TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Law is a White Dog (extended)
6 November - 18 December 2020
Curated by Sarah Browne
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2020 programme, The Law is a White Dog, including a podcast series, a book, exhibition, and a series of online talks and workshops. Contributors (artists, poets, lawyers, activists): AM Baggs, Éric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre), Maud Craigie, Máiréad Enright, Forerunner, Michael Holly, Justice for Magdalenes Research, Vukašin Nedeljković, Felispeaks, Charlotte Prodger, Bob Quinn, Sibyl Montague, Kevin Mooney, Julie Morrissy, Rory Pilgrim, Rajinder Singh, Soft Fiction Projects, Anne Tallentire, Saoirse Wall, Eimear Walshe, Suzanne Walsh, Gernot Wieland.
The Law is a White Dog borrowed 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. In a west of Ireland context, Dayan’s text offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the landscape, and to consider the interaction of capital with the institutions of Church and State.
As a curatorial proposal, The Law is a White Dog invited artists to refute categorisation, and to invent new languages and forms of expression in order to develop affinities with others. Responses involve forms of memoir, analysis, mourning, fable, film and song. Again and again, an obstacle occurs: the problem of how sensing bodies, as sources of knowledge, conflict with legal and regulatory logics. How do we know the law, and how does the law know us?
Podcasts
Unfolding throughout a historical global pandemic, where movement is restricted, The Law is a White Dog podcast series transports artworks into remote formats that maintain a sense of contact, intimacy and intensity:
Episode 1: AM Baggs, In My Language
Episode 2: Saoirse Wall, The Leaf and the Saviour Guy
Episode 3: Suzanne Walsh, Lazarus Lingua
Episode 4: Rory Pilgrim, The Undercurrent
Episode 5: Gernot Wieland, Depression in Animals
Episode 6: Eimear Walshe, Fuck Box
Episode 7: Forerunner, the Future and stuff
Episode 8: Maud Craigie, Indications of Guilt, pt. 1
Episode 9: Julie Morrissy, Positions Gendered Male in Bunreacht na hÉireann / 1937
Constitution of Ireland
Episode 10: Vukašin Nedeljković, Asylum Archive
The podcast series places artists and artworks in dialogue with legal researchers and practitioners, such as from the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, both located at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Podcasts are available on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and Google. Episode transcripts available here.
The podcast series was produced by Orla Higgins and Sarah Browne.
Book
The Law is a White Dog book features an eclectic range of commissioned writing, original research and artwork. This includes poetry by Julie Morrissy, photography by Rajinder Singh, an illustrated essay by Eimear Walshe, and extracts from two intergenerational feminist projects by Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre) and Soft Fiction Projects. Máiréad Enright’s essay explores how the imagery of dogs roams across testimonies of institutional abuse in Ireland, and how survivors insist on forms of repair, accountability and truth-telling that might one day redeem both the law and the state that underwrites it.
The Law is a White Dog book remains available to order here.
Exhibition
A rescheduled exhibition ran from 9 - 18 December 2020 at An Post Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Engage Art Studios.
Selected photographic documentation by Ros Kavanagh is available here.
Three offsite artworks are documented here.
Video documentation of the entire programme, edited by Jonathan Sammon, can be watched here.
Work by Forerunner at An Post Gallery. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here
Works by Sibyl Montague and Kevin Mooney at Galway Arts Centre. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here
Work by Rory Pilgrim at 126 Artist-Run Gallery. Photo: Soft Day Media. View here
Work by Saoirse Wall at Engage Art Studios. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. View here
Artist Talks
Presented in partnership with GMIT Centre for Creative Arts and Media.
Talk 1: Vukašin Nedeljković
Talk 2: Sibyl Montague
Talk 3: Saoirse Wall
Edited, captioned versions of these talks are available here.
Screening Programme
A screening programme at PÁLÁS Cinema will follow later in 2021.
Maud Craigie, Indications of Guilt. pt 1. 2020. Still from 4k video, 50 minutes