Image: Graffiti on lavatory paper, J.J. Beegan. Courtesy of the Adamson Collection and the Wellcome Collection
TULCA 2023: Open Call
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2023 Open Call curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais; honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise.
Curatorial brief:
Reflecting on the West of Ireland as a landscape of medical infrastructure and control, artists are invited to consider their own regional relationship to medicine. From St Brigid’s Mental Health Hospital in Ballinasloe as a symbolic site of institutionalised mental illness, to the medical device factories flanking Galway city, to Kilcornan, through Merlin Park TB hospital and onto the Botox factory in Westport, the West of Ireland and the lives of those who live here have been shaped by systems of medicine. In tracing geographies of medicine, illness and disability in the West of Ireland and elsewhere, we might begin to (re)write these knotty legacies into our understanding of nation, modernity and self that reveal stories about ourselves, and where we call home.
Ireland had the one highest rate of incarceration of any country in the mid-20th century, built upon the criminalisation of certain types of disability, pregnancy, gender, sexuality, behaviour, class and mental illness. The majority of those imprisoned - many for life - were patients of mental health hospitals such as Ballinasloe, and were used by every group in society as a means of welfare, punishment and even settling disputes over land and inheritance. These hospitals were found throughout the country, funded by the state with many communities invested in actively perpetuating this carceral system for economic and political gain. What might an emancipatory approach to the body and against the institution tell us about carceral legacies, and inform an abolitionist future? How might we devise a liberatory approach that resists pathologisation and institutionalisation, and moves towards new ways of shaping and caring for ourselves? How can we take ownership over our own bodies and learn from the politics of disability justice, abolition and bodily autonomy, that build solidarity between institutionalised peoples? Through that, how can we address the violence of colonial science, and how it has shaped landscapes and peoples? In reflecting on this history, how do we remember the lives shaped by these places and think critically about how they still impact us today? Through that, how can we recover the voices of those historically made voiceless by these institutions and resist the power of these institutions’ inheritors today?
Taking its title from the description of an Irish folk cure, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise gestures towards evolving notions of cure and care and their relationship to land. In a region transformed by holy wells, pilgrimages, folk cures, myths, factories and institutions, medicine, illness and disability are profoundly enmeshed into the fabric of this region and many others throughout the world. From this telling, what narratives can be told that deepen our understanding of being in a body and a place?
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: 19 March 2023, 5pm (closed)