126 Artist-Run Gallery
15 St. Brigit’s Place, Galway
Tues-Sun, 12-6pm
Welcome to the 19th edition of the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Eoin Dara under the title: there’s nothing here but flesh & bone, there’s nothing more.
Developed over the last year under different levels of lockdown between Ireland, Scotland and several other countries where some of the contributors to the programme reside, the festival seeks to gently offer up some conversations around closeness and connection at a time when we are just beginning to gather again in proximity to one another.
This project is an aggregate of many unwieldy things including wet caresses, soft affection, immortal loves, necessary resistance, quiet rest, careful togetherness, boundless longing, abiding loss, honeyed scents, close correspondence, vocal exaltation, enduring solidarity, unexpected intimacies, ecstatic whispers and deep tenderness.
The title of the festival this year is lifted longingly from George Michael’s 2006 masterpiece Outside which advocates for an abundance of physical intimacy in public spaces.
Some of the artworks in the programme focus on different kinds of bodies — on flesh and bone — exploring how we inhabit them and connect with others (both living and dead, real and imagined); how we use them to resist or repair; how we care for them; how we find grace within them; and
how we love and nurture them. Other projects reach back in time to touch forgotten figures, retell overlooked histories, and excavate lost narratives in order to try and understand our contemporary condition a little better. There are further works that reach across the world during the pandemic to craft community and togetherness when travelling to be with one another was impossible, and works that chart epic journeys into the unknown together, thinking towards an uncertain future in a world humankind has transformed irrevocably.
The contributors to this year’s programme are artists, filmmakers, writers and poets:
Sophia Al-Maria, Claire Biddles, Renèe Helèna Browne, Miriam de Búrca, CAConrad, Mariah Garnett, Lauren Gault, Patrick Hough, Adrien Howard & K Patrick, Jasmine Johnson, Vishal Jugdeo & vqueeram, Stanya Kahn, Theodore Kerr, Sekai Machache, Mira Mattar, The Many Headed Hydra, Mícheál McCann, Tonya McMullan, Harun Morrison, Isobel Neviazsky, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Nisha Ramayya, Amanda Rice and Jay G Ying.
There are artworks to see in the form of films, drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations. There are artworks to listen to in the form of soundscapes. There is an artwork to smell in the form of a perfume. There is correspondence to read in the form of love letters. There are talks to attend. There is a workshop to taste. There is a performance to witness. Take things slowly. Use your body, listen to it, be gentle with it — there’s nothing more.
Vishal Jugdeo & vqueeram
Does Your House Have Lions (48min, HD video with sound, 2021) is an experimental documentary by the Delhi-based poet vqueeram and Los Angeles-based artist Vishal Jugdeo; the latest iteration
of their ongoing, transoceanic collaborative practice and friendship. Shot in Delhi, Bombay, and Goa, the film follows vqueeram and their housemates Dhiren Borisa, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Andre Ling — friends, lovers, and co-conspirators in activism and survival — against a four-year backdrop of turbulent political developments throughout India.
Within the film, households and friendships run coarse against the world from which they
seek shelter. Jugdeo’s camera trails vqueeram through a women’s sit-in protesting the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act. It bobs in the waters of a pool in which Dhiren splashes and mimes a Bollywood disco song with abandon. Throughout, movements and collectives reckon with a persistent and intractable loneliness. The film’s subjects do not strive to eliminate or evade this loneliness, but
to elevate it to a new register thereby making it livable. In one scene, the lens focuses on the hands of Natasha and Devangana peeling garlic for a house dinner; months later they would be arrested and jailed for political dissidence.
These moments in which the subjects carve spaces for themselves situate a collective experience that otherwise has no place; practicing mutual care where the state has failed to provide adequately, if at all. These mundane moments carry a political thrust, a subversive streak. Community here is a tool for survival in the face of the structural forces of caste, gender, and religion. Queer history resounds with this same communal urgency. Nightlife, fleeting incandescent moments of cruising communion too, are imbricated with survival in a world that does not hold them.
The work is also a document of Jugdeo’s own relationship with his collaborators, as the camera perhaps cannot help performing both a surveilling and a coveting gaze. Its guiding hand remains palpable as it lingers on the fringes of its subjects’ relationships. Sometimes the filmmaker risks voyeurism, lingering longer than consent can be sure, its threat to the relationships it documents hovering just outside of frame. As the artists write: “This video document is an archive of friendship—near, far, and displaced; interrupted by sex, politics, and abandonment. These scenes hold unlikely alliances and wayward relations in the middle of fear and hesitant futures. As love manifests its totalitarian tendencies and loss is capacious, we imagine a practice of freedom.”
Tonya McMullan
For TULCA this year artist Tonya McMullan has created a scent for the festival which appears close to the entrance of each exhibition venue across the city. This artwork, titled There’s something in the æther, takes the form of a limited edition perfume (and accompanying scented hand sanitiser) for you to sample, smell and wear if you wish.
It contains water from the Corrib river; honey from Galway bees; rainwater from Edinburgh; and a careful mix of hedione, geosmin, and isoamyl acetate. The particular chemical compounds in this scent have been selected to encourage our bodies to consider togetherness and intimacy in new ways after such a long period of isolation over the course of the pandemic. Beside the scent in each venue you will find a postcard with further details on this olfactory proposition.
Loving Correspondence
You will also find a letter written by Sophia Al-Maria on a wall of the gallery.
This text forms part of the publication for TULCA 2021, which comprises a small folio of intimate correspondence written over the past year from writers and poets in different parts of the world including Sophia Al-Maria, Claire Biddles, CAConrad, Theodore Kerr, Sekai Machache, Mira Mattar, Mícheál McCann, Nisha Ramayya and Jay G Ying.
These are letters of love and longing, written towards someone or something just out of reach.
Further letters are on display at the other festival venues, as well as in the windows of Galway City Library. You can purchase the full set of letters in person at the An Post gallery, or online at tulca.ie. 50% of the proceeds from all sales of the publication will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians. You can find out more about their work at map.org.uk