The World Was All Before Them

The World Was All Before Them

EMMA CAMPBELL INTERVIEWS CLARE GORMLEY ABOUT HER CURATORIAL VISION FOR TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2022.

Emily Speed, Flatland, 2021, mixed media installation comprising two film works, set and costumes, commissioned by Tate Liverpool, installation view, TULCA Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and TULCA Festival.

Emma Campbell: Can you discuss your curatorial theme and aspirations for TULCA Festival 2022?

Clare Gormley: The final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, recount Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and leaves them on the precipice of a new world. I’d been struck by the terror, but also the potential offered in imagining what lies ahead. Popular conventions imagine the future in the binary terms, dystopia vs utopia. However, this is a problematic framework, centred on saving us via technological, masculinist mastery, because technology’s sense of connection to world events offers mere performance of politics.

EC: Many of the presented artworks are tactile, as if seeking to explore beyond mediated screen existence.

CG: I devised the call-out to be evocative of human centred practices. Some engaged civics, dance, or other connections, borne out of a need for continued reinvestment in those things. From a curatorial standpoint, having been physically denied exhibitions, I wanted something human and warm. Evocations of technological and human agency as well as climate change became linchpins of the festival.

EC: Were there artists included that you hadn’t encountered before?

CG: Judith Dean is unlike anything I’ve seen; her work was a revelation. There are vortexes that encompass different cultural and historical reference points that are hard to pinpoint yet are portals to somewhere – bizarre but connected. Thinking particularly in ecological and environmental terms, universal deep time was another way to unlock potentiality. Judith’s works do that by col-

lapsing abstract pictorial space. The work of Dutch artist Anouk Kruithof, which was installed in Colombian Hall, comprises eight, four-hour edits of 8,800 films, representing diverse cultures of dance gathered from social media. It’s immersive and mimics the addictive qualities of scrolling; time fades away, as bodies move together.

EC: Do you think any artists involved in TULCA 2022 would be happy to have tins of soup thrown at their work?

CG: The action has resonance for the work in TULCA. It’s been interesting, in terms of an urgent rethinking of how we live, and art’s role in social change. People want justification for art’s potential as a vehicle to ask important questions. Artists provoke us, and art can be an activist tool for engagement. The act of throwing the soup on canonised masterpieces poses some hard questions. In 200 years, we won’t be talking about the paintings; we’ll be talking about the ecological destruction of the world. Artists are citizens of our world and offer subtle prompts for contemplation. Encounters with art can create space for dialogue. The artist-run spaces in Belfast are some of the only places in the city where conversations on the environment, abortion, or bodily autonomy are permissible.

EC: Which of the works exhibited this year would you describe as the most provocative?

CG: Tabitha Soren’s interaction of oily bodies and

the cold hard surface of the screens asks if on-screen interactions enable or prevent political agency. It recognises that we’re constantly consumed with decontextualization. The surface of Tabitha’s iPad highlights the psychological impact of the bombardment of images that we are rendered incapable of acting upon. Anouk Kruithof’s Contagious Speech is one of the pandemic-related works. Anouk explores English as it morphs through non-native English speakers. During the pandemic she was researching how our speech and our breaths have changed from continuous Zoom interactions.

EC: Because of the scale of laptop and phone screens, have you chosen work that plays with scale?

CG: Tabitha has done so much research around our engagement with screens. Researchers noted that our stress levels are increased through close looking but decreased with distance. Looking closely at a phone, versus looking at the horizon from cliffs towards a bigger vista, physiologically does something to our bodies. The proportions of the main venue, TULCA Gallery, allowed a large-scale sculptural presence, thus reorienting the body around objects bigger than us. Universal Tongue (2022), an immersive video with dance and colour, is taken from a screen-sized engagement and blown right up. Another artist, Caroline Jane Harris, does incredibly intricate, beautiful, hand-cut stills. This includes screenshots of volcanic eruptions, from which she hand-cuts tiny pixels, and intricate stilled moments

of a video crafted by hand. These works play with scale but also create moments, encouraging viewers to stay with things like digital engagement, that would normally be fleeting. These works also oscillate between time periods, from the contemporary consumption of images to the deep time of a volcanic eruption.

EC: What is next, Clare?

CG: I plan to refocus after TULCA. I have some core exhibitions coming up around Northern Irish books but Hannah Starkey’s project in the Ulster Museum will be the big one.

Clare Gormley is a curator and researcher based in Belfast and founder of the Northern Irish Art Research Group. She is Head of Programmes and Partnerships at Belfast Photo Festival and was Assistant Curator at The MAC in Belfast.

Emma Campbell is completing her practice-based PhD at Ulster University, addressing photography as an activist tool for abortion rights. Emma is a member of the Turner Prize-winning Array Collective and has exhibited in international solo and group shows. Emma is co-convenor of Alliance for Choice and core campaigner since 2011. emmacampbell.co.uk

Anouk Kruithof, Universal Tongue, 2022, video loop with sound, 4hrs duration, edited by Ieva Maslinskaitė, sound by Karoliina Pärnänen, installation view, Columban Hall; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, i am not done yet, 2022, xerox paper prints and wall painted text, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

Berte & harmey, Nul Punt Wolk: Points of Departure, Attempts at Orientation, 2020, 2021, 2022, installation view, wooden dowels, 3D print, block mounted riso prints, installation view, TULCA Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.