TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture are delighted to present:
Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past
Curated by Gregory McCartney
Online Exhibition and Publication
1 December 2020 - 31 March 2021
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture are delighted to announce Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past curated by Gregory McCartney. This online exhibition and free print publication considers the journey of humanity as a species, and explores an imagined evolutionary path that mixes the animal and human to produce something potentially unknown and new.
The original Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past concept was of course written well before the Covid-19 Pandemic, but it somewhat eerily articulates the sudden change in everyday life and behaviour as well as our sense of being, which the virus has perhaps caused us to reassess. It is also a continuation of the Abridged obsession with actual and metaphorical viruses. Our recent issues have had titles including, Wormwood, Contagion, and Relapse.
Speaking about the project TULCA said: “The Board of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts are delighted to launch Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past online exhibition and publication as part of our UnSelfing Visual Arts programme in collaboration with Galway 2020. This programme has been reimagined and updated to comply with Public Health guidelines. We are delighted to have this opportunity to bring such inspiring artwork and an evocative publication to our audiences in this way.”
Speaking about the project Marilyn Gaughan-Reddan, Head of Programme, Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture 2020 said “The agility and determination of TULCA to reimagine the project, in light of the pandemic is remarkable, and believe that it’s concept and content is more relevant than ever, given the challenges we’re facing in 2020. We are looking forward to the presentation of a memorable exhibition, with incredible artists that global audiences can experience.”
This post lockdown re-imagining of the project sees the exhibition element move online to the www.abridged.zone website. Working with four artists: Stuart Cairns, Nadege Meriau, Daniel Seiffertand Tara Wray, the online exhibition will be accompanied by a series of essays by academics, poets, and writers exploring various aspects of the concept of personal and societal collapse: an attempt to make sense of this recent upheaval in our society and think about how this pandemic will change our journey forward and outlook for the future.
Along with the online exhibition, there will be a publication with a print run of 500. Featuring essays and more, including artworks from the exhibition plus poetry from Charlie Baylis, Peter Boyle A time of endings, Moyra Donaldson, Colin Dardis The Year of Non-Resistance, Keshia Starrett, Liam Bates, Aisling Bradley, Clare McCotter, Susannah Dickey, Yvonne Blomer, Lydia Unsworth, Soso fragments, Stephanie Burt, Stuart Cairns, Adam Crothers, Maria Finch, Jess Mc Kinney, Sharon Young, Dylan Brennan, Maroula Blades An Ancestor Guards, Anna D’Alton, Eva Griffin plus fiction from Maeve O’Lynn all responding to the Nothing To Look Forward To The Past theme.
Copies of the Print Edition will (Covid restrictions permitting) be available in Galway, Derry and Belfast plus a limited amount from Abridged.
Artists
Stuart Cairns is a Belfast-based artist who works with natural materials and found objects picked up on his ‘wanderings’. Working as a silversmith, Cairns combines these natural materials and found objects alongside precious metals to create artefacts in the tradition of tableware and domestic objects. Here he presents Hinterlands, influenced by his journeys around his local coastal area.
Nadege Meriau, a French, London based artist whose experimental practice is principally photographic, but encompasses sculptural installations and video work. Best known for her use of organic matter - bread, chicken carcasses, honeycomb - her visceral and sensuous imagery both seduces and disorientates. Spaces are ambiguous and scale is distorted. For each piece Mériau exercises both control and restraint, manipulating and coaxing her materials into certain behaviours or forms, whilst simultaneously allowing nature to take its course. For this project she presents In These Times, They Who Eat My Flesh and The Fall.
Tara Wray is a photographer, curator, and filmmaker. Her work is autobiographical in nature and focuses on issues of mental health and the ambivalence of family ties. And dogs. She makes art to understand the world around her and to define her place within it. Her sold out photobook, Too Tired for Sunshine, was published by Yoffy Press in 2018. Recently she founded the Too Tired Project, a non-profit photo initiative helping those struggling with depression by offering a platform for collective creative expression and community. We present Everything All The Time Never Enough, a beautifully abstract look at our contemporary existence.
Daniel Seiffert, influenced by his political studies, tends to document the true and the real in his photographs. Many journeys prior to and during his artistic career also influenced his worldview and strengthened his desire to preserve time and space. In Raufaser he wants to raise awareness of how the aftermath of war and crisis can affect the generations that follow and examine how collective and individual memory is shaped and influenced. He is creating a new sense of identity by confronting his relationship with the past, spanning four generations, providing the basis for a detailed investigation of post-memory, mental health, war and history.
About UnSelfing
In 2020, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts has created a special programme of visual arts events for the occasion of Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture 2020. This programme is called ‘UnSelfing’. Taking the theme of Journeys, both exterior and interior, ‘Unselfing’ refers to the idea of going outside of oneself in order to find truth. The writer Iris Murdoch, who was born in Ireland in 1919, contributed much to the field of philosophy, including the idea of ‘unselfing’, or, to turn one’s attention outward, away from the self and into the world and nature in order to see things as they really are rather than from a self-centred perspective. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many of the events, exhibitions, and commissions for UnSelfing have been changed and adapted to comply with public health advice. A programme of upcoming events is available at www.tulca.ie and www.galway2020.ie
About Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture
Galway is European Capital of Culture in 2020. Due to the impact of Covid-19 the cultural programme has been reimagined, with local and national artists and cultural organisations that won Galway the European Capital of Culture designation remaining at its core. The ambitious programme comprises both digital and live events which take place across the villages, towns, islands and the city of Galway and offers theatre, music and sport, to poetry, film, visual art and much more. The reimagined programme will run until the end of March 2021.
Image: Tara Wray, from the Everything All The Time Never Enough series, 2020, courtesy of the artist.
www.tulca.ie