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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