An Post Gallery
18 William St, Galway
Tues-Sun, 12-6pm
Welcome to the 19th edition of the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Eoin Dara under the title: there’s nothing here but flesh & bone, there’s nothing more.
Developed over the last year under different levels of lockdown between Ireland, Scotland and several other countries where some of the contributors to the programme reside, the festival seeks to gently offer up some conversations around closeness and connection at a time when we are just beginning to gather again in proximity to one another.
This project is an aggregate of many unwieldy things including wet caresses, soft affection, immortal loves, necessary resistance, quiet rest, careful togetherness, boundless longing, abiding loss, honeyed scents, close correspondence, vocal exaltation, enduring solidarity, unexpected intimacies, ecstatic whispers and deep tenderness.
The title of the festival this year is lifted longingly from George Michael’s 2006 masterpiece Outside which advocates for an abundance of physical intimacy in public spaces.
Some of the artworks in the programme focus on different kinds of bodies — on flesh and bone — exploring how we inhabit them and connect with others (both living and dead, real and imagined); how we use them to resist or repair; how we care for them; how we find grace within them; and
how we love and nurture them. Other projects reach back in time to touch forgotten figures, retell overlooked histories, and excavate lost narratives in order to try and understand our contemporary condition a little better. There are further works that reach across the world during the pandemic to craft community and togetherness when travelling to be with one another was impossible, and works that chart epic journeys into the unknown together, thinking towards an uncertain future in a world humankind has transformed irrevocably.
The contributors to this year’s programme are artists, filmmakers, writers and poets:
Sophia Al-Maria, Claire Biddles, Renèe Helèna Browne, Miriam de Búrca, CAConrad, Mariah Garnett, Lauren Gault, Patrick Hough, Adrien Howard & K Patrick, Jasmine Johnson, Vishal Jugdeo & vqueeram, Stanya Kahn, Theodore Kerr, Sekai Machache, Mira Mattar, The Many Headed Hydra, Mícheál McCann, Tonya McMullan, Harun Morrison, Isobel Neviazsky, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Nisha Ramayya, Amanda Rice and Jay G Ying.
There are artworks to see in the form of films, drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations. There are artworks to listen to in the form of soundscapes. There is an artwork to smell in the form of a perfume. There is correspondence to read in the form of love letters. There are talks to attend. There is a workshop to taste. There is a performance to witness. Take things slowly. Use your body, listen to it, be gentle with it — there’s nothing more.
Isobel Neviazsky
Isobel Neviazsky is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice rooted in drawing. On display in the gallery is a small snapshot of the work that they make prolifically, offering glimpses into the artist’s life over the last eighteen months through the drawings that they make almost every day.
These are intuitive and intimate artworks. In the drawings, line is used with honesty and grace to build figures, shapes and scenes from everyday life. Included are personal details concerning their own life, family and loved ones, as well as what are now universally recognisable circumstances from our collective experiences moving through the pandemic.
Neviazsky’s treatment of form does not stray far from elementary simplicity, and yet somehow captures a great deal of feeling and emotion with just a few marks on each page. Their choice of surfaces to draw upon is similarly straightforward. The different types of paper on display are reflective of the various spaces where the artist finds time to draw on any given day — occasionally
in the studio, or at home, or outside on walks where they frequently produce sketches in pocket-sized notebooks. Finally, the rawness of the display methods used for the work (where drawings are very simply taped to the walls) stems from a desire to retain the sense of immediacy with which Neviazsky might display work temporarily in their studio or at home.
Renèe Helèna Browne
Renèe Helèna Browne’s work for TULCA comprises four new vocal soundscapes that form part of an ongoing oral archiving project of Urania, a little-known journal which was privately published from 1916 to 1940.
Urania’s main editors were Irish poet and activist Eva Gore-Booth, English activist Esther Roper, and English lawyer Irene Clyde. Through Urania, the editors formed an informal network of 250 subscribers. The journal foregrounded fluidity as an ideal model of gender and sexuality, and each issue produced began with the statement, “There are no ‘men’ or ‘women’ in Urania.”
The publication, a black-inked A3-folded newsprint, featured a mosaic of texts ranging from reprinted articles from newspapers around the world to editorial commentaries and poetry — all of which gave readers an alternative political and cultural basis of expression on androgyny and love. These texts are currently archived at both the Glasgow Women’s Library and the London School of Economics.
Rebuilding Urania: Episode One is made up of four aural contributions by different speakers invited by the artist to read an article from Urania. Following each reading is a personal response or reflection by each contributor, opening up new discussions on this radical historical journal.
The Many Headed Hydra
The Many Headed Hydra collective is dedicated to queer and feminist ecologies, myth making and situated practices that emerge from bodies of water. The collective collaborate with inhabitants of different lands and seas to cross-connect queer-feminist and decolonial research, art making and publishing, and this is their first appearance on Irish shores.
Gently billowing towards the back of the gallery are the collective’s Oracle Flags — a series of hand-dyed and screen printed swathes of cotton that each carry a vocabulary of gestures relating to queer touch, intimacy, ritual and mythology. The Many Headed Hydra often reference different kinds of fiction and storytelling in their work, focusing on shape-shifting practices and narratives that resist categorisation and containment. In this body of work specifically, each flag refers to a moment of overlap between the Lithuanian fairy tale Egle Queen of the Grass Snakes (which includes shapeshifting across different kinds of flora and fauna) and the radical knowings of queer serpent sexualities in Gloria Anzaldua’s 1987 text Borderlands La Frontera (which uses the symbol of the snake to delve into queer matriarchal narratives in Chicano culture).
Connected to these artworks are two recent publications made by the collective, a limited number of which are available from the information space in the gallery. Making publications such as these allows The Many Headed Hydra to surreptitiously circulate their ideas further around the world and draw new voices together through invitations to kindred writers and thinkers.
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s work also taps into ideas concerning ritual and transformation of different kinds of bodies, focusing on a long-standing preoccupation with marl clay and drawing on the historical context of this substance as housing material for tenant labourers enduring precarity in 18th century Ireland.
Upon a fabricated steel autopsy table in the gallery she has constructed a kind of thermal bath for a collection of moulded ceramic spirits gathered together in an steaming earthy archipelago. These entities have been dug from the artist’s uncle’s garden in north Wexford, and they are imagined to be in a rapturous mood, caressing themselves and experiencing joy and pleasure that was never granted to them in their previous lives. These are a lively, ecstatic, orgasmic dead and they are being cared for on this tabletop which is regularly topped up with heated Galway water infused with hedera helix oil over the course of the festival.
There is an ongoing preoccupation with synthesising support systems in Ní Fhlaibhín’s installations. Materials that in some way offer up healing and nourishment (such as clay and essential oils), are a key component in her formation of sculptural mechanisms of circulation and regeneration. Her work makes space for tangible gestures of care towards humans, spirits, plants and minerals. Her work makes space for ghosts.
Adrien Howard & K Patrick
Adrien Howard & K Patrick’s new collaborative film Silence reimagines the 13th century manuscript Roman De Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle, which thematically explores ideas around sound, silence, gender, sexuality and nature. It chiefly centres on the life of a person called Silence who was born a ‘woman’ but raised as a ‘man’.
Howard & Patrick’s interpretation takes direction from both Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter, bringing the character of a rock (called Merlin) into dialogue with an armpit (called Silence), drawing out a non-linear abstracted tale of human entanglement with other kinds of organic matter. More specifically, the work explores the potential of the trans body when it can directly communicate with its surroundings.
The original text has been adapted in a hybrid style of poetic prose exploring the relationship between Silence and Merlin, and is delivered by a disembodied voice in the film (spoken by Rabindranath Bhose). Through this interpretation of the original text the artists emphasise the awkwardness and illegibility of the trans body in our cis heteronormative society. The armpit becomes attuned to this as a bodily site that is both erotic and removed from the semiotics of a gender binary, leaving it neither ‘male’ or ‘female’.
Visually, the work comprises filmed footage, overlayed on occasion with text written using a paintbrush made of armpit hair. Aurally, as well as the spoken narrative, a soundtrack composed by Simone Seales and Sonia Killmann gives ‘voices’ to the armpit (cello) and the rock (saxophone).
Tonya McMullan
For TULCA this year Tonya McMullan has created a scent for the festival which appears close to the entrance of each exhibition venue across the city. This artwork, titled There’s something in the æther, takes the form of a limited edition perfume (and accompanying scented hand sanitiser) for you to sample, smell and wear if you wish.
It contains water from the Corrib river; honey from Galway bees; rainwater from Edinburgh; and a careful mix of hedione, geosmin, and isoamyl acetate. The particular chemical compounds in this scent have been selected to encourage our bodies to consider togetherness and intimacy in new ways after such a long period of isolation over the course of the pandemic. Beside the scent in each venue you will find a postcard with further details on this olfactory proposition.
Loving Correspondence
You will also find a letter written by Claire Biddles on a wall of the gallery.
This text forms part of the publication for TULCA 2021, which comprises a small folio of intimate correspondence written over the past year from writers and poets in different parts of the world including Sophia Al-Maria, Claire Biddles, CAConrad, Theodore Kerr, Sekai Machache, Mira Mattar, Mícheál McCann, Nisha Ramayya and Jay G Ying.
These are letters of love and longing, written towards someone or something just out of reach.
Further letters are on display at the other festival venues, as well as in the windows of Galway City Library. You can purchase the full set of letters in person at the An Post gallery, or online at tulca.ie. 50% of the proceeds from all sales of the publication will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians. You can find out more about their work at map.org.uk