The 20th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts will take place in venues across Galway City November 4 - 20, featuring a programme of multi-venue exhibitions and events including seminars, workshops and an Education Programme with artist talks and gallery tours that focus on looking at and responding to contemporary visual art.
Exhibition galleries will be held at the TULCA Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Columban Hall. The Artist Talks Series will take place at Pálás Cinema in partnership with ATU.
Every year TULCA commissions an Irish curator to develop a concept for the festival. Through a process of open call and invitation the curator selects national and international artists to respond to the theme. This year’s festival is curated by Clare Gormley, Director of Programmes & Curator at the Belfast Photo Festival and Co-Founder and Director of the Northern Irish Art Network.
The 2022 festival programme is titled The World Was All Before Them, with a theme that addresses the notion of futurity and asks – in this moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty – what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.
The festival title comes from the final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which recounts Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and into a new, unknown world. This edition of TULCA seeks to take stock of our current moment and imagine what lies ahead, as we find ourselves on a precipice of ecological destruction, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, global pandemics, wars and technological over-saturation. There has never been such an urgent time to challenge the structures of our current existence, and to seek out visions of future worlds worth living in.
“I’m very excited to be working with the TULCA team on an edition of the festival that both takes stock of our current moment and, hopefully, also provides a glimpse of the way forward as we reckon with the myriad challenges—ecological, societal, political and cultural—posed by our rapidly changing world,” said Clare.
“I’m particularly looking forward to exploring the work of artists, who are adept at problem-solving, world-making and asking questions about the future of our society, to see what they might have to offer us in this unprecedented moment.”
This year’s contributors to the festival are artists, filmmakers, writers and poets, including Anouk Kruithof, Becca Albee, Berte & Harmey, Caroline Jane Harris, Chloe Cooper, Christopher Steenson, Elise Rasmussen, Emily Speed, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Judith Dean, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michael Hanna, Nicoline van Harskamp, Quentin Lacombe, Tabitha Soren, Tadhg Ó Cuirrín and The Lifeboat.
This year’s festival aims to conjure a vision of the future tied to the world we live in now with its inequities as well as its possibilities. It aims to question how we might make our existing world a more liveable place. The programme features works that bypass and critique the notion that technology alone might save us, seeking instead practices that engage civics, alliances, poetics, politics, bodies, dance, movement, language, decoloniality, sociality and connectivity as tools of future world-making.
Since 2002, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts has captivated Galway city and county with an eclectic display of contemporary art. TULCA is a multi-venue, artist-centred festival of contemporary art that works with Irish curators to present innovative exhibitions that provoke and energise audiences into the world of the Visual Arts.
TULCA Festival champions Galway city and county as central to the contemporary visual arts community and as a hub for artists, audiences and culture. The festival promotes the development and exhibition of contemporary visual arts culture through a national and international network of artists, audiences, curators and art critics.
