and Soft Fiction Projects. Máiréad Enright’s essay explores how the imagery of dogs roams across testimonies of institutional abuse in Ireland, and how survivors insist on forms of repair, accountability and truth-telling that might one day redeem both the law and the state that underwrites it.

The Law is a White Dog book remains available to order here.

Exhibition

A rescheduled exhibition ran from 9 - 18 December 2020 at An Post Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Engage Art Studios.

Selected photographic documentation by Ros Kavanagh is available here.
Three offsite artworks are documented here.
Video documentation of the entire programme, edited by Jonathan Sammon, can be watched here.

Work by Forerunner at An Post Gallery. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here

Works by Sibyl Montague and Kevin Mooney at Galway Arts Centre. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here

Work by Rory Pilgrim at 126 Artist-Run Gallery. Photo: Soft Day Media. View here

Work by Saoirse Wall at Engage Art Studios. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here

Artist Talks

Presented in partnership with GMIT Centre for Creative Arts and Media.

• Talk 1: Vukašin Nedeljković

• Talk 2: Sibyl Montague

• Talk 3: Saoirse Wall

Edited, captioned versions of these talks are available here.

Screening Programme

A screening programme at PÁLÁS Cinema will follow later in 2021.

Maud Craigie, Indications of Guilt. pt 1. 2020. Still from 4k video, 50 minutes

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The Law is a White Dog
Curated by Sarah Browne
6 November - 18 December 2020
Galway, Ireland

TULCA 2020 produced by David Finn

www.tulca.ie

UnSelfing 2021 Programme: Upcoming Projects

UnSelfing 2021 Programme: Upcoming Projects

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 
Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture
1 February 2020 - 30 April 2021
 

UnSelfing is a programme of visual art exhibitions, performances and encounters commissioned by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture.
Launched in February 2020 with the inaugural exhibition Deep States curated by Helen Carey presenting the work of artists; Dominic Thorpe (Ireland), Veronika Merklein (Austria and Germany), Andrej Mircev (Croatia), Nikoleta Markovic (born in Yugoslavia), Eunseo Yi (Republic of Korea).

Followed by two exhibitons; Threads by artist Austin Ivers curated by Sarah Searson and online exhibition and publication Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past curated by Gregory McCartney with artists; Stuart Cairns, Nadege Meriau, Daniel Seiffert, Tara Wray. Writers: Prof. Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Prof. Peter Knight, Dr Dara Downey, Anna Walsh, Gail McConnell and Sharon Young.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the remainder of the programme has been further reimagined and repositioned with projects taking place in April 2021.

A VISIT, A CEREMONY, A GIFT

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present:

A VISIT, A CEREMONY, A GIFT
Curated by Kate Strain
New film commission - premiere ONLINE via tulca.ie
16 April 2021, 9pm

A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is a new film commission curated by Kate Strain as part of the TULCA UnSelfing programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture, supported by The French Embassy in Ireland.

The film focuses on the research and practice of Austrian artist and philosopher Elisabeth Von Samsonow who has been inspired by the role of the White Goddess, and the Deep Ecology movement. Elisabeth von Samsonow uses an alphabet based on trees native to both Ireland and Austria, to create poetry and uncover its’ origin in the woods.

Participating artists: Marielle MacLeman, Ruth Le Gear, Ruby Wallis and Michaële Cutaya, Michelle Doyle, Liliane Puthod, Naïmé Perrette and Sara Sadik; will contribute new work through film, sculpture, music, sound and design investigating the access to nature through poetic language.

A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift connects distant places by investigating the enduring challenge that all people face. That is, trying to understand the mysterious languages of nature in trees, the open air and the earth.

ARTISTS
Elisabeth Von Samsonow (AUT)
Marielle MacLeman (IRL)
Ruth Le Gear (IRL)
Ruby Wallis and Michaële Cutaya (IRL)
Michelle Doyle (IRL)
Liliane Puthod (FRA)
Naïmé Perrette (FRA)
Sara Sadik (FRA)

The film will premier online for a limited duration via tulca.ie from 9pm GMT on Friday 16 April 2021 as part of a weekend of events to celebrate the culmination of TULCA’s UnSelfing programme. To register for the special online screening please visit: www.tulca.ie

Image: Elisabeth Von Samsonow, A Visit, A Ceremony A Gift - production still, 2021

WEATHER GODS

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present:

WEATHER GODS - Reprised
Isadora Epstein with Davy Kehoe, Daniel McAuley, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and Stéfane Béna Hanly
New performance commission
Launch: 17 April 2021

Having been cancelled in 2020 due to a red weather warning, TULCA is pleased to announce the reprise and re-imagining of this specially commissioned work by Isadora Epstein. Weather Gods was originally conceived as a live performance taking place in front of an audience on the Galway to Gort train. This new work is inspired by Iris Murdoch’s concept of unselfing, and its demand that we journey away from ourselves to be attentive to the world, to be curious about the people, places and ideas that surround us. It has now been reimagined as a radio play which will be available to download from the TULCA website from Saturday 17 April. 

Weather Gods is written and performed by Isadora Epstein, who, accompanied by musicians Davy Kehoe, Daniel McAuley and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and artist Stéfane Béna Hanly created a performance combining a mythological weather report with a train trip out West on the Great Western Railway. With live musical performance from the titular mythical weather gods, and featuring original scores and some familiar favourites, this work is placed somewhere between an art performance and a memorable piece of theatre.

ARTISTS:
Isadora Epstein
Davy Kehoe
Daniel McAuley
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh
Stéfane Béna Hanly

Weather Gods will be live recorded remotely and presented as a podcast, which will be available on 17 April when it will be premiered online as part of a weekend celebrating the culmination of the UnSelfing programme.

Image: Isadora Epstein, 2019

TULCA: XVIII

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present:

TULCA: XVIII
Specially commissioned publication
Launch: 18 April 2021

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts first presented a programme in Galway city in November 2002. The intervening 18 years have seen the festival become embedded into cultural life of the city by presenting a new programme every year that is formed and informed by life in the west. TULCA is unique in Ireland as the only platform reserved solely for Irish curators.

TULCA has supported hundreds of artist’s diverse practices and introduced thousands of schoolchildren and adult learners to contemporary art for the first time. Over the years, TULCA has transformed many unwanted or neglected sites into spaces to exhibit and experience high quality, ambitious visual art. 

TULCA: XVIII marks TULCA’s 18th anniversary through a series of new writing commissions, photo-essays and reflections and documents the TULCA UnSelfing Programme for Galway 2020. Featuring contributions from: Áine Philips, Michael Dempsey, George Bolster, Gregory McCartney, Mary Cremin, Matt Packer, Kerry Guinan, Helen Carey, Sarah Browne, Aideen Barry, Louise Manifold, Linda Shevlin, Michelle Browne, Josephine Vahey, Lucy Elvis, Gavin Murphy, James Harrold, Marylin Gaughan-Reddin, Austin Ivers, Susanna Galbraith, Dominic Thorpe, Isadora Epstein, Elisabeth Samsonov, Cliodhna Shaffrey, Sarah Searson and Valerie Connor.

Edited by Michaële Cutaya and designed by Pure Designs, the publication launches on Sunday 18th April and is available for pre-order from the TULCA website on that date. As part of a weekend celebrating the culmination of the UnSelfing programme, TULCA presents an online launch, featuring a panel discussion by TULCA alumni.

To register for this event, visit www.tulca.ie

Image: installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Seachange 2015 at Nun's Island Theatre, with Clare Langan’s Floating World, Maria McKinney’s Abyssals and Ruth Lyons’s Afterings. Image Jonathan Sammon

CREATE DANGEROUSLY

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present:

CREATE DANGEROUSLY
February - April 2021
Galway City and County

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present Create Dangerously an education programme that explores creative thinking and creative making to empower teachers and learners.

Create Dangerously is a new arts education programme designed for school groups and teachers. TULCA has commissioned three Irish artists to create new artworks for the project. Editions of these works will become permanent parts of the Create Dangerously programme which opens to schools nationally after its pilot in Spring 2021.

ARTISTS:
Donal McConnon
Emma Zukovic
Maeve Clancy

SCHOOLS:
Clontuskert NS, Ballinasloe
Cregmore NS, Cregmore
Coláiste Iognáid (The ‘Jes’), Galway

This project is facilitated by TULCA education partner CURO, who focus building thinking skills through philosophical dialogues and creative activities.

Learners will explore the following questions:

• Why do we create?

• What do we create?

• For whom do we create?

Participating teachers will learn to facilitate philosophical conversations in their classrooms, and learners will develop their skills confidence in art making and creative thinking. At the end of the project classes will draft their own ‘creativity manifesto’ which they will present to their partner artist and local community along with an exhibition of some of the artworks produced in response to the artwork they received.

This project presents a unique opportunity for students not only explore new ways of being creative, but to carefully think through why creativity is important and what being creative means to them. It creates a lasting legacy for teachers through active mentoring in the principles that inform the project.

Register your interest: createdangerously@tulca.ie

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For more information and updates see: www.tulca.ie

THREADS | New Writing Commissions

THREADS | New Writing Commissions

Curated by Sarah Searson
The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon
14 November 2020 - 6 February 2021
 

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture in association with The Dock presents four new writing commissions for Austins Ivers exhibition THREADS. Four Irish writers, Patrick McCabe, Joanne Laws, Cathy Sweeney and Ian Maleney. 
 
Speaking about the essays, The Dock’s Director Sarah Searson said “Austin Ivers work is highly evocative; it points the viewer towards the social and cultural forces at play in 80’ and 90’s. The opportunity to commission new writing from four contemporary Irish writers enriches the exhibitions ideas and perspectives, bringing you on a literary journey into the themes of Ivers work and this era.” 
 
For this exhibition, Austin Ivers considers some technological developments of the post-war period and their subsequent application in state command and control systems during the Cold War. Utilising video, sculpture and photography, this is a consideration of the relationship between the aesthetic of power and life as experienced under the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation.

Off the Shoulder of Skibbereen by Patrick McCabe uses science fiction, in particular the film Bladerunner, to consider a variety of references, from Irish society and pop culture of the early 1970s. Looping in Time by Cathy Sweeney looks back at the cultural references around the cold war in the 1980s, specifically the music video for Elton John’s Nikita. Joanne Law’s essay, The Passing of a Shadow examines the posthumous work of three artists, Francesca Woodman, Patrick Jolley and Felix Gonzales Torres. Finally, Ian Maleney writes in Patterns in the Sand about the Manhattan Project, drawing parallels between that time in history and the current interesting times we live in. 

Josephine Vahey, Co-chair of TULCA said “We are really pleased to present these essays to the public in this extraordinary time we are living in, and at a time when lockdown impedes our access to cultural nourishment. We invite everyone, to download and enjoy this new writing by four significant Irish authors.“

All four essays are available to download on thedock.ie and tulca.ie. The exhibition THREADS is scheduled to run at the Dock until 6th February and will reopen pending Government guidelines. 

New Writing Commissions

Patrick McCabe

Joanne Laws

Cathy Sweeney

Ian Maleney

Off The Shoulder of Skibbereen by Patrick McCabe

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. Shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award for The Butcher Boy, his other novels include The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto, Winterwood and Heartland. He has also written for radio, stage and screen and is a member of Aosdána.

The Passing of a Shadow by Joanne Laws

Joanne Laws is an arts writer, editor and researcher based in County Roscommon. She is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, where she commissions new writing for an Irish arts readership. Joanne is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and a regular contributor to international art publications, including Art Monthly and Frieze. She is Assistant Editor of Protest! - the monograph of Derek Jarman - published in April 2020 by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery and Thames & Hudson. She was Arts Writer in Residence at The Dock from 2017 to 2020

Looping in Time by Cathy Sweeney 

Cathy Sweeney is a writer living in Dublin. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Egress, Winter Papers, Banshee, The Tangerine and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut short story collection Modern Times will be published by The Stinging Fly and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2020. She is at work on a novel

Patterns in The Sand by Ian Maleney

Ian Maleney is a writer based in Dublin. Born and raised in Co. Offaly. His first book, a collection of essays entitled Minor Monuments, was published in 2019 by Tramp Press and shortlisted for the Michel Deon Prize and Butler Literary Award. He received the Arts Council Next Generation Bursary for Literature in 2019. He is the online editor of the Stinging Fly. His work has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, and the New Statesman Winter Papers, gorse, and the Dublin Review. He is the founder of Fallow Media, an interdisciplinary publication for music, photography, and long-form writing.