Image: Emily Speed, Flatland (digital film still), 2021. Commissioned by Tate Liverpool.
TULCA Gallery
Hynes Building, St Augustine St, Galway
Mon-Sun, 12-6pm
Welcome to the 20th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Clare Gormley under the title The World Was All Before Them.
Constructed in a moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty, this year's festival addresses the notion of futurity and asks what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.
Taking its title from the final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which recounts Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and into a new, unknown world, the festival seeks to take stock of our current moment and imagine what lies ahead, as we too find ourselves on a precipice: of ecological destruction, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, global pandemics, wars and technological over-saturation. Surely, there has never been such an urgent time to challenge the structures of our current existence, and to seek out visions of future worlds worth living in.
Disrupting traditional western, capitalistic, theistic tendencies to imagine the future as either utopian or dystopian, the festival will instead conjure a vision of the future as inextricably tied to the world we live in now: its inequities, as well as its possibilities. As such, it is less invested in depicting the world we might create, than in questioning how it is we might make our existing world a more liveable place.
The intention is to map a more expansive, non-binary, open-ended and fluid conception of what might lie ahead, through an engagement with a form of futurity rooted in a politics of livability, not escapism or mastery.
By-passing and critiquing the notion that technology alone might save us, this edition of TULCA seeks out practices which engage, among other things; civics, alliances, poetics, politics, bodies, dance, movement, language, decoloniality, sociality, connectivity, collectively and the quotidian acts of everyday existence as among the tools of future world-making.
Becca Albee
Berte & Harmey
Emily Speed
Esmeralda Conde Ruiz
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Michael Hanna
Quentin Lacombe
Becca Albee
Becca Albee is a US based visual artist who works in photography, often in combination with video, sound, sculpture, scent and/or printed matter. Her projects bear witness to a constellation of histories: natural histories, art histories, and subcultural histories, many underrecognized or forgotten.
Her process is informed by her germinal years participating in a feminist queer punk music community in the Pacific Northwest US in the 1990s. This experience strengthened a lifelong commitment to community-building, collaboration and interconnectedness, which carries into her visual art work today.
Her work for TULCA grapples with survival, grief, climate, blood, marine ecosystems and interspecies dependence in its exploration of one of world’s most ancient creatures, the horseshoe crab, which having lived virtually unchanged for 450 million years now faces the possibility of extinction.
berte & harmey
berte & harmey is the collaborative practice of Irish artist Cliona Harmey and Belgian artist Filip Berte. Working from a place of friendship and shared interests they have developed a remote collaborative practice.
Their work, Nul Punt Wolk brings together a series of fragments with a connection to aerial imaging, aviation, mapping and landscape demarcation and includes two large sculptural Bare Maps, which show bare earth visualisations of the surrounding environments of two 1917 airfields: Baldonnel in Ireland and Oostakker in Belgium.
Appearing semi-photographic, this type of aerial view has been enabled by the changing technologies of communication, mapping, optics, capture and transit which have ushered in our contemporary globalised world. Viewing the maps, we can’t help but think of earlier post-war images and the all too real spectres of conflict today. The Bare Maps were created as a space to gather and look at the earth together and reflect on how things might be different.
Emily Speed
Emily Speed is a UK based artist. Known for her work examining the relationship between the body and architecture, Speed’s practice considers how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and how a person occupies their own psychological space. Working in sculpture, performance and film, Speed's work looks at the relationship between people and buildings and in particular the power dynamics at play in built space. Her work plays with scale and creates layers around the body, often hybrid forms of clothing and architecture.
Esmeralda Conde Ruiz
Esmeralda Conde Ruiz is a Spanish award-winning interdisciplinary composer and audio visual artist who lives and works in London. She specialises in creating artworks that focus on human voices and life experiences. Her site specific compositions evolve from a visual starting point and develop into sound landscapes with rhythmic patterns. In her often multilingual compositions she interacts with light and dark, colour, staged elements and moving images. Her work questions how we as humans are shaped by the need to connect and communicate and how we express this sonically.
Esmeralda has worked with choirs from Ecuador to New York, to Syria and Sydney. Her experience ranges from creating and directing the 500 amateur choir who performed at the 2016 opening of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London to writing a composition for 350 child singers from 7 different countries in multiple languages for Dresdner Philharmonie.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
New York-based artist, writer, and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed is known for work that takes an experimental approach to narrating Black experience. Working across a range of media, Rasheed often conceives exhibitions as pedagogical experiences with the power to explore conflicting histories, hidden narratives, archives, memory, and public space.
Working across a range of media, forms and contexts, Rasheed takes an experimental approach to the arrangement of letters, words, sentences, shapes, tones and textures. Her work frequently engages with the poetry, politics and pleasures of approximation as well as (mis)recognition, translation, privacy and dirty data.
A believer in the generative qualities of unfinished work, Rasheed creates iterative and provisional projects. These include publications, poetry, prints, digital archives, lecture-performances, library interventions, performance scores and sprawling, ‘architecturally-scaled’ xerox-based collages.
Michael Hanna
Michael Hanna is an artist based in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. His recent work has taken the form of social and sensory experiments with himself as the subject. His research centres around ideas of utopia, error, and how to live.
His work for TULCA,‘Pi Wrong Tattoo’ continues from the artist’s practice of instituting small changes in the world. These have taken the form of social and sensory micro-disruptions, which function as experiments into how the world might be different.
Quentin Lacombe
Quentin Lacombe (b. 1990, France) lives and works in Paris as a freelance photographer. His work attempts to understand the universe as a fragmented, complex and infinite experience. Trained as a photographer, his work is not limited to the exclusive use of the camera as a means of observation, but also includes the use of primitive photography techniques and digital tools. All these means, when combined with digital collage or studio shooting, aim to challenge the immediacy of the photographic medium.
Like the thinking behind illustrative atlases, Lacombe’s project, Crucible of Time gathers fragments of the world in a photographic time capsule, capturing the very moment in which we lost control of our environment.
Venue: TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, St Augustine St, Galway
Accessibility: venue is wheelchair accessible
Parking: pay and display
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie