TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2020 Open Call curated by Sarah Browne; The Law is a White Dog.
Curatorial brief:
The Law is a White Dog borrows its title from a book by Colin Dayan, which explores how legal rituals have the power to ‘make and unmake’ persons. Historically, certain categories of person have been invented mainly in order to confine or punish them — the slave, the criminal, the homosexual, the insane — and these categories are further entangled and haunted by classifications based on race. Conceived in the legal imagination in this way, these different classes of person are allocated unequal capacities for reason and for pain, and are distributed different rights to property – whether rights to own one’s own body, or to acquire land. Where Dayan’s book explores the interaction of personhood and dispossession within the USA, its themes find particular resonance in Connacht, the alternative to hell as offered by Cromwell during the time of the Penal Laws and the mass evictions of the Plantation era. Today, it offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the west of Ireland landscape, such as the asylum-seekers detained in Direct Provision Centres who are awaiting a ruling, and those who survived (or tragically died) inside state-approved religious institutions, such as the Mother and Baby Home at Tuam, or the industrial school at Letterfrack.
The English common law in the nineteenth century held that it was not a crime to steal a tame dog, but it would be a crime to steal the hide of a dead dog: the possibility of profit transformed the dog into property. Neither fully wild nor fully domesticated for economic use, dogs were creatures who could be prosecuted in law but had no rights, because they were thought to be deprived of personality. As persons thought to have no mind cannot agree in mind with another, they had power neither to consent nor to form contracts. And in this, historically, dogs are placed in uncomfortable proximity with certain categories of humans in different jurisdictions: “idiots”, infants, “drunkards”, married women, Catholics. As Dayan points out, law can create incapacity and powerlessness, rather than simply recognising it.
Certain kinds of legal speech (judgements, in particular) force new realities into being, when they are declared by the powerful: ‘I find you guilty’; ‘I pronounce you married’; ‘I sentence you to X’. With this transformative potential in mind, The Law is a White Dog is a project that invites artists to refute categorisation, to invent new languages and forms of expression, and to develop new affinities with others. The festival will include a public programme as well as an exhibition of artworks and other artefacts, and will be selected through a process of direct invitation as well as TULCA’s annual open call. Artists applying through the open call are invited to consider their work as forms of address that could relate to processes such as bearing witness, giving testimony, granting pardon, lodging complaint, forming contracts, presenting evidence—or steadfastly refusing to speak in those terms.
TULCA is curated through direct invitation and an Open Call process. The final selection of artworks will be based on thematic connection, artistic quality, and feasibility. Selections are made by the curator in consultation with the TULCA producer.
Open Call Process & Guidelines can be found here.
Deadline extended: 31st March 2020 6pm (CLOSED)
Photo: Found image, Royal Veterinary College, London