TULCA 2025

Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo, was the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, presented across multiple venues in Galway city and beyond in November 2025.

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.

Contributors

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
Jess Zamora-Turner

Exhibitions | TULCA 2025

Public Programme | TULCA 2025

Education Programme | TULCA 2025

TULCA 2025: Strange lands still bear common ground will run from 7-23 November 2025 across multiple venues in Galway city.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

www.tulca.ie

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh