TULCA Volunteer Programme | 1-17 November 2024

TULCA Volunteer Programme | 1-17 November 2024

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is now accepting applications for its 2024 Volunteer Programme.

TULCA is a multi-venue, artist-centred festival of contemporary art that works with Irish curators to present innovative exhibitions that provoke and energise audiences into the world of the visual arts. This years TULCA programme is curated by Michele Horrigan and is titled; The Salvage Agency. The festival will run from 1 - 17 November 2024 across multiple galleries in Galway city and county.

TULCA Volunteer Programme

Every year our volunteers form a core part of our team. Participating in the TULCA Volunteer Programme gives you first-hand working experience of the time,energy and ambition that goes into the production and running of a contemporary visual art festival. We seek to provide an enriching, educational, and uplifting time for all of our volunteers.

Tasks Include: 

• Invigilation of TULCA Festival art galleries

• Assisting with the delivery of programme events

• Supporting education tours and workshops

Benefits: Participating in TULCA Festival gives you hands-on experience of the time, energy, drive and ambition that goes into the production and running of a contemporary visual art festival. TULCA Festival values those that volunteer with us as most of the TULCA team started out as volunteers. We seek to provide an enriching, educational, and uplifting time for all of our volunteers.

Gallery Assistant Duties: Art Gallery invigilation, ensuring the safety and security of artworks on display, providing a warm and welcoming environment for our visitors, point of contact for gallery visitors, ensure audience are adhering to latest HSE safety guidelines.

Live Event Duties: Event venue invigilation, assist production team with delivery of event, providing a warm and welcoming environment for our visitors, point of contact for event visitors, ensure audience are adhering to latest HSE safety guidelines.

Educational Duties: Represent TULCA, meet and greet, support/assist with art gallery tours, usher groups between venues, support/assist workshop facilitators, supervision support, ensure groups are adhering to latest HSE safety guidelines.

COVID-19 Safety Measures: The safety of our volunteers and audiences are our top priority. We plan to keep a safe environment by strictly adhering to HSE safety guidance as they pertain to venues and indoor gatherings.

Join our Volunteer Team!

Passionate about visual arts? Join the TULCA Volunteer Programme and become part of our vibrant team! As a volunteer you have the opportunity to go behind the scenes, gain hands-on experience in the fast-paced world of a contemporary visual art festival, and connect with artists and industry professionals. Whether you're looking to learn, grow, or just be inspired, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is the place for you! 

We ask volunteers to commit to at least 2 shifts over the festival run. If there is a particular area of interest you would like to work in, TULCA will do our best to accommodate!

We ask volunteers to commit to at least 2 shifts over the festival run. If there is a particular area of interest you would like to work in, TULCA will do our best to accommodate!

Join our Volunteer Team!
volunteer@tulca.ie
www.tulca.ie/volunteer

Full festival programme and a commissioned publication will be announced in early October. 

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Salvage Agency
Curated by Michele Horrigan
1-17 November 2024
Galway, Ireland

www.tulca.ie

Video: Soft Day Media

REVIEW: Rosa Abbott | Paper Visual Art

TULCA 2023: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, multiple venues, Galway, 3–19 November 2023

A mysterious artist hovers around the programme for honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise. J.J. Beegan created a number of artworks during his stay at Netherne, a psychiatric hospital in East Surrey, sometime between the 1920s and ’40s. Beguiling and intimate works on paper, the artist’s drawings mostly depict animals, and many are signed ‘J.J. BEEGAN / SCULPTURER [sic] / DUNLORST / BALLINASLOE’. We don’t know much about Beegan – how he perceived his art practice, why he ended up in the asylum, whether he ever made it out. The drawings may have been preparatory drawings for sculptures, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. We also can’t be sure about the nature of his connection with Ballinasloe, a Co. Galway town that in local dialect is synonymous with St Brigid’s Hospital, the mental health institution it was home to for 180 years (‘to go to Ballinasloe’, in local idiom, means to have a mental health crisis). Beegan may have been from the town – perhaps a member of the Beegan family of stonecutters that can be recorded as living on Dunlo Street – or he may have had a stay at St Brigid’s. Who can say? With Netherne’s archives now destroyed or sealed, Beegan’s surviving artworks are the only material evidence of his existence.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Beegan’s artworks, now part of London’s Wellcome Collection, are not on show (physically, at least) within honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, the 2023 edition of TULCA curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Inscribed on toilet paper with matchsticks, the drawings are just too fragile to travel. And yet they subtly permeate the exhibition programme: scanned drawings of strange animals slink onto festival branding, adorning programmes and window graphics; Beegan’s life and work are attentively discussed in the accompanying publication, taking on a symbolic and phantasmal role in the exhibition and posing questions about art-making, incarceration, archives, and (dis)ability. Who is afforded the voice to tell their own story, and who is recalled only in the medical and/or criminal reports of their custodians? Which artworks and archival materials warrant preservation and which are destroyed? Which artworks have cultural value and which are solely ‘therapeutic’, or simply ‘graffiti’, the daubings of the insane? Across six main venues, a publication and events programme, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise teases out these questions and more.

The core venue is the TULCA Gallery on St Augustine Street – a cavernous former dole office, stripped to its concrete shell – and the first work we encounter upon entry is by Irish artist Bridget O’Gorman, who lives with a permanent spinal injury known as Cauda Equina Syndrome. Slings, hoists, and other apparatus of disability are suspended from the ceiling by elegant rods, straps, and hooks. This array of assistive devices is cast in unreinforced Jesmonite, a fragile resinous material with a chalky-seeming texture. Pinched into tubes, their floating, delicate forms show wrinkles, sags, and strain where they bend. I cannot help but think of them as limb-like, bodily: one two-pronged form dangles from the ceiling like a pair of legs, while a lipstick-red arch becomes a comic frown, a line drawing in space. Inspecting the latter closely, I notice a bulbous growth on its surface. Presumably the result of a split casting bag, it resembles a wart or abscess. A glass bubble protrudes from underneath another form, and the limp shreds of glue-on mosaics are draped under and over various tubes and poles. Conjuring prosthetic masks or skin-like forms, they bring to my mind the figure of Bartholomew in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, his flayed skin drooping down from a cloud.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Bridget O’Gorman, Support | Work, 2023. Installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

O’Gorman is primarily a sculptor but hasn’t been able to produce work of this kind for several years due to the changing conditions of her disability. The creation of this work was supported by Ní Fheorais, who is also the artist’s producer, and by Arts and Disability Ireland, who funded access to a support worker. Accessibility, then, forms both the content and the process of the works, and Ní Fheorais’s programme at large. O’Gorman’s works are a celebration of support structures, making visible the contraptions she uses to operate on a daily basis, but also an expression of fragility. Each sculpture is precariously suspended; worm-like tubes that seem like they could easily snap, or crumble into powder. Theatrically spotlit during TULCA’s evening launch event, they cast strange shadows on the floor and walls, and carry the charged energy of animate objects, waiting to spring into life.

Also suspended from the ceiling are four textile works by German artist Philipp Gufler. From an ongoing series of fifty-two ‘quilts’ and counting, each of these works commemorates a queer figure – in this case, the late nineteenth-century judge and psychiatric memoirist Daniel Paul Schreber, Weimar-era sexologist Charlotte Wolff, 1980s artist Lorenza Böttner (a trans woman who had both arms amputated after climbing a pylon as a child), and the genderqueer star of Germany’s 2003 Pop Idol, Lana Kaiser. Rather than traditional portraiture, Gufler has invoked each of these figures through materiality, colour, form, texture, and patterning, telling their stories through visual and haptic means. Schreber’s Quilt, for instance, bears hallucinogenic patterns which undulate in and out of focus as they’re orbited, referring to the schizophrenic visions (including the strong feeling that he had transformed into a woman) recounted in his 1903 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, snippets of which trail snail-like around the fabric. Böttner’s Quilt is screen-printed three times with a modified photograph in which the artist appears playful and spectre-like, sheathed in gauzy fabric. Wolff’s features photographs of the subject from both a police document and by her friend Man Ray, presented in combination with a hand motif, a reference to her vocation as a palm reader while in exile from Nazi Germany. Finally, Gufler’s Quilt for Lana Kaiser has a clear personal resonance, collaged with photographs from the artist’s personal archive, many of which document occasions where he met the singer.

Philipp Gufler, Quilt #31 (Lorenza Böttner), 2021 Silk screen print on fabric, zipper, 95 x 180 cm. Courtesy BQ, Berlin, and the artist. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooji, Amsterdam

Offering creative and unconventional portrayals of their subjects, Gufler’s Quilts materialise the artist’s research into queer histories and figures: the artist is also a member of a queer archive in Munich, a pursuit that has clearly infused his art practice with fascinating content and visual sources. Each bearing roughly the same dimensions, the Quilts act like index cards of queer history, the four biographies chosen for TULCA spanning a period of almost 150 years. Individually, each story elucidated is fascinating. Collectively, they demonstrate the importance of remembering, of storytelling, and of looking to forebears and tracing a lineage. They point to the crucial power of the archive as a tool for bearing witness and preserving these stories. In an era in which right-wing media typifies transness as a contemporary (and invented) phenomenon, relaying the stories of figures like Schreber, Wolff, Böttner, and Kaiser give vital evidence of the existence (and struggles) of queer and gender non-conforming people throughout history. In an artist’s talk as part of the TULCA programme, Gufler pointed out that often, the only archival evidence of queer experience in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries comes in the form of medical or criminal reports (including the mugshot that appears on Wolff’s Quilt). The queer subject is rarely given a voice or permitted to tell their own story. Creating an archive through art-making that is brimming with wit, verve, and aesthetic power, then, offers a compelling counterpart to often punitive institutional reports.

Though titled Quilts, the dimensions of these works are somewhat smaller than the term might imply, and their materials are not very quilt-like (gauze and PVC both feature in this small selection). Use of this terminology is suggestive, however, of the long tradition of queer storytelling through quilt-making, most notably by various international strands of the NAMES Project, which memorialised the victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis. (Initiated in the US, the project spread to many locales including Ireland. The Irish NAMES Project’s quilts were also, coincidentally, exhibited last year at VISUAL Carlow.) Jamila Prowse, whose Crip Quilt (2023) is situated near that of Gufler in the TULCA Gallery, also continues this powerful legacy of storytelling through quilt-making. Prowse has embroidered colourful patches onto the surface of a weighted blanket, each one offering stitched musings or diaristic snapshots of day-to-day life, some from the artist’s own recollections, others drawn from oral histories by artists with disabilities. On a nearby wall, a series of monoprints by Paul Roy give darkly humorous sketches of his experience living with long-term illness (‘Drugs but not the fun kind’, reads one, ‘I can’t dance but I want to’ another). Shown side-by-side, Prowse’s and Roys’s offerings give two tonally divergent but equally frank first-person accounts of the life of an artist living with disabilities, enthused with emotion, humour, pathos, and prosaic detail.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Paul Roy, (from left) I Can’t Dance, Hospital Food and Frozen, 2023. Monoprints, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

The specific context of incarceration in Ireland is explored further in Galway Arts Centre. As Ní Fheorais’s essay in the publication shares, mid-twentieth-century Ireland had the world’s highest rates of incarceration per capita (astonishingly, more than Stalin’s USSR). This incarcerated population was distributed between prisons, Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, country homes, industrial schools, and orphanages, but the biggest proportion by far (around 0.7% of the population) was in mental health institutions such as St Brigid’s, Ballinasloe. This complex history is tackled head-on in bless every foot that walks its portals through (2023), Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha’s installation of paintings and audio works in response to the history and site of St Brigid’s. Ní Aodhna’s paintings are subdued and simplified, almost monochromatic renderings of the site and its vernacular architecture: stone-trimmed windows, heavy grey facades that shroud the interior in mystery, a solemn bell tower. A few jugs and hanging sheets can be glimpsed through the windows but not much else. Ushered into eclectic assemblages with wooden frames, the paintings are presented alongside needlework, small watercolours on paper, a painted shutter. In the accompanying audio, a gentle but rapid voice describes the material facts of the site, the specificity of its architectural detailing, finding a hushed poetry in attention to detail, and ruminating on the thorny relationship between colonialism and the Irish Free State’s policy of mass incarceration.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, the usual pieces of cloth (from bless every foot that walks its portals through), 2023. Audio and painting installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Also at Galway Art Centre, P. Staff’s seventeen-minute film Weed Killer (2017) takes a tenacious look at the politics of sickness, the body and biomedical technologies such as radiation treatments. Actress Debra Soshoux delivers a frank and impassioned monologue (adapted from Catherine Lord’s 2004 memoir The Summer of Her Baldness) detailing the abject horror of undergoing chemotherapy. Despite the bleakness of this subject matter, Soshoux’s chilling performance, coupled with striking thermogenic imagery, makes the film compelling viewing. Its harrowing account of bodily decay, focusing on the sensorial and animalistic – ‘No feasting and no fucking’ – is cut through with an emotional and impassioned lip sync performance by Jamie Crewe. Pulsating with desire and lived experience, Crewe’s blistering performance offers much-needed respite from Soshoux’s harrowing monologue, ruminating instead on the malady of lovesickness. Staff’s film demonstrates the fine line between sickness, cure, chemical treatment, and intoxication, likening chemo to ingesting weed killer. By casting trans women in the performing roles, the artist creates links between different kinds of medicalised bodies and highlights the politicised nature of healthcare.

With support from Arts and Disability Ireland, a huge effort has been made to make the TULCA programme as accessible as possible, from providing closed captioning and audio descriptions of video works to hanging wall-based works at a lower level to provide a more inclusive viewing experience. There is also plenty of seating available and moments to rest built into the architecture of the display, which feels generous to all kinds of bodies. The exhibition space at Outset, across the road from the TULCA Gallery on St Augustine Street, has even been transformed by queer collective Bog Cottage into a pleasant space to sit and reflect, socialise, and slow down. Styled as a ‘faerie fort’, a sense of play and mischief as well as relaxation is implied. Cheeky motifs of feasts and animals adorn colourful curtains made from recycled textiles, sourced in charity shops in Berlin. Fragments of poetry by Ainslie Templeton spill across the patchworked fabrics, while a mellifluous sound piece by Renn Miano impels one to linger a little longer, lolling on the custom-made seating and interacting with fellow visitors.

As well as inclusion, Bog Cottage’s work points to the importance of socialities in Ní Fheorais’s curatorial approach. This is the first TULCA since 2019 to be permitted an afterparty, so it feels pertinent that a space has been created to facilitate connection, intimacy, friendship, and community-building. These are themes that resonate throughout the programme, also coming into focus in Sean Burns’s Dorothy Towers (2022), an enchanting thirty-one-minute film about two residential tower blocks on the outskirts of Birmingham. The postwar development’s proximity to several gay nightclubs made it an unexpected haven for LGBTQ folk, particularly during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Shot on 16 mm, Burn’s film transforms the towers into shining beacons, windows shimmering in the light like synthetic gemstones. The artist celebrates the modernist architecture of the site, with its colourful tiled underpasses, overpasses, subways, and flyovers. Interviews with residents, including legendary club kid Twiggy and drag queen Seema Butt, reflect on the difficulties faced by queer residents in the ’80s and ’90s, and the importance of community bonds in the face of such hardship.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023. Video, duration 14 minutes 34 seconds. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Ní Fheorais is a native Galwegian who has based herself, in recent years, in Dublin, London, and Berlin. She brings to TULCA a deep awareness and sensitive consideration of the context of the West of Ireland. Aware of the region’s complex histories in relation to mental illness, state care, and incarceration, Ní Fheorais is able to situate this within an international and intersectional context. Her programme and its accompanying publication draw parallels between the struggles faced by disabled communities and other groups that have been medicalised and ‘othered’ by a paternalistic state – most prominently LGBTQ+ and, in particular, trans people. Writing, film, sound, storytelling, and experiential works all have a strong presence in the programme, bridging the gap between archival research and more immersive, haptic, and sensory experiences. This is a valuable way to shine a light on stories that have been previously confined to archives, such as the one in which Beegan’s artworks were found.

The title of this TULCA, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, comes from an Irish folk cure for what would have once been referred to as ‘madness’. No bold claims linking the ‘curatorial’ and the ‘curative’ are made here, but the programme does offer a generous, compassionate, and tender reflection on its sometimes challenging subject matter of sickness and incarceration, offering moments of humour, theatricality, and even a soupçon of glamour to help the medicine go down.

Rosa Abbott is a writer and curator based in London.

TULCA 2024: Open Call

TULCA 2024: Open Call

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2024 Open Call curated by Michele Horrigan; The Salvage Agency.

Curatorial brief:

The 22nd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts will embed itself in multiple venues and locations throughout Galway City and County in November 2024, accompanied by an extensive public programme and publication.

Entitled The Salvage Agency, curator Michele Horrigan welcomes artistic proposals and artwork submissions that consider the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental study, and those that examine the underlying attitudes that have led to today’s critical and urgent impasse.

Galway, on the edge of the northeast Atlantic, is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake, and why? Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent. These are paths taken by our collective society in the shaping of today’s world and a contemporary Europe. Can art create an undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, haphazard formality, and change to offer new perspectives, provocations and empathy? From the wreckage, can art nourish a new reality?

TULCA is curated through direct invitation and an Open Call process. The final selection of artworks will be based on thematic connection, artistic quality, and feasibility. Selections are made by the curator in consultation with the TULCA producer.

Open Call Process & Guidelines can be found here.

Deadline: 28 March 2024, 5pm

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Image: Glass model of a blue sea dragon by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, circa 1880. Courtesy of the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, University of Galway.

Announcement: Michele Horrigan to curate TULCA 2024

Announcement: Michele Horrigan to curate TULCA 2024

TULCA is pleased to announce Michele Horrigan as the curator of the 22nd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in 2024.

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.

“I have been a firm admirer of TULCA for many years and have enjoyed watching it grow and encompass the city and county and take its place in the local, national and international art scene. I look forward to working with artists, places and communities that shape its unique vision as the west of Ireland’s most renowned visual arts festival. It is a privilege to be able to follow in the footsteps of last year’s curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and build on the legacy of accessibility that she has put in place.”

Michele Horrigan, TULCA 2024 Curator

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TULCA 2024: The Salvage Agency will run in November 2024 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 Michele Horrigan, please click here.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Salvage Agency
Curated by Michele Horrigan
1-17 November 2024
Galway, Ireland

www.tulca.ie

Image: Michele Horrigan photograph by Deirdre Power

REVIEW: Theresa Zwerschke | Arts Of The Working Class

On The Medical Condition Of A Landscape | Theresa Zwerschke

Notes on honey, milk & salt in a seashell before sunrise - the 21st edition of TULCA Festival in Galway.

What else is a landscape than a “backdrop for the experience of seeing”? [1]

I’m sitting on the train to Galway, to attend the opening of the 21st edition of TULCA, an art festival in the West of  Ireland. As my gaze slides over green fields divided by neatly stacked stone walls, some are occasionally inhabited by herds of sheep, confirming my presumptuous, romanticized idea of pastoral Ireland. I think of Lucy Lippard's definition of landscape as an activity, “a way of seeing the world and imagining our relationship to nature.” [2] Landscape as an actively produced image, emerging from an external perspective that gets mediated through experiences, knowledge, ideologies, and the historical narrative written into it. 

The exhibition honey, milk & salt in a seashell before sunrise addresses a landscape of  medical incarceration. One that is deeply embedded in Ireland’s history of mental health institutions and inseparable from its colonial past. Tracing back to the 1830s, a time when Ireland was ruled by England, the institutions hold evidence of the aftermath of this period of domination and the implications it left on the medical complex. Consequences of the British occupation, such as oppression, poverty, or migration of family members played a role in the incarceration of many in those hospitals. The medical condition of the Irish landscape forms the backdrop for our experience of seeing. Questions around access, health, home, and belonging are posed and contested in the context of the festival. Spread over various locations in and around Galway, a harbor town of 83.500 in the West of the country, TULCA presented a festival including exhibitions, screenings, talks, readings, and a mediation program in November 2023. 

“In the 1950s, Ireland imprisoned more of its population than any other state at the time, the  largest cohort of which were living in mental health institutions,“ [3] writes the curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais in the accompanying publication. Committed for various reasons and labeled “mentally ill” or “socially dysfunctional”, inmates of these hospitals, which were located in many Irish towns were segregated from the local economy in sites that were, first and foremost, centers of control. 

The history of medical incarceration inscribes itself into the landscape of West Ireland, with mental hospitals, built in an “X” shape with a central watchtower, as is the case of the St. Bridgit Hospital in Ballinasloe in Galway. In its resemblance to prison architecture, the building presents itself as an almost perfect example of Michel Foucault’s panopticon: the surveilling architecture of the disciplinary society, which inevitably prompts understanding of the history of mental health institutions as being interconnected with the prison industrial complex. 

The Black Panther Party continuously addressed this connection in the US American context in the 1960s and 1970s, challenging the medical and legal abuse in both structures, but also the “racialized norms of able-mindedness, which constructed appropriate behavior, mental states, emotions, and reactions based on white male middle-class norms,” [4] as Sami Schalk writes in TULCA’s publication. In light of the Panthers’ abolitionist activism, it seems crucial to understand the structural workings of power in the history of medical incarceration through a confrontation with its intersectional layers of gender, class, and race.

fig. 1

These controlling and regulating functions of mental health institutions are explored in Aisling-Oi Ní Aodha’s work bless every foot that walks its portal through (2023), which consists of collages and an accompanying audio essay. Depicting architectural drawings of St. Brigid's Hospital, reminiscent of classic landscape paintings, the collages break through their supporting structures; these include little wooden bricks, strings, and embroideries, which visiblize the structure of the work itself, as well as the constructed-ness of the system that produced St. Bridgit’s architecture. In contrast to the oral cultural tradition, painting was a medium imposed by the British, says the artist. Visuality, the sense that is connected most with measuring, categorizing, and control is imposed by the colonizer. Appropriating and disrupting a traditional way of representation, for Ní Aodha, is also a way of interfering with the colonizer's tools. 

Repurposing tools of display and presentation is not only seen in multiple works within the show but also in TULCA’s exhibition design. Access tools, which are often regarded as merely functional and in opposition to aesthetic, curatorial, and artistic decisions, seem to merge effortlessly into the exhibition architecture and contest ableist display standards. Frames are hung 110 cm from the ground, which orients to the viewing height of someone sitting in a wheelchair, creating a new norm of seeing in the show. Audio descriptions of video works become part of the formal language of the films. In Holly Marie Parnell’s Cabbage (2023), made in collaboration with her brother David, whose communication device - involving an eye movement tracing technology - gives the film its structure. By following David and their mother preparing for relocation back to Ireland (which they had to leave due to changes in disability services), the work documents the family’s relationship, and beautifully speaks of the wholeness of a human life beyond medical categorizations and care schedules. In the film, as their mother goes through boxes of old medical records detailing the clinical violence of fitting the essence of a human being into scales, the narrating audio carries the viewer into David’s reality. 

fig. 2

TULCA’s narratives do not remain in an observing position, but instead approach the medical landscape through lived experience. “A lived-in  landscape becomes a place, which implies intimacy.” [5] This intimacy Lippard mentions is reflected in the booklet Access Intimacy [6] the exhibition offers, as well as in the language of those, who don’t enjoy the luxury of regarding the medical complex as a landscape; those for whom it conditions their experience of place. Bridget O’Gorman’s fragile installation, Support I Work (2023), was produced in close collaboration with her support worker. The hanging elements, made with medical support materials, both hold and fracture the sculptures, they document a translation of ideas into material, and thereby speak of the intimacy of their shared production.

fig. 3

In Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s work Ridgewood Sick Center (2023), featuring a billboard in the University Hospital of Galway, I find drawings of a mountain landscape built from the artist's bed sheets. Between references to “sick ancestors” the billboard invites visitors to an audio tour and a radio broadcast from the hospital, for which patients can request songs as wishes via their phones. Passing patients, nurses, and visitors while walking through the labyrinth of aisles not only puts the hospital itself on display but also makes everyone in the hospital a potential festival participant. 

fig. 4

Sean Burns’ film Dorothy Towers (2023) sensitively records the lived experience of inhabitants of two residential blocks in Birmingham that were built in 1971, and which has been a long-time home for the LGBTQ+ community. Long-shot architectural sequences are merged with interviews and archival documentation of a generation of inhabitants, celebrating their togetherness amidst the horrors of the AIDS pandemic. His film - partly shot on 60mm - is shown at the 126 Gallery, the only artist-run space in Galway. The nostalgia connects with my own melancholy thoughts about the role of economic changes in erasing self-organized art and subculture. Walking from one festival location to the other, through cute little streets with stylish cafés and local shops, I can’t help but be struck by the contrast of the homeliness, with which contemporary Galway presents itself and the hauntings of its past. 

Leila Hekmat’s film, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels (2023), which premiered in the Pàlàs  Cinema on the fourth of November, troubles the landscape/place distinction using a sassy theatrical performance centered on the “Hospital Hekmat”, in which “the patients and staff share a hysterical language.” [7] Inhabitants of the Hospital share their stories and desires while shifting in and out of roles and chants, mocking and teasing each other (and their audience) and throwing rigid parameters of care, sexuality, and well-being into question. Acknowledging the fluidity and social determination of the protagonist’s positions on a scale between binary poles of sickness and health ties Hekmat’s film to the core demands of The Mental Patients Union, founded by both patients and hospital workers within the antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s. In their connection to Marxist ideology, the MPU demanded a questioning of the economic forces at play in categorizations of “sickness” and “health”, placing mental illness “in the context of capitalism, to disentangle it from the biological and psychoanalytic theories that defined it,” [8] as Roisin Agnew elaborates.

fig. 5

The hegemonic indoctrination of collective remembrance is faced with the position of forgetting as a physical condition in Rouzbeh Shadpey’s video essay Forgetting is the Sun (2023). The film intercuts sequences of his grandmother’s hands repeating answers to a memory test imposed by an invisible narrator with archival footage of other video essays by Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmed Bouanani. Considering individual forgetting as both an act of resistance against biopolitical forces and a moment for achieving composure, the narrator states: “Through the lens of her camera, Fourough afforded those deep lepers the gift of the impossible - that is: the possibility to forget.“ [9] 

Philipp Gufler’s Memorial Quilts (2022) entangle the relationships between individual and collective memory by asking who are the ones that are remembered. The quilts offer a glimpse into Philipp Gufler's extensive, ongoing research into historically underrepresented queer personas upon which he works closely together with Forum Queeres Archiv, München. Depicting stylized, collaged portraits of queer German ancestors - the pop star Lana Kaiser, the painter Lorenza Böttger, the writer Daniel Paul Schreber, and the doctor, sexologist, and writer Charlotte Wolff - these quilts make those portrayed symbols for the celebration of queer life, and the work pushes against their systemic historical erasure. 

TULCA festival is dedicated to the Ballinasloe-born artist and sculptor J.J. Beagan, who according to Clair Wills’ extensive research, spent most of his life in institutions, such as the Netherne Mental Hospital in Surrey, England. While the decision to not display his work in the exhibition resulted more from logistical than conceptual reasons - his drawings, which are now part of the Adamson Collection, were too delicate to be transported, and instead are printed in the accompanying booklet - it does open relevant questions about the reproduction of medical violence through the displaying so-called “Outsider Art”. Is there a way of presenting a body of work, like J.J.Beagan’s without replicating the pathologizing gaze that perpetuates landscapes of medical incarceration within cultural spaces? To detach the artwork from the clinical language which justified their expropriation, collection, showcasing, and ensuing market value as Outsider Art, seems to provide a first step in changing the narratives attached to his art. Nonetheless, it also demands a shift in the way the works are displayed and perceived because as long as the ways we address, show, and review the art of disabled artists differ from those of able-bodied artists, contemporary art and culture will reproduce these stigmas. Dedicating the festival to J.J. Beagan instead of being about him, celebrating his work rather than pathologizing it, might offer a starting point to break with both the institutional erasure of subjecthood for artists who have been incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, and of the framing of such artists’ remembrance through art historical categories. TULCA for me is a reminder that a changing of the means of representation is needed to form the basis for rethinking the narratives inscribed into the medical landscape, and onto the bodies that inhabit it. According to Carolyn Lazard: „To commit to disability justice is to redefine the terms of subjecthood“. [10]     

I am not a dreg of society 

I am a loved and wanted person 

I am not a dependent person 

I am an interdependent person 

I am a skilled poet 

I am not a heterosexual woman 

I am a survivor in today’s times. [11] 

In her opening speech, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais called the festival “a love letter to Galway”. This feels bittersweet when regarding it through the angle TULCA offers. Admittedly, though, this text is a little bit of a love letter itself. One written with a deep appreciation for the dedication to accessibility and disability justice of my dear friend Iarlaith, and for the impressive group of artists she brought together in this festival. What Iarlaith and I share is an abiding interest in the particularities of history in locality, and a persuasion that “the local” can never only be a static, romanticized image. 

\\

Feb 09 2024

• Theresa Zwerschke

  (*1993, Germany) works as an artist, organizer and educator with a specific interest in cultural practices striving for systemic change. Her practice is situated at the intersection of critical pedagogy, artistic research, and socio-political knowledge production. She holds a BA in Art Pedagogy (University of Leipzig), a Diploma in Fine Arts (HGB Leipzig), and an MA from the Dutch Art Institute.
  
  

• FOOTNOTES

  [1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 2007) 8.  

  [2] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The  New Press, 2007) 8.  

  [3] Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, “From Ballinasloe to Netherene: The Drawings of J. J. Beangan,” in honey,  milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 5.
  
  [4] Sami Schalk, “Making Connections: Prisons and Mental Institutions,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 52.

  [5] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The  New Press, 2007) 7. 

  [6] Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link, (Leaving Evidence Blog: https://  leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/) last access:  28.11.23

  [7] Leila Hekmat, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels, Video, 86 min, 2023. 

  [8] Róisín Agnew, “The Mental Patients’ Union,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise  (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 39. 

  [9] Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting is the Sun, Video, 14:34 min, 2023.

  [10]  Carolyn Lazard, Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (Recess Publication: 2019) 9. 

  [11] Carol K. Kallend, “The Lone Dreg Seaks Back,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 17.

  IMAGE CREDITS

  Cover: Leila Hekmat, Symptom Recital - Luzie Naters, Filmstill, 2023 © Leila Hekmat.

  fig. 1: Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, bless every foot that walks its portal through, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.

  fig. 2: Bridget O’Gorman, Support I Work, 2023 & Philipp Gufler, Quilt #47: Charlotte Wolf, 2022 © Ros Kavanagh.

  fig. 3: Anna Roberts Gevalt, Ridgewood Sick Center, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.

  fig. 4: Sean Burns, Dorothy Towers, 2022 © Ros Kavanagh.

  fig. 5: Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is the Sun, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.