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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2022
Festival
Stanya Kahn, No Go Backs, 2020, 16mm film transferred to 2K video, with sound. 33 minutes; image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival of Visual arts.
Jennie Taylor: How do you see TULCA 2021 in the context of your broader curatorial practice?
Ephemeral Permanence JENNIE TAYLOR INTERVIEWS EOIN DARA, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2021.
Eoin Dara: Much of my work over the last decade has been within public institutions, collaborating with colleagues to develop exhibition programmes across years at a time, and working very slowly with artists towards new solo commissions. So, to shift gear into curating a festival that took place in one short burst over a few weeks, with a whole host of different artists, writers and contributors, was a wild and beautiful ride. But in much of the work I’ve been doing for a few years now, I have been collaborating with and learning from artists who, I think, are delving into really expansive ideas about tenderness and intimacy in their work, and that really sat at the heart of a lot of my early thinking around developing an edition of TULCA. I should say that, that thinking was also pre-pandemic, and then, to be blunt, I really just doubled down on these ideas throughout lockdown and started to try and shape a programme that spun out and around conversations about love and closeness and connection. JT: How did you find the TULCA open-call process for artist submissions? How many artists participated in the festival? ED: I remember vividly being petrified at the thought of having to write a curatorial statement for the open call. I hadn’t even been able to visit the city at that point; we were still in lockdown, and everything in my life seemed to be uncertain in ways I could never have imagined. So, I wrote quite a personal letter instead, trying to be open about the impossibility of the situation, and also throwing out there some loose associations and tangential ideas that I had been obsessing over in my solitude. I had been mulling over a question posed by Ocean Vuong in his poem, On earth we’re briefly gorgeous, where he asks: “Don’t we touch each other just to prove
