Documentation of Public Programme | TULCA 2023
Part Two: Artist Talks
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2023 programme, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais.
In part two of four of our digital content we present documentation of the TULCA Artist Talks Series in partnership with ATU School of Creative Arts & Media and Pálás Cinema.
Curator’s Talk | Iarlaith Ní Fheorais | ATU
Artist Talk | Rouzbeh Shadpey | Pálás
Artist Talk | Sarah Browne | TULCA Gallery
Artist Talk | Bridget O’Gorman | Pálás
Gain an insight into the curation of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise. Curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais provides an overview of the festival theme and the curatorial principles that have guided her programme of unique artworks and events.
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais is a curator and writer, recently the curator of the 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. As a writer she has written for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal, Girls Like Us, and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, KW Institute, Konstfack University and Arts and Disability Ireland. Committed to anti-ableism in the arts, she published a free online access toolkit for art-workers in 2023.
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. His musical practice exists under the moniker GOLPESAR. He is based between Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and Berlin.
Forgetting Is The Sun (2023) is a video-essay that seeks to restore dignity to the act of forgetting. The video-essay juxtaposes footage from the artist's grandmother - who remains silent in the face of a medical memory test being administered to her by an acousmatic narrator - with borrowed footage from two essay films which challenge state sanctioned regimes of remembering: the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), and the Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and writer Ahmed Bouanani’s Mémoire 14 (1967). Weaving together the falsely dichotomized registers of biological memory and collective history, Forgetting is the Sunrecontextualizes Farrokhzad and Bouanani’s defiance of state sanctioned remembrance through the lens of individual forgetting - and its resistance to medical capture.
Sarah Browne is an artist concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, and frequent interdisciplinary collaboration.
Echo’s Bones (2022). A collaborative film-making project made with autistic young people in North County Dublin. The project borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in that landscape of Fingal, where now an old asylum building meets the coastline. Beckett’s plays are populated with people who might move with difficulty, mutter over each other, talk into the dark or not speak at all. The project questions why such neurodivergent or disabled styles of communication may be treated poorly in everyday situations, but valued as artistically exciting in others. It is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, art, and world could be like.
Bridget O’Gorman is a visual artist and writer. Using text, live event, video and sculptural installation, her work explores the body as material, considering otherness, the speculative and expanded corporeal experience. Bridget recently reached an impasse in the way that she works due to the deterioration of a permanent spinal injury known as Cauda Equina Syndrome.
Support | Work (2023) is a sculptural installation, forming an ecosystem of balance and precariousness reflecting on what it means to support and be supported and ultimately how we affect one another. The sculptures are large-scale ‘mobiles’: reflecting upon ideas of support and equilibrium, and created using found and fabricated media, using pulleys, parts from mobility aids, and hoists. The sculptures are informed by support and access, but were also produced through access, made with a support worker. A commission supported by Arts & Disability Ireland’s Connect+ Award 2023.
Contributors to honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise include: Áine O’Hara, Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Bog Cottage, Bridget O'Gorman, Edward Lawrenson & Pia Borg, Holly Márie Parnell, Jamila Prowse, Jenny Brady, Leila Hekmat, Nat Raha, P. Staff, Paul Roy, Philipp Gufler, Rouzbeh Shadpey, Sarah Browne and Sean Burns.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise
Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
3 - 19 November 2023
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie
Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo credits: Ros Kavanagh