TULCA 2020 Curator: Sarah Browne
Curator Biography
Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with non-verbal, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, as well as forms of writing and publishing in diverse contexts.
Solo exhibitions of her work include Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Sick and Desiring at Bergen Assembly (2019); Strange Foreign Bodies at the Hunterian, Glasgow; TOUCH, nGbK, Berlin (both 2018); Liverpool Biennial (2016) and All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (2015).
In 2016 with Jesse Jones she made In the Shadow of the State, a transnational co-commission for Artangel and Create. This involved close collaboration with women in the fields of law, music, material culture and midwifery, to explore the ‘touch’ of the law, and proposed a hypersensitivity to contact with the state. The project unfolded as a series of four performances and legal drafting workshops in Derry, Liverpool, Dublin and London, staged in a domestic home, in a feminist bookshop / as an online broadcast, in a maternity hospital and in a former children’s court. In 2019, Browne presented Public feeling, a commission for South Dublin County Council that was presented in leisure centres in Clondalkin and Tallaght. Public feeling explored the health impacts of austerity on the individual and collective body and the politics of 'resilience', and was staged in the format of participatory fitness classes. The project suggests that ‘feelings’ – like joy, shame, anxiety and depression – are not only individual emotions, but also have a shared social dimension, and asks how we can re-imagine and re-work these collective experiences.
Browne’s work proposes that, even while bodies can hold onto trauma, there is the possibility of learning and practicing different ways to move. Since 2015 she has curated a number of discursive film screening programmes as part of her expanded research process. These include Gastromancy in partnership with aemi, and To train the whole body as a tongue, an Irish national touring programme, also with aemi. With Jenny Richards and Mint in Stockholm, she is currently developing FALLOUT / falling out: work injuries and resisting voices in the wake of second wave feminism.
Browne co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, their shared collaborative practice in 2009. She is associate artist in residence with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.
“I’m very excited by the opportunity and challenge of curating TULCA in 2020, and working closely with the festival team here. I look forward to discovering new practices, to supporting artists to make new work, and to sharing these artistic proposals with a public in the city and the region.” Sarah Browne
“Everyone at TULCA is delighted with the appointment of Sarah Browne as curator for TULCA 2020. It’s an important year for TULCA as we continue to develop as a team and organisation and look forward to working with Sarah on the 18th edition of the festival.” David Finn, TULCA Producer
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Law is a White Dog
Curated by Sarah Browne
6 November - 18 December 2020
Galway, Ireland