UnSelfing TULCA Festival of Visual Arts Programme Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture present:
UnSelfing 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. Contact:
info@tulca.ie www.tulca.ie
Official Launch
UnSelfing 2020
Responding to the theme of migration, this project examines leaving and returning, exploring the changes that are wrought by the opening of new horizons when we leave home. With this in mind, TULCA is creating a series of exhibitions that begin and end in Galway, that has been our home for 18 years
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UnSelfing/ Arrivals 29 February 2020 Galway City & Gort Library A newly commissioned performance by Isadora Epstein entitled Weather Gods. Isadora Epstein Davy Kehoe Daniel McAuley Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh Stephane Bena Hanly
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. 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 commission by Isadora Epstein which combines a mythological weather report with a trip on the Great Western Railway. Epstein’s performance will be accompanied by musicians Davy Kehoe, Daniel McAuley, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and Stephane Bena Hanly. On arrival in Gort, guests will enjoy a reception and the official launch of TULCA’s 2020 UnSelfing programme at Gort Library, with performances, refreshments, readings of work by Iris Murdoch and speeches followed by transport by bus back to Galway city at 5pm.
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UnSelfing 2020
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts Programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture
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Deep States Curated by Helen Carey 6 - 27 March 2020 Nuns Island Theatre, Galway Dominic Thorpe (Ireland) Veronika Merklein (Austria & Germany) Andrej Mircev (Croatia) Nikoleta Markovic (born in Yugoslavia) Eunseo Yi (Republic of Korea)
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 that both the unconscious and the conscious are battlefields for dominance, can be overwhelming: getting your rival fighting on at least two fronts is afterall, the cornerstone of military strategy. Deep States, centres on the struggle for dominance and primacy within both the individual and the collective. Dominic Thorpe addresses sentient information, the senses and the fault lines between what is locked in, what is manifest and what is manipulated. Through 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.
Towards the end of the exhibition, a schedule of performance and events will take place, further pushing the ideas of traces of the questions left in a space over the time of an exhibition.
Deep States opening Date: Friday 6 March 2020 Time: 6.00pm Venue: Nuns Island Theatre, Galway
6 Image: Dominic Thorpe. Image from the performance Table Bite. Machaela Stock Gallery. Vienna. 2019. Image taken by Lea Sonderegger.
UnSelfing 2020
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.
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Threads Curated by Sarah Searson 28 March - 16 May 2020 The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon Austin Ivers (Ireland) Opening: Sat 28 March 2pm
As TULCA Festival of Visual Arts turns 18, it invites three of its alumni curators Sarah Searson, Gregory McCartney and Helen Carey to curate a series of exhibitions within UnSelfing, a year-long project presented by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture. At the Dock, Galway-based artist Austin Ivers presents a new body of work including photography, installed objects and, ‘The World at War’, a new multi-screen video piece. A programme of screenings, readings and a publication will document these events. In Threads, Ivers considers the psychic effects of the Cold War on popular culture. As an adolescent in the 1980’s and early 1990’s Iver’s world appeared to be teetering on collapse. Nihilistic popular culture, aided by world events, promised the end of everything. This was facilitated to no small degree by the emergence of domestic VHS technology. Today’s accelerationism celebrates the same chaos fuelled by a new wave of domestic technologization. Contemporary parents’ experience escalating fear of digital technology and their children’s enhanced understanding of and increasing access to it. Ivers’ generation by contrast, had video, “under the counter” tapes, “video nasties” and the world of cheap-to-license B-movies (as well as art classics) at their disposal.
Visual Arts Associated events: Sat 28 March 2pm
Exhibition Opening & talk with Austin Ivers, Louise Manifold and Jamie Cross.
Sat 28 March
Film Screening; ‘Threads’ (Mick Jackson 1984).
Sat 9th May
6pm Performance with Elizabeth Hilliard. 7pm Reading: New writing commissions featuring, Pat McCabe, Cathy Sweeney, Ian Maleney and Joanne Laws in response to Threads. 8:30pm Screening of ‘Quatermass’ (1979), four part TV series.
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Sat 16 May 8pm Image: Austin Ivers
Film Screening of ‘Babylon’ (1980) followed by a discussion with Dr. Kieran Cashell.
UnSelfing 2020
8pm
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Image: Nadège Mériau
Curated by Gregory McCartney Verbal Arts Centre, Derry~Londonderry
September - December 2020 Galway City and County
August 21 - 5 September 2020 Opening: Friday 21 August, 6pm
Foreign Objects is a primary school education initiative presented by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture that integrates care, curiosity and critical thinking with art experience in the classroom.
Stuart Cairns (Ireland) Nadège Mériau (France) In Nothing To Look Forward To But The Past curator Gregory McCartney explores concepts of ‘journey’ and ‘journeying’ in an evolutionary and environmental context considering both its micro and macro manifestations. At its heart, this exhibition asks: Is there really anywhere to go? Working with Stuart Cairns, a Belfast-based artist who works with natural materials and found objects picked up on his ‘wanderings’ and Nadege Meriau, a French, London-based artist whose experimental practice is principally photographic, but encompasses sculptural installations and video work. Where Cairns presents cornucopia gathered by chance, Meriau invites audiences to explore organic matter at close-quarters, celebrating the sensuousness of inevitable decay. 10
McCartney develops an exhibition that attempts to forge new paths at a time when retrospect seems the only appealing option despite the consistent rhetoric of development and change that forces us to forge blindly onward.
It consists of a cluster of custom produced boxes, mobile by nature and multi-functional by design. Each one is home to an original artwork and supports an educational toolkit. Foreign Objects operates through invitation with schools inviting a box to their location. On arrival, the school community become custodians of the box and its contents. Students will directly learn from and respond to the artwork and its associated concepts. Through an exercise in care, Foreign Objects, explores how we receive, welcome and embrace the new in our communities. It simultaneously seeks to demystify the sometimes alien perception of contemporary art by placing it directly in familiar and accessible environments. Up to 12 schools across Galway City and County will participate in the project in 2020, after which it will be rolled out as a national education initiative. An open call will be published on the 20th March 2020. Register your interest: foreignobjects@tulca.ie
UnSelfing 2020
Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past
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ADDITIONAL PROGRAMME 29 February 2020 | UnSelfing/Arrivals
A dynamic launch event with a newly commissioned performance by Isadora Epstein and the official UnSelfing programme launch.
March 2020 | Deep States curated by Helen Carey Nuns Island Theatre, Galway City.
March - May 2020 | Threads curated by Sarah Searson The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.
June - July 2020 | Deep States curated by Helen Carey Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin.
August - Sept 2020 | Nothing to Look Forward to But the Past curated by Gregory McCartney Verbal Arts Centre, Derry~Londonderry.
August 2020
Interface Inagh - Residency by artists from Kaunas, Lithuania. Foreign Objects - Primary school education initiative, County Galway.
September 2020
Public Commission in County Galway.
November 2020
UnSelfing Exhibition, Galway.
info@tulca.ie www.tulca.ie