Renowned Irish and international artists will showcase their work in several venues across Galway city and county for the Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2011, from November 4th to 20th. This year’s theme ‘After the fall’ has inspired works that embody artist responses to the recent global economic, political and social collapse and subsequent ‘fall-out.’
This annual, multi-venue visual arts festival has been showcasing the work of local, national and international artists in Galway since it was founded in 2002. Its programme includes a number of exhibitions, live art performances, talks and discussions. Admission to all festival events is FREE. Among the many Irish artists participating in this year’s festival are Dublin-based video artist Jesse Jones, whose works represent and explore the gesture of revolutionary action and historical moments of collective resistance; IMMA artist in residence Seamus Nolan, whose two-screen synchronized video Oral Hearing presents a reenactment of the Corrib pipeline hearing in 2009 that offers the viewer an objective perspective; and mixed-media artist Gareth Kennedy, whose work addresses social, aesthetic, economic and environmental concerns within specific public contexts.
Highlights this year include New York-based artist Gregory Sholette’s collaboration with Galway’s 126 Gallery. Working with a team of local and international artists, Scholette produced the site-specific Imaginary Archive – a collection of real and fictional printed materials and objects that imagine and record an alternative history. This unusual ‘archive’ contains a miscellany of unknown, overlooked and dreamed-up materials. The cache includes objects related to forgotten Irish inventors, uncharted offshore islands, mysterious pirate radio broadcasts and nation-branding campaigns. The exhibit challenges the way we look at the past, present and future.
Another highlight this year is Subjective Art History from leading Romanian contemporary artist Lia Perjovschi. Her work often consists of hand-drawn diagrams and notes that record her own history of the world and summary of human knowledge, touching on politics, art theory and language. For Subjective Art History, Perjovschi combines reproduced images and text to create a three-stemmed time line stretching from Modernism to the present day. These interconnected stems have been edited and re-edited over the last 15 years, and consist of ‘timeline general,’ ‘timeline on Romanan culture’ and ‘my timeline.’ This work will be exhibited throughout the festival at the James Hardiman Library in the National University of Ireland, Galway. Perjovschi will also present a talk on her work in the Library’s Browsing Room on Saturday, November 5th at 3.00pm.
The Tulca Festival of Visual Arts takes place in Galway from November 4th to 20th. For a full programme of events and more information on the artists participating in the festival, visit tulca.ie . You can contact festival organisers on 00 353 87 069 4007 or by email: tulca.festival@gmail.com.
