Deep States curated by Helen Carey | Nun's Island Theatre | 6 - 27 March 2020 (CLOSED)

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture and Fire Station Artists' Studios present:

Deep States

Curated by Helen Carey
Nun’s Island Theatre, Galway
6 - 27 March 2020*

Dominic Thorpe (Ireland)
Veronika Merklein (Austria & Germany)
Andrej Mircev (Croatia)
Nikoleta Markovic (born in Yugoslavia)
Eunseo Yi (Republic of Korea)
 

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present: UnSelfing; a programme of exhibitions, performances and encounters with visual art taking place in Galway and across the country, this year. The programme takes as its theme Iris Murdoch’s concept of ‘UnSelfing’; the idea that in order to find truth, it is necessary to seek outside of one’s self; to be attentive to the world, to be curious about the people, places and ideas that surround us.

The inaugural exhibition of the UnSelfing Programme, Deep States, opens on Friday 6th March at 6pm at Nun’s Island Theatre.

Deep States explores the complex states of freedom and responsibility. This exhibition examines the articulation and understanding of these states; how they inform social norms, and how this impacts the personality and character of both the individual and society.

Realising the unconscious as well as the conscious is a battlefield for dominance, can overwhelm: get your rival fighting on at least two fronts is the cornerstone of military strategy. In this exhibition, the central enquiry centres on states within both the individual and the collective, engaged in a struggle for dominance and primacy. Whatever triumphs, the exercise of power - regulated, observed or controlled - is deeply complex, often contradictory, often unknown. The battle, however, never ends, the struggle begins again. This is the human experience.

In the exhibition Deep States, artists Dominic Thorpe, Veronika Merklein and Red People work on the psychology deeply embedded within often observable, sometimes hidden frameworks, placed within the black box in its darkness of Nuns Island in Galway on Europe’s periphery. This site, a former oratory, is an important element of the exhibition, being a trace of the past, of a different society. With performances at the end of the exhibition, the audience is invited to experience this exhibition a number of times, suggesting the shifting shape of what seems to be manifest.

What Dominic Thorpe addresses is sentient information, the senses and the fault lines between what is locked in and what is manifest, what is manipulated. In video and mixed media, photography and performance, Thorpe pushes the matrix of human endurance and the senses, exploring power and vulnerability.

Veronika Merklein suggests the information presented reveals a narrative the truth of which is embedded in social contexts and power relations. Response to the photographic works and video works is a function of complex, highly political and vulnerable responses forming the controlled matrix of power relations in society. Merklein’s performance reaches deeply into the audience’s humanity.

Red People - Andrej Mircev, Nikoleta Markovic and Eunseo Yi - trace the scars of boundaries and limits, of ‘spectres and leftovers’ becoming the props of new desire and hope. As the next element in their installation of the text of Everything Divided as a wall of books, their installation for Nuns’ Island draws on the theatrical setting as well as the West of Ireland in terms of memory, absence, and archaeology.

“In an increasingly unstable world, it is to artists we look to articulate our greatest fears and most powerful hopes. In this exhibition at the commencement of TULCA for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture, it is a pleasure to present Deep States with artists who ask us to feel the fear, do it anyway and then breath the freedom. This exhibition with its installation and performances acknowledges the complexity of human experience.” Helen Carey, Curator

Helen Marriage, Creative Director Galway 2020 said: "Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture is delighted to be working with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts to showcase these five European artists in Galway as part of this year of cooperation and collaboration. We look forward to experiencing their intriguing combination of installation and performance."

Performances and events towards the end of the exhibition will pursue the traces of questions raised in the space through the exhibition.

Deep States - Opening Preview
Date: Friday 6 March 2020
Time: 6.00pm
Venue: Nuns Island Theatre, Galway (map)

More info: www.tulca.ie/unselfing2020/deep-states

*Following directives issued by the government and health authorities, we regret to inform you that Nuns Island Theatre will be closed to the public from 12 - 29 March 2020.

Photo: Dominic Thorpe. Image from the performance Table Bite. Galeria Michaela Stock. Vienna. 2019. Image taken by Lea Sonderegger

www.tulca.ie

TULCA 2020: Open Call

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2020 Open Call curated by Sarah Browne; The Law is a White Dog.

Curatorial brief:

The Law is a White Dog borrows 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. Where Dayan’s book explores the interaction of personhood and dispossession within the USA, its themes find particular resonance in Connacht, the alternative to hell as offered by Cromwell during the time of the Penal Laws and the mass evictions of the Plantation era. Today, it offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the west of Ireland landscape, such as the asylum-seekers detained in Direct Provision Centres who are awaiting a ruling, and those who survived (or tragically died) inside state-approved religious institutions, such as the Mother and Baby Home at Tuam, or the industrial school at Letterfrack. 

The English common law in the nineteenth century held that it was not a crime to steal a tame dog, but it would be a crime to steal the hide of a dead dog: the possibility of profit transformed the dog into property. Neither fully wild nor fully domesticated for economic use, dogs were creatures who could be prosecuted in law but had no rights, because they were thought to be deprived of personality. As persons thought to have no mind cannot agree in mind with another, they had power neither to consent nor to form contracts. And in this, historically, dogs are placed in uncomfortable proximity with certain categories of humans in different jurisdictions: “idiots”, infants, “drunkards”, married women, Catholics. As Dayan points out, law can create incapacity and powerlessness, rather than simply recognising it.

Certain kinds of legal speech (judgements, in particular) force new realities into being, when they are declared by the powerful: ‘I find you guilty’; ‘I pronounce you married’; ‘I sentence you to X’. With this transformative potential in mind, The Law is a White Dog is a project that invites artists to refute categorisation, to invent new languages and forms of expression, and to develop new affinities with others. The festival will include a public programme as well as an exhibition of artworks and other artefacts, and will be selected through a process of direct invitation as well as TULCA’s annual open call. Artists applying through the open call are invited to consider their work as forms of address that could relate to processes such as bearing witness, giving testimony, granting pardon, lodging complaint, forming contracts, presenting evidence—or steadfastly refusing to speak in those terms.

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 extended: 31st March 2020 6pm (CLOSED)

Photo: Found image, Royal Veterinary College, London

Announcement: Sarah Browne to curate TULCA 2020

Announcement: Sarah Browne to curate TULCA 2020

TULCA is pleased to announce Sarah Browne as the curator of the 18th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in 2020.

Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with non-verbal, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, as well as forms of writing and publishing in diverse contexts.

Solo exhibitions of her work include Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Sick and Desiring at Bergen Assembly (2019); Strange Foreign Bodies at the Hunterian, Glasgow; TOUCH, nGbK, Berlin (both 2018); Liverpool Biennial (2016) and All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (2015). 

In 2016 with Jesse Jones she made In the Shadow of the State, a transnational co-commission for Artangel and Create. This involved close collaboration with women in the fields of law, music, material culture and midwifery, to explore the ‘touch’ of the law, and proposed a hypersensitivity to contact with the state. The project unfolded as a series of four performances and legal drafting workshops in Derry, Liverpool, Dublin and London, staged in a domestic home, in a feminist bookshop / as an online broadcast, in a maternity hospital and in a former children’s court. In 2019, Browne presented Public feeling, a commission for South Dublin County Council that was presented in leisure centres in Clondalkin and Tallaght. Public feeling explored the health impacts of austerity on the individual and collective body and the politics of 'resilience', and was staged in the format of participatory fitness classes. The project suggests that ‘feelings’ – like joy, shame, anxiety and depression – are not only individual emotions, but also have a shared social dimension, and asks how we can re-imagine and re-work these collective experiences.

Browne’s work proposes that, even while bodies can hold onto trauma, there is the possibility of learning and practicing different ways to move. Since 2015 she has curated a number of discursive film screening programmes as part of her expanded research process. These include Gastromancy in partnership with aemi, and To train the whole body as a tongue, an Irish national touring programme, also with aemi. With Jenny Richards and Mint in Stockholm, she is currently developing FALLOUT / falling out: work injuries and resisting voices in the wake of second wave feminism.

Browne co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, their shared collaborative practice in 2009. She is associate artist in residence with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.

“I’m very excited by the opportunity and challenge of curating TULCA in 2020, and working closely with the festival team here. I look forward to discovering new practices, to supporting artists to make new work, and to sharing these artistic proposals with a public in the city and the region.” Sarah Browne

“Everyone at TULCA is delighted with the appointment of Sarah Browne as curator for TULCA 2020. It’s an important year for TULCA as we continue to develop as a team and organisation and look forward to working with Sarah on the 18th edition of the festival.” David Finn, TULCA Producer

TULCA 2020: The Law is a White Dog will run from 6 - 22 November 2020 across multiple venues in Galway city and county. TULCA is now accepting submissions for its Open Call. For information on how to apply click here.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Law is a White Dog curated by Sarah Browne
6 - 22 November 2020
Galway, Ireland

www.tulca.ie

TULCA to launch programme of events for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture

PRESS RELEASE

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture presents UnSelfing; a programme of exhibitions, performances and encounters with visual art taking place in Galway and across the country, this year. The programme takes as its theme Iris Murdoch’s concept of ‘UnSelfing’; the idea that in order to find truth, it is necessary to seek outside of one’s self; to be attentive the world, to be curious about the people, places and ideas that surround us. 

UnSelfing/Arrivals is a dynamic launch event featuring a newly commissioned performance by Isadora Epstein entitled Weather Gods. This performance will take place on a moving train, travelling between Galway and Gort, highlighting UnSelfing’s theme of interior and exterior journeys. 

UnSelfing/Arrivals will begin with a gathering at Ceannt train station in Galway. Attendees will board the 1.45pm train and be treated to Weather Gods, a new show by Isadora Epstein which combines a mythological weather report with a train trip on the Great Western Railway. Epstein's performance will be accompanied by musicians Davy Kehoe, Daniel McAuley and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh. On arrival in Gort, guests will enjoy a reception and the official launch of TULCA’s 2020 UnSelfing programme at Gort Library, with performances and readings from Iris Murdoch and speeches followed by transport by bus back to Galway city at 5pm. 

Speaking about UnSelfing/Arrivals, Lucy Elvis and Josephine Vahey co-chairpersons of TULCA said: “Arrivals is an exciting way to launch this red-letter year for TULCA. Like audiences at this special performance, and those who will meet our exhibitions taking place across the island of Ireland for 2020, TULCA has been on a journey of discovery and development these past 18 years, attending closely to Galway City and County to find ways of sparking and enriching civic conversations about questions that matter. We’re excited to be commissioning Weather Gods, this new performance piece on the Galway to Gort train. This performance brings audiences from the city and county together for a truly unique experience.”  

Speaking about the overall programme of events for TULCA as part of Galway 2020, Kate Howard, cultural producer said, “It is very exciting that TULCA, Irelands leading festival of visual arts turns eighteen this year! Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture are delighted to be working with TULCA on commissioning a year-long programme of exhibitions and performances presented both here in Galway and across Ireland, featuring very exciting Irish and European artists”.

The inaugural exhibition of the UnSelfing Programme Deep States opens on Friday 6th March at 6pm at Nun’s Island Theatre. The exhibition is curated by Helen Carey and runs until the 27th March 2020. It features Irish artist Dominic Thorpe working with international artists Veronika Merklein, Eunseo Yi, Andrej Mircev and Nikoleta Markovic to create a series of installations and performances that will explore the complex states of freedom and responsibility. Deep States will examine how these tensions are articulated, understood and inform social norms, impacting the personality and character of both individuals and society. The exhibition asks ‘what’ and ‘where’ are the boundaries that define an individual’s freedom, whether corporeal, spatial or mental. Performances and events at the end of the exhibition will pursue the open questions left in the space over the time of the exhibition.

UnSelfing/Arrivals: Official Launch of UnSelfing - TULCA Festival of Visual Arts’ Programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture

When: Saturday 29th February 2020
Where: 1.15pm at Ceannt Train Station, Galway
Tickets: €10.00 (booking essential)
Buy tickets: https://unselfing-arrivals.eventzilla.net

www.tulca.ie

Image: Isadora Epstein, Weather Gods

Magical Creatures County Project - Exhibition at Galway City Library

Magical Creatures County Project - Exhibition at Galway City Library

The 2019 festival theme Tactical Magic invited audiences to reflect on the magical effects of art probing the division between truth and reality. The exhibited works drew on intuition, historical beliefs and customs as well as challenging us to consider the historical in contemporary society. 

As part of our Education Programme, two artist facilitators delivered a ‘Magical Creatures’ project within two primary schools that drew on the theme of the festival. The workshops were facilitated by Noel Arrigan with teacher Áine Ní Thuathail and her 3rd class students at Furbo National School. Jennifer Cunningham worked with Neasa O’Dea and her 3rd class students in Cregmore National School.

Students explored the concept of hybrids through drawing, printmaking, use of found objects and recycled materials to create their own modern-day magical creatures that could inform future myths and legends. This work can be viewed in the Galway City Library until the end of February 2020. The project is funded through the Arts Office of Galway County Council and kindly supported by Galway Public Libraries.