Celebrating 20 years of TULCA
"After two decades of producing contemporary art, it’s tempting to indulge in a nostalgic backward glance. Indeed, TULCA has produced important work that has highlighted social inequalities, brought audiences to hidden pockets of our city and county and opened conversations about how we might address the world in a new key. But, as this edition of TULCA curated by Clare Gormley reminded us, to be contemporary requires accepting the future as abiding yet unknowable.
Making a festival is a very tangible thing, something acutely felt staging an exhibition against a backdrop of inclement weather and spatial squeeze. The future on the other hand seems free of these limitations. Rather it represents an expansive vista of mercurial possibility, where apocalypse and perfection are equally close at hand. The effect is a future at once enticing and terrifying, a pressure of possibility that encourages the maintenance of the status quo while we tussle over what ‘might be.’ This year’s festival asks us to break away from these conversations that, like a finely tuned Rube-Golberg machine circuitously return us to an unchanging present.
Instead, it prompts us to interrogate the forces that atrophy talk about the future. What emerges are works that employ a variety of languages to explore the forces that animate the material world. From cartography to dance, poetry to photography, installation and film, artists in the festival are interested in the unspoken dialogues between nature and its persistent reorganisation in and through language, history, technology and geometry. The celebration of processes and the ‘in-progress’ here remind us that the future is not some far-flung province. Rather, the future exists in the present moment in the same way that the past reverberates in the now.
If we abandon the prospect of conquering the future (successfully or otherwise,) we are left with a curious alternative. The acknowledgement that the future abides with us, constitutive of the present in the same way as the past. This makes the ‘contemporary’ a striking mix of historical narrative and unvoiced claims. Accepted as something impossible to objectively know, we learn that; “the life in expectation is our constant present” a reality that there is no objective perspective on either past or future.1 Far from being a nihilistic claim, the conversations opened in this iteration of TULCA echo an imperative that drives our annual making of a festival. That we should in ways small, surprising, poetic and yes, imperfect step tangibly into a future of our own (re)making.
On this, our 20th edition, the board of TULCA would like to thank those that help us explore the past and future of our present moment. Our fabulous team and the funders, local businesses, institutions and audiences who help us make this tangible thing.
Here’s to its future!"
Lucy Elvis
On Behalf of the TULCA Board of Directors
Archive video: Jonathan Sammon / Music credit: Jonathan Sammon
Lead image credit: Michael John Whelan, From the Mountain (2014), still from single channel HD video, monochrome, sound, 9:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai.
Supported by the Arts Council Ireland | Galway City Council | Galway County Council
