TULCA 2025: Open Call
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2025 Open Call curated by Beulah Ezeugo; Strange lands still bear common ground.
Curatorial brief:
The prevailing global logic suggests that we as humans cannot bear alterity. We configure ourselves as nations, groups, or individuals whose autonomy is maintained by the boundaries we create. In reality, all of us are enmeshed in complex, interdependent networks - the recent pandemic has clarified that nations cannot operate as entirely isolated entities. Similarly, our current ecological crisis is rooted in extractive relationships, particularly those formed by the Global North’s ongoing reliance on the Global South.
Our intrinsic desires for familiarity and connection with the Other persist and are reflected in our lived experiences on this island. We see this exemplified through recent acts of solidarity between the people of Ireland and Palestine, ongoing dialogues between the country’s North and the South, and Galway’s position at the Atlantic edge, which invites us to consider how moments of contact with the external world can echo outward through the island and shape the contours of our collective identity.
The 23rd edition of the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts invites proposals from artists whose work orbits around themes of collectivity, binarism, solidarity, affinity, and exchange or whose work engages with these dynamics:
Within the landscape; if a border is a real or imagined line that separates one entity from another, or an island is an independent land-mass distinguished from the sea, when do such boundaries blur, shift, collapse, or merge?
Within our cultural imaginations, where historical or mythological affinities with others shape our configurations of ourselves.
Within and beyond our own borders, where Ireland, as an island nation divided into two, relates to its internal others.
We welcome individual artists, cultural workers, filmmakers, and writers. We especially would like to hear from collaborative duos or groups who work across borders or nations and whose work resonates with these ideas, however they may manifest.
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: 02 May 2025, 5pm
Image: A Burmese map of the world, showing traces of Medieval European map-making from The Thirty-Seven Nats: A Phase of Spirit Worship Prevailing in Burma (1906) by Sir Richard Carnac Temple (1850-1931). The Himalayas are shown by a horizontal green line: above is the magical land of seven lakes and Mount Meru; below is where strangers come from.
