TULCA 2018

TULCA November 2 - 18, 2018 curated by Linda Shevlin

www.tulcafestival.com

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artists

Bassam Al-Sabah Cyprien Gaillard Mark Garry Sadhbh Gaston Aoibheann Greenan Helen Hughes Jesse Jones Mark Leckey Colin Martin Stella Rahola Matutes Eleanor McCaughey Conor McGarrigle Dennis McNulty Paul Murnaghan Gavin Murphy Laura Ní Fhlaibhín Ciarán Óg Arnold Ciara O’Kelly Deirdre O’Mahony Rosie O’Reilly The Domestic Godless Marcel Vidal Susanne Wawra 2

It is an honour to introduce syntonic state for TULCA this year. This should be a fresh and engaging presentation of material through performance, film, artworks, events and talks.

TULCA would not be possible without the dedication and commitment of the TULCA team. We welcome David Finn as our new producer having handled the role of production manager over the years with a deft touch. David takes over from Kate Howard who, along with Denise McDonagh, have moved on to fresh pastures. We must also thank Joanna McGlynn, Hilary Morley and Judith Bernhardt for their sterling work in Education and Engagement, and, our Volunteer Co-Ordinator, Susan Roche, who will muster a squadron of volunteers whose work is equally indispensable to the success of TULCA. We are equally indebted to institutional support from GMIT, NUIG and Saolta University Health Care Group. Claire Doyle, James Harrold and Sharon O’Grady merit special attention in their roles with the Arts Council and Galway City and County Councils.

Finally, we must thank those who have offered TULCA the use of their space: 126, Columban Hall, Fairgreen House, Galway Arts Centre, NUIG Gallery, The Fisheries Tower, Biteclub @ Electric Galway, Sheridans and the O’Donoghue Centre, NUIG.

syntonic state is curated by Linda Shevlin. We, the board of TULCA, recognised an ambition, audacity and organisational flair when selecting Linda Shevlin for this year’s festival of visual arts. Linda has established a reputation as an artist and curator who explores facets of our contemporary world in all its complexity. Her various projects are characterised by a collaborative approach, often in rural contexts, and reveal a sensitivity to that which is perceived as marginalised or peripheral.

From her base in Roscommon, Linda has also been developing what she has called a ‘nomadic approach’ as she develops projects in non-art spaces around the county. This sensibility coupled with a solid track record of delivering on the international stage resonates with what TULCA itself aspires to be.

I will admit I was unsure as to what a syntonic state actually is. I thought I may well have entered one in my more reckless days. But no, it turns out to be what I have been seeking all this time.

It is to be responsive to and in harmony with the surrounding environment so that any action is appropriate to the situation. So while I write on the eve of TULCA 2018, I am aware of the various new commissions and events planned which will draw local history and tradition through this idea in the hope that we may (re)orientate ourselves towards the world we now find ourselves in. To be critically charged on the cusp of hope is to chime once again with what TULCA aspires to be.

TULCA is now 16 years old and on the brink of adulthood. syntonic state is a welcome addition to those years of development and maturation. I have no doubt it will continue the tradition of rich critical engagement with the locale established by previous curators and TULCA teams. I hope it contributes to setting further the foundations of future TULCA’s. I hope you will enjoy all it has to offer.

Gavin Murphy Chairperson TULCA Festival of Visual Art

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launch syntonic state TULCA 18

Aoibheann Greenan The Life of Riley TULCA presents a major newly commissioned performance, The Life of Riley, by Aoibheann Greenan.

On the 12th of September every year, a flag is raised in Clifden Co. Galway; on the same date in Mexico City, an Irish Flag is raised. Two disparate communities are united symbolically on this day by a shared cultural memory: the story of the St. Patrick’s Battalion formed by Captain John Riley of Clifden, Galway. The latter were a group of (predominantly) Irish soldiers who deserted the US army to fight alongside Mexico during the War of American Intervention in 1847. The San Patricios are lauded as heroes in Mexico, with schools, streets and churches named after them, along with a plaque in the Mexician Parliament honouring their contribution. For the opening of Tulca, Aoibheann Greenan has invited members of the St. Patrick’s Battalion Pipe and Drum Band from Mexico City to lead a commemorative procession through a planned route in Galway. Along the way, local performers will narrate the biography of Captain John Riley, the Clifden-born leader of the battalion.

Friday 2 November 2018 8pm / Launch Reception TULCA Festival Gallery, Fairgreen House

9pm / The Life of Riley performance by Aoibheann Greenan

This heroic underdog tale resonates strongly with the concepts of nostalgia and displacement underwriting TULCA 2018 thematic. Greenan identifies these connected processes at play in ‘creative cities’ such as Galway; heritage industries tend to treat history as a malleable resource for legitimating neoliberal forms of organizing; meanwhile property markets promote the creative ‘character’ of certain neighbourhoods, while dispossessing the original residents that produced it. As Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia, writes, “it is algia—the longing—that we share, but nostos—the return home—that divides.” The artist responds to this situation by asking how nostalgic capital might be recoded and repurposed for the commons? How might a détournement of cultural value enable us to construct new social imaginaries? The Life of Riley plays with contradiction and ambiguity in an effort to reanimate ongoing struggles for what Henri Lefebvre called “the right to the city.”

TULCA Festival Gallery, Fairgreen House

10pm / Afterparty Biteclub Electric, Galway

Documentation of The Life of Riley will be installed in the Fishery Watchtower from November 5th - 18th.

This performance is commissioned by TULCA with additional support from Fingal County Council.

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What is a syntonic state?

Linda Shevlin

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We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion.

Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.1 These lines are lifted from the opening of Adam Curtis’ film Hypernormalisation.

To be syntonic, or perhaps more accurately, to be ‘culturally syntonic’ in psychology terms is to be emotionally in harmony with our environment.

But when that environment is so volatile, unfamiliar, precarious, where do we find refuge? This spiralling sense of paralysis has led us to being in the state we are in. We regress and look backwards to a time when things seemed simpler, we nostalgise. A contemporary wave of nostalgic revelry forms part of a continuum of nostalgic discourse that repeats itself until its signifiers exist without true recollection of the original. A certain aesthetic style speaks of a kind of nostalgia that is, even momentarily, entirely ahistorical. It is capable of being consumed independently of any emotional investment in the times and places to which the style alludes. In turn, nostalgia becomes a powerful political device. The fear and anger of those who feel most aggrieved by rapid change or loss continue to redefine the political landscape.

Early on in the process of curating syntonic state, before it had a title or any direction, I was revisiting a work by Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. I must have watched this a dozen times and felt an inexplicable pull towards this work, the compulsion to repeatedly watch this film was irrepressible. Leckey has openly spoken about the effect making this work had on him. “I had an overwhelming nostalgia for Britain, I had a nostalgia for my youth, it was like a sickeness, kind of debilitating, I was so saturated in nostalgia I made this to exorcise these feelings of lost youth, lost Britain” 2 . I’m of a similar generation to Mark Leckey, had comparable taste in music and I shared Leckey’s nostalgic impulses towards a time when things felt more in my control, the world felt more contained, I didn’t have to deal with the trauma of being an adult in a very troubled society.

Leckey described the process of making Fiorucci as a form of exorcism, taking existing footage of raves and nightclub scenes to reassemble memories of his youth. syntonic state has taken on a similar configuration to Leckey’s editing. Compiling artworks that are underpinned by a yearning to understand nostalgia, its cultural links with revelry & hedonism, our fascination with retro future aesthetics and the fetishisation of obsolete technologies.

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Adam Curtis on his film Hypernormalisation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c

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Mark Leckey talks about Fiorucci Made me Hardcore, 2013. https://vimeo.com/63769157

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Galway is a city that’s very familiar to me. Although not from here, I spent much of my mis-spent youth as a pseudo new-age traveller in the clubs and pubs of this city, longing to be part of the Galway tribe. I realised Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore was taking me back to here, to this city. I shared his overwhelming nostalgia and longing for a lost youth, a lost place.

TULCA 2018, syntonic state, takes dual cues from Galway’s merchant and mariner histories, along with this concept of nostalgia, as the premise for this years festival. Initially founded as a military base and urban site offering sanctuary to early colonists, Galway – derived from the Gaelic Gaillimh, meaning ‘Town of Strangers’ – ultimately became a settlement of foreign freemen. Burgeoning trade routes and increased commerce influenced the evolution of Galway as a city, creating a newlyformed social stratum – that of the merchant classes. These historical developments arguably influenced the social and cultural diversity for which Galway has since become renowned.

Introduced in the seventeenth century, the term nostalgia denoted a common condition among Swiss mercenaries who displayed symptoms of: extreme homesickness, sentimental longing, or wistful affection for the past. Historically described as a “disorder of the imagination”, nostalgia is now viewed as an emotion, rather than a physical condition. However, nostalgia does not always concern the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. For many twentieth-century societies – including cultures that were globally displaced, marginalised from the cultural mainstream, or forged by eccentric traditions – a creative rethinking of nostalgia was not merely an artistic device, but a survival strategy. Such processes sought to make sense of the stateless condition, the impossibility of a homecoming, or a return to the halcyon days of a bygone era. This sense of grappling with displacement creates a desire to find one’s place in the world; to be ‘culturally syntonic’.

Festivals differ from exhibitions in that they have the ability to shapeshift, to expand outside the parameters and confinement of the gallery space, weave in and out of the fabric of the city. In many ways, curating TULCA requires a reverse engineering. As a curator you generally have a sense of the space you are working with. When looking at and selecting works I generally visualise the space the work will be sited in, how it with function in relation to the architecture, the works around it, the flow of people through the space. In the context of TULCA, that clarity comes later. The shifting of venues and the search for offsite locations means there needs to be a fluidity around the ‘where’ and ‘how’ work is presented. Galway city becomes a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are buildings, streets and pockets of space, waiting to be populated with objects, provocations and interuptions to the everyday #Rise&Grind and #Hustle3 of the city.

Occupying spaces that have their own historical legacy and baggage, spaces that aren’t generally accostumed to hosting these objects leads to a shift in their function and purpose. And that’s what’s really exciting about TULCA. 3 #Rise&Grind. By Conor McGarrigle. #RiseandGrind is a generative installation that explores the rules and norms of global internet social media culture through the lens of two hashtags, #RiseandGrind and #Hustle. The hashtags captured, #RiseandGrind and #Hustle, represent the globalised embodiment of the values of a neoliberal culture that gets up early and self-exploits, success in the sharing gig economy is only achievable by getting up earlier and grinding that bit harder, by bringing even more hustle to the game. #Rise&Grind is installed in Fairgreen House.

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TULCA is delighted to present a newly commissioned performance by Aoibheann Greenan as part of the launch celebrations. Aoibheann has invited members of the St. Patrick’s Battalion Pipe and Drum Band from Mexico City to lead a procession in commemoration of Clifden born Captain John Riley who deserted the US army to fight alongside Mexico during the War of American Intervention in 1847. This heroic underdog tale resonates strongly with the concepts of nostalgia and displacement underwriting TULCA thematic. The procession will take us from Fairgreen House to the TULCA afterparty at Electric Galway where Mark Leckey’s work is installed.

The festival is punctuated with other events that also expand on the festival thematic including a discussion between author Owen Hatherley and Declan Long where Hatherley will discuss his book The Ministry of Nostalgia. The O’Donoghue Centre in NUIG will host a screening of HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis, which will be introduced by Conn Holohan from the Huston Film School. Curtis’ films are known for scrutinising the new narcissistic culture of the self and its relationship to 1960s counter-culture, the birth of the internet and technology networks.

To mark the conclusion of syntonic state, TULCA in partnership with CERERE present a newly commissioned event by The Domestic Godless. Inspired by the theme of Cereal Renaissance in Rural Europe (CERERE), Gruts Buffet will explore the culturally and historically entangled relationship between society and food, elucidating ironies, complexities, and contested narratives from distinctive heritage varieties. The audience will also comprise members of Deirdre O’Mahony’s Mind Meitheal and the exterior of the building will be drapped with Sadhbh Gaston’s Grain Series banners.

Several of this year’s works make connections to lost futures which brought me back to reading Mark Fisher’s writings around ‘The slow cancellation of the future’. While reading FIsher, I had to remind myself of Derrida’s use of ‘hauntology’ as being our inability to encounter things as being fully present. In all our experiences the present is always mixed up with the past and the future. We can only make sense of a present moment by comparing it with the past. Our experiences are always haunted, haunted by that which no longer exists and by that which does not yet exist. Mark Fisher’s use of the term hauntology is more in reference to a cultural hauntology, the way we are haunted by our past in our media, art and entertainment, people are no longer trying to anticipate the future or trying to conceive new worlds leading to revivalism and pastiche. Many of the works presented at this year’s TULCA embody the anxiety surrounding these ideas, shaping the narrative of a syntonic state.

Our experiences are always haunted, haunted by that which no longer exists and by that which does not yet exist.

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Feed Your Head: The Speculative Futures of Rave Joanne Laws 10

A hoarder friend was having a clear-out and handed me an old ticket: SJM presents MANCHESTER MEGADOG Featuring Eat Static + Egebamyasi + Imperium WEDNESDAY 22nd MARCH 1995 Manchester Academy Doors 9pm – 4am More often than not, our student days blur into one continuous party, with vague memories occasionally thickening around significant moments. Sometimes we recall locations – a warehouse in Hume, an afterparty in a Sheffield basement, a church in Birmingham where the dawn streamed so euphorically through stained-glass windows, that the entire crowd shifted one step closer to God... Occasionally dates are the most memorably factor. Who can forget the frenzied countdown to the new millennium that ushered in the digital age? Computers were still pretty abstract things in those days, and the catastrophic threat posed by the Y2K bug seemed so irrelevant, that it may as well have been happening in a distant galaxy1.

As a material artefact, this ticket betrays me on many levels.

It is forcing me to formalise these memories against my will, defying the fuzzy impulses of nostalgia, by anchoring me to a specific time and place. Collapsing time, it casually exposes everything that has since become outmoded – music subcultures, technology, even certain recreational drugs.

To stare at an old ticket is to confront personal aging with gratitude, thankful for an era when mid-week raves were an acceptable way to spend your time. Now I’m googling, not expecting to find very much...

On YouTube, you can view a three-minute promotional video, ‘A short taste of Megadog filmed at the Manchester Academy, Spring 1995’. It’s quite a spectacular experience, to see an off-the-radar, half-forgotten moment from your past, being plucked from the depths of cyberspace. When returning to a place that I’ve previously spent a lot of time, I half expect to see ghosts of myself in the street, going about everyday business. This feels like the same kind of ‘non-place’ – an astral projection, a virtual glitch, a temporal disjuncture between then and now – that somehow belongs to neither domain. The YouTube description explains that dips in the sound quality are attributable to the footage being “rescued from an ailing VHS copy.” Filmed on cutting-edge video equipment at the time, this grainy footage not only exposes the era’s technological deficiencies, but manifests the hazy and ambiguous qualities of memory itself. Such anachronistic conjuring of videotape via the internet serves to contain the event (to a specific place and date), while simultaneously unleashing it onto a global arena, subjecting us to the contemporary forces of retrospective digital surveillance.

The soundtrack accompanying the film is Gulf Breeze (Sasha Remix) by Eat Static – a live electronic music act with Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton, former members of the psychedelic rock band, Ozric Tentacles. The spiralling melody and whomping bassline situate the event within a burgeoning wave of Acid Trance, a spacier version of Techno that fused Acid House with the psychedelic and new age scenes of the mid-90s. The dark, smoke-filled nightclub is illuminated in

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disorientating flashes. Intermittent strobe lighting reveals a dense, rippling sea of sweat-covered bodies. Synchronised light sequences throw laser beams across the crowd, like the panopticon hunting for escaped prisoners in the dead of night.

Against a backdrop of hallucinogenic video projections, we can see silhouettes of stage-dancers, waving arms, flailing dreadlocks, topless men, all high as kites and oscillating at the same frequency. As a feverish, sleep-defying impulse, rave was felt most explicitly at the level of the body.

Filmed in the context of a nightclub, the footage is historically underpinned by rave’s contentious relationship with bricksand-mortar. Rave culture emerged in the UK during the late 80s, when DJs began to run Balearic club-nights in London, inspired by Ibiza’s all-night beach parties. By mid-1988 – nicknamed the ‘Second Summer of Love’, because it coincided with the UK’s first significant influx of Ecstasy – illegal raves and outdoor parties were springing up spontaneously all over the British countryside, in fields, aircraft hangars and abandoned warehouses. In 1994, the widely contested Criminal Justice Act (which banned trespassing, squatting and many forms of public protest) gave police the power to shut down ‘unauthorised gatherings’ featuring music characterised by ‘the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. Organisers responded by running ticketed events in nightclubs and private members’ clubs. Coupled with relaxed licensing laws, a thriving circuit of commercial all-night raves emerged across Britain’s urban, suburban and provincial nightclubs. The Megadog began as Club Dog, a multimedia event in an obscure venue in North London, which aimed to “recreate the festival environment indoors”2. Megadog later morphed into a touring dance music event, before taking up monthly residencies in The Rocket in North London and the Manchester Academy.

There’s Life in the North Beyond the physical venue, the footage also alludes to the conceptual space of the nightclub, as an important countercultural site of hedonistic abandon. With a “policy of inclusivity”, Megadog events attracted a diverse mix of subcultures, from punks, goths, indie kids and drag queens, to new age travellers, boy racers and casuals. According to one of the cofounders, Megadog was a place where “new age met rock, met acid house, met reggae, met squat culture, met cabaret, met film night, met installation”3. It was a space of “unbridled bacchanalia4, where loved-up skinheads embraced saucer-eyed hippies and rubber-necking cultural tourists”5.

Many have argued that rave culture transcended divisions of class, gender, age, sexuality and race, creating levels of heterogeneity not seen in previous or subsequent youth movements. Some suggest that rave was a place of freedom, collectivity and community, at a time when such democratic spaces in public life were being rapidly eroded.

The footage cuts from the dancefloor to a raver queuing in the street outside. He is well-spoken, his cheeks sparkle with glitter and he is wearing a Parka – a style of jacket associated with British mods of the late sixties and revived by Britpop.

“There’s life in the North” he says. “Maybe it’s something to do with the Northern struggle of the early years. It’s much more lively; the blood’s more mixed”. During the 1980s under

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As a feverish, sleepdefying impulse, rave was felt most explicitly at the level of the body.

Absorbing the defiant spirit of activism, rave resisted the divisive hierarchies and control mechanisms of modern British society by creating “hidden arenas of pleasure in the nighttime economy’’

Thatcherism, Britain experienced severe recession, the decline of industry, the decimation of trade unions and the highest levels of youth unemployment seen in half a century.

A growing ‘north-south divide’ created unprecedented levels of regional inequality, felt most prevalently in former industrial regions like Greater Manchester6. Above all, this period saw the proliferation of the neoliberal ideology that “individuals should pursue their personal goals within atomised societies.”7 General political unrest continued into the 90s – expressed through the Poll Tax riots, Criminal Justice Act protests and Reclaim the Streets demonstrations, among others. This provided the political backdrop of rave, framing its embodied connectivity as an act of rebellion. Absorbing the defiant spirit of activism, rave resisted the divisive hierarchies and control mechanisms of modern British society by creating “hidden arenas of pleasure in the night-time economy’’8.

Though constituted by spatially diverse ‘scenes’ and locations – nightclubs, afterparties, street parties and festivals – rave fundamentally hinged on the production of hedonistic space9.

As described by German artist Wolfgang Tillmans (who was heavily involved in Hamburg’s Acid House scene after the fall of the Berlin Wall) hedonism is a highly political gesture that articulates “the right to party, take up space, and control one’s body and identity”10.

Altered States: Transcending Place, Body, Mind This found footage from a rave in the mid-90s tells us a lot about a culturally-ripe moment in British music history, however, it can be difficult to preserve it from the carnivorous forces of nostalgia, mythology and ‘retromania’. Potentially more interesting is the relationship between rave culture and ‘the future’ – particularly a speculative future, as it may have been anticipated and conceptualised in 1995. Inevitably, such retrospective readings are tainted with our knowledge of what has since transpired.

As evident in the film, one of the most pressing characteristics of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) was its reliance on analogue recording equipment and rudimentary digital technology that has since become outmoded or obsolete11. The era’s largescale mobile sound systems comprised hardware such as record turntables, synthesisers, drum machines and samplers – computerised devices that convert sound into digital code (zeros and ones), allowing pre-recorded music to be copied, rearranged and replayed. Unlike many DJs of the time, Eat Static created their distinctive sound through technically demanding 52-channel live mixes. In the footage, hefty greenscreen monitors, connected via endless wiring, provide cumbersome interfaces for tasks that could be easily carried out nowadays with a simple laptop or iPhone. Around this time, software engineers in California were working on Java, a computer-programming language that would later become the dominant software for internet browser applications.

However, in 1995, digital technology was still generally seen as something vaguely futuristic, yet it was embraced by EDM as a vehicle to map and interrogate the collective imagination.

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Across post-war popular culture, electronic music had been synonymous with general articulations of ‘the future’. While EDM was broadly perceived as a future-orientated musical genre, the soundscapes and visual iconology of Acid Trance brought these futuristic associations to a whole new level.

Firstly, the influence of Science Fiction on Acid Trance is widely evident. Where early rave culture drew on Sci-Fi’s visualisations of dystopian futures, nuclear contamination and apocalypse – with clubwear featuring boiler suits, gas masks, glow sticks and radioactive symbolism – Acid Trance’s socio-sonic aesthetic assimilated Sci-Fi’s imaginings on “the cosmic liminality of space exploration”12. Eat Static took their name from a quote in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), when Khan declares “Let them eat static” – with static suggesting a form of transmission, making its way across the dark galaxy and suffusing everything in its path. Eat Static’s first album, Abduction, expressed the band members’ shared interest in extraterrestial life and ufology, informed by the modern-day folklore of their hometown of Somerset, the site of mysterious crop circles and alleged alien abductions in the early 70s. Repurposing the figure of the alien as a potent symbol of dislocation, exile and ‘otherness’, Acid Trance used psychedelic event-culture to infiltrate the dance floor, “that orgiastic domain in which a multitude of freedoms are performed, mutant utopias propagated, and alien identities danced into being” 13.

Secondly, Acid Trance – also known as ‘intellectual techno’14 – took influence from the ritualistic and transcendental practices of eastern spirituality. As the DJ bounces onstage in front of the crowd, we read the words ‘Feed Your Head’ on the back of his vest. In the footage, cloud formations gather on the screen, offering visual and cerebral connections with Ambient music pioneers, The Orb, who released Little Fluffy Clouds in 1990.

Other projections feature spiral symbolism, alluding to rave culture’s tribalistic roots in the Stonehenge Free Festival of the mid-70s. This annual festival was held at the prehistoric Stonehenge monument – a powerful site associated with energy ley lines and pagan sun worship – until 1985, when it was suppressed in a violent clash with authorities that became known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

Lastly, the Acid Trance movement manifested a widespread suspicion about the infiltration of digital technology, still perceived as something mesmerisingly futuristic and ‘otherworldly’. According to political theorist Fredric Jameson, who began theorising the ‘technological sublime’ in the early 90s, “technology represents contemporary society’s ‘other’…[an] anti-natural power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery – an alienated power”15. Eat Static’s live shows were themed around Artificial Intelligence, resonating with the transcendentalist fantasies of cyberpunk fiction that juxtaposed scientific advancements in cybernetics with a radical breakdown in societal order. Augmented and posthuman lifeforms were common motifs, as was the robot or cyborg, described by Donna Haraway a decade earlier as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” who is, without question, the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”16. Eat Static’s stage sets frequently featured large Day-Glo models of brains, surrounded by dense webs of electrical circuitry, perceived as the matrixed site of augmented intelligence and expanded consciousness. If, as

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Repurposing the figure of the alien as a potent symbol of dislocation, exile and ‘otherness’, Acid Trance used psychedelic eventculture to infiltrate the dance floor, “that orgiastic domain in which a multitude of freedoms are performed, mutant utopias propagated, and alien identities danced into being”

Haraway suggested, “liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness”, then the driving narratives of Acid Trance – extraterrestial encounters, digital infiltration and spiritual transcendence – propagated ‘altered states’, through which to depart the planet, mind and body that we currently inhabit.

Any journey (intergalactic or otherwise) became a narrative of self-metamorphosis.

Rave Undead

Joanne Laws is an arts writer and Features Editor of the Visual Artists’ News

It is no coincidence that, with the dawn of the internet in the early 90s, Jacques Derrida began conceptualising his theory of hauntology – a zeitgeist of Marxist revivalism that would, ironically and symptomatically, come to ‘haunt’ postmodern critical theory. Derrida defined hauntology as a “disjuncture of temporalities”, best expressed as a time that is “out of joint”17. Expanding the applications of hauntology, cultural theorist Mark Fisher conceived the contemporary moment as being ‘haunted’ by “all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate” 18. Such futures – including the heterogenous cultures of resistance and transcendence conjured by rave culture – were ultimately prevented, derailed or cut short by capitalism. Through a lifetime of writing, Fisher skilfully analysed the hauntological confluences occurring in popular music, highlighting a continual progression towards ‘the futuristic’ between the early-1960s and mid-90s.

After this time, the “very possibility of imagining a future was superseded by existing technologies”. By 2005, Fisher noted that “electronica was no longer capable of evoking a future that felt strange or dissonant... Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection.” After this point, subcultures began to lose their vitality, morphing into a series of “temporal drifts”, characterised by the “remixing and plundering of already existing genres”. For Fisher, the futures that were lost were more than a matter of musical style. More troublingly, this “disappearance of the future” also meant the “deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination”. In other words, it marked the melancholy demise of our “capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live” 19.

Via the internet’s nonlinear streams of mass-mediation, rave as a dead movement makes its apparitional ‘return’.

Untethered to time and place, chronology and narrative, this undead footage is now free to roam, flitting from screen to screen as a networked, immaterial incarnation. Even more problematic than the separation of the film from its distinctive cultural history, is the reality that it can be instantaneously downloaded and consumed without any obvious sense of this anachronism. The fact that the footage predates the mass self-surveillance of our smartphone age, only further enhances its sense of voyeuristic infringement, as we observe the predigital bodies that feature in this short videoclip. Emerging instantaneously without context from another temporality, these fragmented, encoded, virtual bodies – made more foreign through grainy reproduction and outdated fashion – appear as low-res interlocutors from the past. These bodies are real, but within the hyperconnected landscapes of the internet, their realism is compromised. As untouchable, weightless abstractions, their ghostliness is made explicit through hallucinogenic flashes, a phantasmic semi-presence conjured in Day-Glo.

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Sheet (IRL).

1 Notes:

The Y2K bug, also known as the Millennium bug, was a computer glitch associated with the formatting of calendar data at the start of the twenty-first century. It was anticipated that with the advent of the year 2000, problems would arise in relation to the four-digit date format, necessitating computers worldwide to be upgraded, in order to prevent widespread system failures.

2

Andy Fyfe, ‘A Cosmic Dog’, Record Collector (December 2015) p 55.

3 Ibid.

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Bacchanalia – Roman festivals of Bacchus, celebrated with ecstatic revelry, dancing and song.

5

Andy Fyfe, ‘A Cosmic Dog’, Record Collector (December 2015) p 56.

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As a post-industrial region, Manchester remained an epicentre of countless musical subcultures. Building on the momentum of Northern Soul, a Motown-influenced dance movement of the late 1960s, Manchester’s Punk and post-Punk scenes produced bands like the Buzzcocks, the Fall, Joy Division and then New Order. Indie acts like James and the Smiths were followed by the emergence of ‘Madchester’ in the 80s, which merged with Acid House culture to produce bands such as the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets.

Supported by a network of alternative record labels (most famously Factory Records) and venues (including the Haçienda, co-owned by members of New Order and Factory’s Tony Wilson), the city’s distinctive music culture was fuelled by its associations with Manchester, often featuring place-related references and channelling localised experiences.

7

Alistair Fraser, ‘Spaces, Politics and Cultural Economies of EDM’, Geography Compass, 6(8), 2012, p 502.

8

Ibid. p503.

9

See Goulding, C., Shankar, A. and Elliott, R. ‘Working weeks, rave weekends: identity fragmentation and the emergence of new communities’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 5(2), 2002, pp. 261-284.

10 Ha Duong, ‘Photographers Who Captured the Ecstasy and Abandon of Rave Culture’, 7 September 2018 www.artsy.net 11 It’s worth noting that the tactile interactions offered by certain analogue devices have experienced a nostalgic revival in the digital age.

12 Graham St John ‘The Vibe of the Exiles: Aliens, Afropsychedelia and Psyculture’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5(2), 2013, p56.

13 Ibid.

14 By the mid-90s, the term ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ (IDM) was commonly used to denote a whole form of ambient electronic music, with prominent artists including Aphex Twin, Autechre and The Orb. The compilation series released via Warp, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (1992-4), is widely cited as the start IDM. 15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso 1991) p38.

16 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 15(2), 1985, p65.

17 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, Trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge 1994) p49.

18 Mark Fisher ‘What Is Hauntology?’ Film Quarterly, 66(1), Fall 2012, p16.

19 Ibid.

16

artists

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Bassam Al-Sabah Wandering wandering with a sun on my back NUIG GALLERY MON – FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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Wandering wandering with a sun on my back is a new CGI film work by Bassam Al-Sabah that relates to war and unrealised childhood fantasies. The work is informed by a specific series of Japanese anime that were dubbed in Arabic in the 1980s and broadcast across the Middle East. In these animations the protagonists where often depicted protecting their homelands from the outside invader. The film looks at representations of hyper-masculinity that is often directed at children and the potential distortions of reality and future that these images may cause.

Wandering wandering with the sun on my back depicts various human representations within dwellings that cannot be escaped, dwellings that are positioned in landscapes that oscillate between dystopian and utopian scenery.

Both archival and fictional dialogue, narrate the moving images, creating a sense of a dislocated reality.

Tackling themes of revolution, war and exile, Al-Sabah’s works consider the influence and agendas of these Japanese anime on Arab popular culture. His work is often concerned with how the past is continually revised to meet the present, when the juvenile fantasy breaks down into the reality of adulthood. Displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology play a significant role within his work as it tries to capture a recollection that is not fixed, but rather an amalgamation of various narratives both false and true that have collapsed into each other causing the sensation of falsified memory and trauma.

The newly commissioned film will be shown alongside existing sculptural works.

Wandering wandering with the sun on my back is supported by the Arab Culture Fund (AFAC) and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Wandering wandering with a sun on my back, 2018, digital render, dimensions variable.

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Cyprien Gaillard Cities of Gold and Mirrors 126 ARTIST RUN GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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A series of vignettes take place in the Mexican city of Cancún, drawing attention to the relationship between architecture, time and experience, and the confrontation between ancient and modern culture. The film shows a group of young spring breakers drinking bottles of tequila which are emblazoned with Mayan iconography on their labels. We see dolphins idly swimming past Brutalist architecture and a gang member dressed in a bright red bandana covering his hair and face, performing a ritualistic dance in the ancient El Ray ruins that sit on the edge of this hedonistic Mecca.

An interior courtyard teems with hanging plants as though nature is on the verge of taking over culture; a mirrored building wobbles and is brought to the ground with a controlled explosion; and the lighting rig of a nightclub casts its lasers as though a spaceship. Uniting each film is the sound of mystical, futuristic synthesizers, taken from The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a FrenchJapanese cartoon about Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors in 16th century Latin America. The images and soundtrack amount to an investigation into the archaeological impulse of science fiction, and how in the context of Cancun, the present cannot be separated from the ancient past.

City of Gold and Mirrors is presented in partnership with the French Embassy in Ireland. www.ambafrance-ie.org Cyprien Gaillard is represented by SPRÜTH MAGERS.

Cyprien Gaillard, Cities of Gold and Mirrors (Film Still), 2009, 16 mm film, colour, with sound, 8:52 min

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Helen Hughes COLUMBAN HALL MON – FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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The often synthetic quality of her elected materials is in line with the smooth styling of commodification, where we become assigned to broad demographic groups for marketing purposes. In this work, she probes a sense of individual, ethnic loss and nostalgia arising from too pure an alignment with the spirit of global capitalism.

Columban Hall will host this new site specific work by Helen Hughes.

Combining two strands of working, Hughes brings together standard, rigid, components from our mass produced structural surroundings with individual fragments of modern materials that have been altered and manipulated by hand. No longer homogeneous units, these irregular, fragile composites now bear character and a certain human sensibility, their flow having been interrupted and displaced on their designated route.

Drawn to working with balloons - a fragile but ubiquitous commodity providing intriguing structural/sculptural surfaces, Hughes altered, manipulated and combined them with other materials to defy their assigned path to deflation and obsolescence. This process results in an eternal preservation of the balloons in an in-between state somewhere between buoyant, potent symbols of revelry and celebration, and left-over, flaccid, consumed fragments. These semi-recognisable remnants of a past hedonistic time continue to visibly punctuate and disrupt the surrounding environment.

Materiality is central to Helen’s sculpture and installation practice. She utilises mass produced goods to reflect on consumerism and the exuberance of capitalist production. Materials selected are often willful, unpredictable and difficult to control. Working against their intended use by disrupting the designated functioning of these materials, the homogeneity of mass production is probed. Through fluid and gestural physical engagement, she counters the mechanical behaviour linked to materialism, forcing her materials out of an inertia and endowing them with a more tactile and human sensibility.

Fair and Balanced (installation view), 2017. Resin, latex balloons, aluminium foil, 90x90x90cm

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Jesse Jones Zarathustra TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 / SAT & SUN: 11-6

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school roots following allegations of historical child abuse were published in the 2009 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

The 16-mm film Zarathustra, depicts a performance by The Artane Band. The Band play Strauss’s “Zarathustra”, echoing Kubrick’s 1968 score from the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film’s release date in April 1968 makes a historical parallel to the launch of the iconic modernist housing project in Ballymun, the location of the drained swimming pool the band are performing in.

The film creates a parallel between the popular consciousness of this moment and the political undercurrent to it’s ensuing future. The Artane band also echo a moment of a militaristic nostalgia and how it has assimilated itself into our culture. This is further questioned by the fact that the band, a famed Dublin marching band that comes from a long-standing tradition of young male marching bands, has been called upon to change it’s name to dis-associate itself from the traumatic past of it’s industrial

Zarathustra, 2008. 16mm film transferred to video, 4 min. 50 sec. Courtesy the artist.

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Zarathustra plays on the sedimentation of historical forces into our culture and questions how the site of leisure such as a swimming pool or marching band are haunted with political ideology.

Resonances of this soundtrack’s better-known antecedent tease out the dereliction of both the historical and the contemporary: just as the 1960s vision of a contemporary civilisation was not realised, so this swimming pool is now abandoned to a new wave of regeneration.

The film ultimately conveys a sense of modernity in general, remaining undecidably placed between a doomed past and a time yet to come.

Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore ELECTRIC MON-FRI: 4-LATE SAT & SUN: 11- LATE

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In the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Leckey spliced altered video footage from dance clubs with an amalgamation of sounds to examine countercultural nightlife, revealing the poignant interpersonal energy and socioeconomic aspirations of its revelers.

The video is sourced from footage of British clubs that spans trends in fashion and attitude from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite the differences among the revelers, Leckey’s film unites the disparate cultural moments in a frenzy of youthful, euphoric ritual. Tongue in cheek, the title alludes to Italian fashion house Fiorucci, wildly popular during the artist’s youth in the late ’70s.

Although dress and taste evolve through Leckey’s edited juxtapositions, brand allegiance and material symbolism are

undeniable constants in an otherwise fleeting remix of three decades of dance culture. Leckey composes and captures a palpable euphoria: of bodies on the dancefloor, of the particular pulses of the music — and of nostalgia’s seductive creep when looking back at days long gone.

Leckey produces art that addresses the abundance of objects and images in contemporary culture. In his films, sculptures, and installations, the artist has at various times assumed the role of alchemist by transforming objects and images into new mediums.

Please note Electric will be closed on November 9th.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999. Color video, with sound, 15 min.

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Colin Martin Empathy Lab 2018 TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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Empathy Lab 2018Â is based on a dedicated area in Facebook headquarters were employees can express empathy through technology to various causes.

This series of paintings explores a prosthetic relationship with technology.

The practice makes reference to science fiction genres and imagined futures that have come to pass such as future orientated culture that has become obsolete or reappraised. The works depict computer museums, analogue recording equipment and modular electronic instruments. Some paintings depict pre-internet sites of surveillance

such as the Berlin Stasi Museum and the geneses of a boundless surveillance culture were the politics of private and public space is fluid. The works explore spaces that blur boundaries between the real and virtual and where technology, culture and politics have become synthesised. Newer works depict research and development from technology companies such as Boston Dynamics, Facebook and Tesla.

Uncanny Valley III, Oil on canvas 40 x 55cms

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Stella Rahola Matutes Babel TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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Stella Rahola Matute’s otherworldly sculptures, Babel, question the globalised capitalisation of architecture.

Leaving aside architecture’s premise of utilitas (functionality) that distinguishes it from other arts, many of today’s buildings are erected to represent power. The result is no longer the edifice of the medieval cathedral that oriented a community but rather an extravagant competition of rare and autonomous objects. These forms are far from the original archetypes that were constructed to embody their environment and the landscape, instead epitomising economic status. This effect displaces communities and extends the feeling of rootlessness and non-

belonging, creating a disorder and a lack of harmony with the environment. An unequivocal feeling of nostalgia for lost utopias, city scapes and environments relates with the impossibility of returning to a previous home.

Babel, as with much of Rahola Matutes’ work, is strongly underpinned by craft.

Confronting the modern forms of capitalist production, Rahola Matutes favours hand-made processes and seeks a material culture without the aid of automation that will ultimately redirect us to nature.

Babel I – II, 2018, mirrored borosilicate glass, 18 x 18 x 170cm and 18 x 18 x 220cm

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Eleanor McCaughey The blood-dimmed tide is loosed GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Eleanor McCaughey presents work under the title The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. The title is borrowed from the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. The poem uses Christian imagery allegorically depicting the apocalypse and the second coming to describe the atmosphere of postwar Europe. The second coming is a statement about the contrary forces at work in history and the conflict between the modern and the ancient world; a new civilisation will be born, one that will reject what the previous generations celebrated, while humanity descends into moral confusion.

Thematically, the work is a vehicle for reflecting on the present moment with

a sentimental affection for the past.

It contemplates impenetrable forces shaping our contemporary society, from the ideological to the technological.

McCaughey’s portraits are represented in a way that questions how we use social media to construct false impressions of status and authority in an age of displacement and individualism that emphasises the moral worth of the self. The portraits appear genderless, resembling a statue of importance, a bust on a plinth like a godly figure on a pedestal. The presentation of the work has over time transformed spaces with a nod to nostalgic 1990s pop optimism like classic MTV studio sets combined with traditional shrines and alters.

Brigid, 2018, sheet, trimmings, oil on canvas, Dimentions approx. 5ftx7ft

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Conor McGarrigle #RiseandGrind TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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#RiseandGrind is a generative installation that explores the rules and norms of global internet social media culture through the lens of two hashtags, #RiseandGrind and #Hustle.

The hashtags captured, #RiseandGrind and #Hustle, represent the globalised embodiment of the values of a neoliberal culture that gets up early and selfexploits, success in the sharing gig economy is only achievable by getting up earlier and grinding that bit harder, by bringing even more hustle to the game.

The project data-mines Twitter to capture millions of conversations which are used to train an artificial intelligence model on Google’s neural network platform, Tensor Flow.

The AI “learns” the rules of the new economy from this data in real time and begins to participate in the conversation on Twitter. This process is made visible in the space in real-time with neon lettering and a five-screen array showing the machine learning process and the AI generated tweets.

Throughout the festival’s duration these generated tweets evolve from nonsense to well-honed texts that encapsulate the spirit of the new economy and are often indistinguishable from the real thing. #RiseandGrind was funded by the Science Gallery Lab, Detroit.

#RiseandGrind, 2018, neon, 165 x 28 cm

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Dennis McNulty David (Timefeel) TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY MON - FRI: 12-6 / SAT & SUN: 11-6

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but hesitantly. The audio has been re-edited in the manner of a discoedit. The original track features drums (physical), guitar (electro-mechanical), vocals (human) and a synth (electronic).

Like Prince’s “When Doves Cry”, a hit in the same year, the track has no bass-line. Fragments from different moments in the song are juxtaposed David (Timefeel) is an AV Work which combines second-hand speakers with to produce a strange time-feel and prolonged listening draws attention to an old analogue cube monitor that was this. The edited version is a long loop intended to form one component of a almost devoid of language. Springsteen video-wall. Sound and image are drawn communicates mostly by humming from Bruce Springsteen’s 80s hit, “I’m On Fire” and its MTV-friendly video. and via a series of howls and yelps.

Most of the words that make it through In it, Springsteen plays the part of a mechanic who drops a repaired car back the editing process are truncated and reordered. “Sometimes it’s like to the mansion of a wealthy customer. someone ...” he repeats. This monitor is The version on YouTube has clearly placed on a specifically fabricated plinth been transferred between a number designed by McNulty and fabricated for of different media formats over time.

Digital stills from the video are replayed his TTOPOLOGY show at VISUAL earlier in 2018. by a Raspberry Pi computer according to an algorithm to simulate glitching David (Timefeel) was produced with the support video playback. Bruce looks skywards, Dennis McNulty has recently began using the term AV Works to describe his assemblages that combine media technologies of various kinds (screens, speakers, projectors etc.), media fragments (video, audio, still images) and computation (algorithms and CGI).

TTOPOLOGY installation shot, VISUAL, Carlow.

David (Timefeel) is visible in the foreground, centre left.

Images courtesy VISUAL and Ros Kavanagh, Photographer.

of VISUAL and the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.

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Paul Murnaghan, Somehow you knew that this was coming GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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This is one reading of the work, and it is a valid one but when making the work, Murnaghan was considering things that we think we know, things proven, empirical, like a 56 lb. weight. Vs. things less knowable, a hunch, intuition, belief.

The flavour of our time is to know what we know and to refute all evidence to the contrary. If it is not my opinion, it is fake.

Duncan focused on one of the many Perhaps this is a mercy. A tool to allow those displaced, those partially erased, contrasts within the work, like the to construct a new past and a new future. solid form of the antique weight which attempts to anchor the shivering tree and To invent a different psychology that allows them to evolve and us, to ignore. its occupants in place, or the static oval of light which contains the constantly After all, they probably knew that this was coming. moving shadows. While the aesthetic is reminiscent of shadow puppetry or The work was originally made for Video Killed the early silent film, the audio tape flailing Radio Star at The Royal Hibernian Academy in in the wind delivers a hint of violence or 2010 as part of the Artist curates series and was tension pertaining to something that is curated by 126 from Galway in collaboration with coming, something inevitable. One could the artists and The RHA. read it as a fatal attachment to nostalgia or a deliberate ignorance of the ogre of *reviewed on Papervisualart.com by Adrian Duncan new technology about to displace and disrupt some fragile enclave.

In a review* of Video killed the Radio Star, the exhibition in which this work was first exhibited, Adrian Duncan considered that The taut black piece of rope, between island and weight, was a sort of constant counter-point to the hysterics of the fan and theatrical spotlight.

Somehow you knew that this was coming, 2010, Inflatable palm trees and monkeys, spray-paint, cord, antique weight, audiotape, fan, spotlight. Dimensions: variable.

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Gavin Murphy Double Movement GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Gavin Murphy’s film and sculptural installation, Double Movement stems from the artist’s in-depth research into the now defunct Eblana theatre, which was located in the basement of Dublin’s central bus station Busáras. The works seek to reveal and examine gaps in our cultural memory, and to create and preserve specific bodies of knowledge, focusing on the cultural and evidential value of architectural structures, which can reflect and focus a wide variety of social facts: from the state of the industrial arts, to the processes of social organisation, and the world-outlooks of a whole society.

Busáras was a visionary and politically contested scheme for 1940s Ireland, and was at that time, the largest civic building project in post-war Europe.

Designed by Michael Scott and Partners, and influenced by International Modernism, the building was envisaged as a kind of civic Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘total art work’), to serve the practical, social and cultural needs of its public users. An ambitious expression of a

nascent modern Irish State, the building conversely became a locus for large-scale Irish emigration to the UK and beyond.

Its basement cinema was repurposed into a theatre in 1959, and taken on

by Phyllis Ryan as a base for her Gemini theatre company. At a time when The Abbey Theatre was not seen to be supporting new writing, the Eblana premièred the early works of Irish playwrights including Brian Friel and John B. Keane, and staged plays ranging from popular revues to experimental works, and covered taboo subjects in Ireland of the time such as homosexuality, contraception and criticism of the Catholic Church.

However the artistic fortunes of the Eblana gradually declined, and the theatre was eventually closed in 1995.

It remains – albeit in poor condition – underneath the station.

Funded by The Arts Council and The Arup Trust, supported by The Irish Architecture Foundation, The Irish Theatre Archive, and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Production support: Scott Tallon Walker Architects, Dublin City Archives and Project Arts Centre.

Gavin Murphy, Double Movement, 2017 (Film still).

Film with sound, 45 minutes, continual loop

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Laura Ní Fhlaibhín COLUMBAN HALL MON – FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s sculptural objects exist as ritualistic signifiers from an imaginary Goddess figure and as interlocutors from the past or future, offering protection and salve while also suggesting alternative codes and mythologies which excavate words and agency.

Forged in the artist’s family forge in Aughrim County Galway, Aughrim Brander Pendant functions as an agricultural brander and is mythologised as the weaponised pendant-necklace of a fictional Goddess. Traced from Perspehone, to the 17th century Irish female soldier, Kit Cavanagh, whose own father died in The Battle of Aughrim, to her own Great Grandmother. The Goddess offers balm and recovery to the site of The Battle of Aughrim, perceived as traumatised by military confrontations and residual haunting of the soldiers’ nostalgic yearnings and loss. A white chalk rock is drilled and partly opened, to support and hold a pointed metal rod, dipped in hematoxylin. Codes, words and calls are marked and branded into the surface.

The dodecagon features emblematically in Ní Fhlaibhín’s practice as being symbolic of a Goddess collective.

The mirror hints at time-travelling and agency, reflecting, dazzling and, confronting with shards. Referencing Boym’s thoughts on nostalgia as ‘a yearning for a different time’1, the Goddess figure, armed with a dodecagon shield, cuts across temporalities, intervening across past and future histories and traumas.

Balm, a turmeric soap sculpture, is symbolic of the ritualistic cleansing, healing, caring, protecting and salving properties that emanate from the Goddess, which are believed to enhance a syntonic state. The soap form serves as multiple signifiers; a substitute, a replica or as a reminder for a lost crystal or a mineral rock-salve, in an effort to support and soothe.

1 Svetlana Boym: http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html

Balm, 2018, turmeric soap, 60cm diameter Dodecagon shield, 2018, sandblasted dodecagon mirror, 30cm diameter

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Ciarán Óg Arnold I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Ciarán Óg Arnold’s series of photographs I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again is a hazy journey through a number of dive bars and nightclubs in the Galway born photographer’s recession-hit hometown of Ballinasloe.

Winner of MACK’s First Book Award 2015, this diminutive, diary-like series with grainy, out of focus photographs reveal a world of furtive glances, aggressive gestures and kisses in the dark. The throbbing intensity of small details in packed rooms merge into drunken walks home through empty streets past derelict houses. It is a catalogue of fragmented moments into memory, waiting to be reassembled in the confusion of the next morning’s hangover.

The men depicted in Arnold’s world are predatory aside from rare moments of what passes for sincerity but could just as easily be inebriation.

Some of these photographs have a subtle poetry to them, befitting the title’s reference to Charles Bukowski while others would look equally at home on a teenager’s social media feed. The overall effect is a strangely moving journey into the nocturnal world of a town wracked by recession, where there is nothing left to do but drink, and wait.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again, 2015 Dimensions variable

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Ciara O’Kelly Procedures for a Prosperous Ecology GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Procedures for a Prosperous Ecology is a dual-screen video installation illustrating the existence of a familiar cycle generated through interactions with cyberspace. Considering Ireland’s role as the “Data Centre Capital”, it references the physical housing of this data and its adaption to particular aspects within our environmental system, reimagining it as a more natural cycle we are subjected to.

The documented space is functional and contains simulations of generated particles systems to challenge the capabilities of these digital entities.

The construction of the video heavily references design aesthetics of leading new technologies creating glorious, seamless documentation of the desired article accompanied by a retiring, commercialised voiceover. The dimensions of the projected images, 960 x 1080 pixels, reflects the double The work examines the political vision lens technique used in virtual ramifications of the viewer’s existence reality headsets, necessary for the within this cycle, prompting actions viewer to become encapsulated in their derived from our physical recorded desired virtual space. Situated within interactions with virtual space, the festival’s thematic, Procedures for a specifically referencing new technologies Prosperous Ecology draws on Galway’s such as virtual reality. Aiming to illustrate merchant and mariner histories in a the individual’s stance in relation to broader global context, considering the corporation and their dual role as Ireland’s role regarding offshore capital both a consumer and a product within relative to both natural environmental this free labour data system, it very systems and the political crisis of subtly situates these intricate bodily data. This work draws on the common movements within a larger functioning thread between the individual and cycle of productivity fuelled by corporate the corporation’s culturally syntonic bodies within a capitalist world. dependency today.

Procedures for a Prosperous Ecology is supported by South Dublin County Council & Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

Procedures for a Prosperous Ecology, 2018.

HD looping video installation, 3m x 1.5m

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Rosie O’Reilly Thrown up by the sea COLUMBAN HALL MON – FRI: 12-6 SAT & SUN: 11-6

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Thrown up by the sea draws its name from an old word in Gaelige for foreigner “murchaoirthe”* - “cast up by the sea”. It imagines an immersive world of ‘bordering‘, a state of existing in all temporalities at all times. ‘Murchaoirthe’, a word linked so closely to mariner histories of Ireland, evokes the mystery of the stranger as arriving and welcome at any time, on any tide. This old reality has been dissolved by history and needs to be retold now. To paraphrase Donna Haraway ‘it matters what stories tell stories’.

All the materials used in the work tell this story. Misplaced but welcome. All bound together by the mineral calcite (limestone, chalk, fish skins from a Galway fish farm, the calcium carbonate in our ears that allow us balance and listen). The wax and mineral vessels sitting on the salmon skin base were made using the ocean currents in Dublin and Galway at high tide and hold both dissolving calcium carbonate and hydrophones that combine the audio of the dissolving world within the vessels and worlds outside. *The Irish in Early Medieval Europe: Identity, Culture and Religion. Roy Fletcher & Sven Meeder. 2016

Thrown up by the sea, 2018, wax, rust, limestone, salmon skin, hydrophones, wood, wifi headphones, radio transmitter. 250cm x 250cm x 800cm.

Photo: Kasia Kaminska.

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Marcel Vidal Dead in the Day / Balcony GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Marcel Vidal’s work often starts with a digital image which is materialised physically and rendered with traditional techniques in oil or watercolor, a painting. Intuitively working with hoarded materials collected in his studio, Vidal devises anarchic architectural sculptures that often stage and frame his paintings and objects.

His volatile assemblages are built from hardware materials, strips of wood, zinc plated bolts, castor wheels, spray paint, expanding polyurethane foam, string, feathers, fur pelts, deer hooves and suggest a function. These processes produce objects that create a dichotomy between the seemingly gentle aesthetic of the paintings versus the visceral and brutal appearance of Failure and the impossibility of the sculptures. These two intertwining representation within the hyper saturated and opposing strands of Vidal’s practice, painting and sculpture, are in constant image culture of today inform Vidal’s work where already existing imagery dialogue, elucidating a tension between along with personal photography are reservation/expression, silence/noise, light/dark. used to isolate gesture and explicate confusion through traditional art making materials and industrial processes.

Dead in the day, 2017, 241x120x80cm 94.9x47.2x31.5in Black roses, 2017, 320 x 145 x 115 cm | 126 x 57.1 x 45.3 in Balcony, 2017, 196 x 62 x 62 cm, 77.2 x 24.4 x 24.4 in Expanding foam, spray paint, wood, watercolour on paper framed with glass, bitumen, shed felt, zinc fittings, castor wheels, rubber, animal fur, animal hooves, twine, linen, plaster.

Images courtesy of Kerlin gallery, photography by Lee Welch.

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Susanne Wawra GALWAY ARTS CENTRE MON - THURS: 10-5.30 FRI & SAT: 10-5 SUN: 12-5

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Nostalgia and place play a significant role in Wawra’s work, the term Ostalgie being used specifically to describe nostalgia for East Germany and the old ways. The materials of the east seep into the patterns and photographic images layered throughout her work where her personal archive from her childhood are digitized and printed later to be adhered to the surface of the canvas, this ground of images is obliterated and worked over with expressive gestures.

Her work explores the intersection between personal autobiography and historical events. Utilising photographs from her own family albums, Wawra draws on printed matter to interrogate her experience of growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Wall.

Wawra establishes personal motifs referring to a heimat, which translates to ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, by introducing a cast of protagonists and propaganda

material from the GDR (The German Democratic Republic). The GDR was seen not only as geographical but emotional Heimat. Heimat was a social and political construct that allowed Germans to maintain a sense of community and belonging in the face of constant ruptures, acquiring rich connotations of protection, familiarity and order. The act of living in a different social system with it’s own vocabulary, political principle and economic organisation created a feeling of togetherness while simultaneously separating East from West Germany.

The use of mundane source material combined with the layered process of collage enables a material reimagining of the tension between fiction and reality, past and present. Wawra reinterprets the relationship between history and the self, working towards a broader understanding of formations of selfhood.

Susanne Wawra, Zeltmutter (Tent Mother), 2016, oil, acrylic and image transfer on patterned fabric on canvas, H 50 cm x W 70 cm

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events

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November 10th

November 9th

Transformative Nostalgic Memories Listening Club with Mark Garry Conference 6-9PM O’DONOGHUE THEATRE, NUIG ADM. FREE

7 – 9PM THE MECHANICS INSTITUTE, MIDDLE STREET ADM: FREE PLACES LIMITED, BOOK THROUGH TULCAFESTIVAL.COM

The world and the experience of the contemporaneous are inextricably linked to a past that not only makes identity, tradition and individual or collective tastes but also shapes the urban landscape, which evolves through a transformative and dynamic interaction with time and history. Memory, with subtle reframing, can collapse a narrative or make it re-born. Even in an iconoclastic form, as black lives matter movement proved, or the more and more media-relevant character of street art as defining a neighbourhood identity, our visual culture resonates with images from a consistently re-worked cannon.

We only hear what we listen for.

John Cage

Within this framework, the role of curators, artists and academics dealing with memory, has great significance.

Disrupting the mechanisms of memory, offering other narratives, examining the risks and limits of nostalgia. This event critically examines these functions of contemporary arts practice as a means of problematising, transforming and reinvigorating public spaces, both physical and virtual.

This event is hosted by the Discipline of Italian, School of Languages, Literatures and Culture.

Listening Club is a night of musical listening and sharing.

Hosted by artist Mark Garry, you are encouraged to bring along music you adore and want to share with other folks.

Listening Club was a weekly group activity initiated by Mark and musician Sean Carpio in 2009. On a Wednesday evening at Mark Garry’s studio, listening club participants were invited to bring music they felt was significant, progressive, interesting or that they simply just loved to listen to collectively within the club. The Nostalgic Listening Club is inviting you to the Mechanics Institute to do the same. You can briefly introduce the piece of music if you wish and the group will collectively listen to it. Group listenings have existed in the United Kingdom for over 80 years in the form of Recorded Music and Gramophone societies and The Federation of Recorded Music Societies has been active since 1936.

To participate in Listening Club please bring along music in any of the following formats; Vinyl 7” or 12”, Gramophone 78’s,Tapes, CD’s or Mp3/Digital players.

The only condition of participation is that the music cannot be streaming from the internet.

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November 11th

November 11th

The Ministry of Nostalgia:

Film screening

12.30PM O’DONOGHUE CENTRE, CAPPA VILLA, UNIVERSITY RD ADM: FREE PLACES LIMITED, BOOK THROUGH TULCAFESTIVAL.COM

5PM O’DONOGHUE CENTRE, CAPPA VILLA, UNIVERSITY RD ADM: FREE PLACES LIMITED, BOOK THROUGH TULCAFESTIVAL.COM

Owen Hatherley’s latest book Ministry of Nostalgia is a stimulating polemic against a suite of aesthetic and political motifs united under the term, “austerity nostalgia”.

For Hatherley, austerity nostalgia is exemplified by the fetishisation of mid-century Danish furniture; by the coveting of the ex-council flat over the suburban maisonette; by the design aesthetic of home goods.

Austerity nostalgia’s influence is observable in fashion & pop culture, while British cuisine at the hands of Jamie Oliver has also fallen under it’s mesmeric spell.

According to Hatherley, austerity nostalgia also informs political narrative. Both “Red Tories” and “Blue Labour” activists have woven these symbols of nostalgia into a retrospective vision of English radicalism in an attempt to appeal to that chimerical entity, the English “white working class”. A proposal for the establishment of an English parliament to be based in York, the anthem of which would be “Jerusalem”, was, according to Hatherley, simply one of many attempts to rejuvenate the left by constructing an image of historical common-sense solidarity that never truly existed.

We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control.

Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.

Adam Curtis’ film Hypernormalisation is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them. Curtis argues that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.

HyperNormalisation

by Adam Curtis with an introduction by Conn Holohan

Author Owen Hatherley in conversation with Dr. Declan Long

The author will discuss this and other works in conversation with Dr. Declan Long.

Archival material is edited seemlessly giving a constant stream of varied, stunning visual information that shows a world reacting to societal control through a staunch sense of self, focusing on some of the biggest events of the last 40 or so years.

The film will be introduced by Dr. Conn Holohan.

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November 16th

November 18th

STATUS & SENTIMENT

GRUTS BUFFET THE DOMESTIC GODLESS MIND MEITHEAL DEIRDRE O’MAHONY

Curator’s walk with Linda Shevlin

GRAIN 1-4 SADHBH GASTON

MEET AT 2PM AT THE TULCA FESTIVAL GALLERY, FAIRGREEN HOUSE, GALWAY. ADM: FREE. PLACES LIMITED. BOOK @ TULCAFESTIVAL.COM

(NOV 2 – 18)

As an expansion on the curator’s tour of Tulca venues, take a walk through the historic city environs that host TULCA.

Top: The Domestic Godless, Gruts Buffet Bottom: Sadhbh Gaston, Grain Series (detail),

6PM, SHERIDANS, 14 CHURCHYARD ST. ADM: FREE. PLACES LIMITED. BOOK @ TULCAFESTIVAL.COM

To mark the conclusion of Syntonic State, TULCA in partnership with CERERE present a newly commissioned event by The Domestic Godless. Inspired by the theme of Cereal Renaissance in Rural Europe (CERERE), Gruts Buffet will explore the culturally and historically entangled relationship between society and food, elucidating ironies, complexities, and contested narratives from distinctive heritage varieties. With their irreverent disregard for current fashions and culinary trends, The Domestic Godless will explore and experiment, challenging norms and provoking new understandings of taste, presentation, histories and cultural values of cereals combined inventively with other foods.

Social interaction with the audience is instrumental to the praxis of The Domestic Godless. The audience will be active participants in discussions of how the heritage cereals have been utilised, catalysing further discussions and reflections with actors using their own lenses and perspectives to re-interpret and re-apply. Along with the general public, other attendees will include invited guests & representatives of 13 CERERE partners from across the EU, members of CERERE’s Mind Meitheal by commissioned artist Deirdre O’Mahony, including agronomists, farmers, social scientists, policy makers, heritage NGO representatives, historians, chefs, food processors, and artists. With members chosen from an interrogative process employed by O’Mahony among people passionate about heritage cereals, the Mind Meitheal approach serves to amplify the inspiration provided by The Domestic Godless in generating new, cross-sectoral imaginings for heritage cereals renaissance.

For the duration of Syntonic State, artist Sadhbh Gaston’s fabric banners and cross-stitch embroideries, Grain 1-4, will be installed outside Sheridans. Accompanying each piece is a diptych articulating the seed’s lifecourse and interactions with human suppliers, cultivators, harvesters and processors.

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, CERERE connects scientists with practitioners and involves farmers, food scientists, sociologists, agronomists and many others interested in heritage cereals. Led by Áine Macken-Walsh, the Irish partner in CERERE is Teagasc, Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority. A central missionof Teagasc in CERERE is to broker innovation between diverse actors in how the renaissance of Ireland’s heritage cereals is imagined and practiced.

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TULCA TALKS

TULCA EDUCATION

The Centre for Creative Arts & Media, GMIT will host a talk by TULCA continues its commitment to the educational a Syntonic State exhibiting artist every Monday for 5 weeks. aspect of the Festival through the development of its education programme T.Ed. T.Ed focuses on looking at EVERY MONDAY, 2PM and responding to visual art. It is about reaching out and LOCATION: THE YELLOW ROOM, GMIT, MONIVEA RD. engaging with schools and the wider community to create NO BOOKING REQUIRED, BUT CAPACITY IS LIMITED SO PLEASE an increased awareness and a shared understanding of the ARRIVE EARLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT Visual Arts.

November 5th, 2pm

Bassam Al-Sabah November 12th, 2pm

Aoibheann Greenan November 19th, 2pm

Conor McGarrigle November 26th, 2pm

Dennis McNulty December 3rd, 2pm

Jesse Jones

Philosophy & Art Workshops A highlight of the ‘Plug-in’ programme for secondary schools is a series of philosophy and art workshops facilitated by CURO. The CURO team use world renowned P4C techniques to lead a philosophical enquiry and develop a community of critical thinkers. It’s really all about big questions!

Make A Day of it Tuesdays Make A Day Of It Tuesdays, in partnership with Galway Public Libraries, returns to the education programme for primary schools for a fifth year running, on the 6th & 13th November. Designed to offer a full day cultural excursion, it pairs a guided visit to an exhibition with a hands-on workshop exploring visual narrative with writer and storyteller Órla McGovern.

The Good Yarn The Good Yarn is an arts in education project that draws inspiration from Galway’s merchant and mariner past, specifically the lucrative wool trade of South County Galway. Through a series of in-school creative workshops, artist-educators Jojo Hynes and Jennifer Cunningham will engage with primary schools in the coastal area of Kinvara to explore narratives of nostalgia, alternative economies and future culture in response to their local environment.

Artists Professional Development Proposal Writing with Annette Moloney & Ceara Conway A new feature of the programme is an opportunity for continued professional development for the arts community, developed in partnership with Galway County Council Arts Office. Independent curator and arts advisor Annette Moloney will host a workshop in proposal writing on Wednesday 7th November, suitable for artists at all stages of their careers. Moloney will also co-facilitate an afternoon series of one-on-one clinics with artist Ceara Conway, of particular interest to artists seeking feedback and advice on project proposals.

BOOKINGS INFORMATION & FULL DETAILS OF THE EDUCATION PROGRAMME CAN BE FOUND ONLINE AT WWW.TULCAFESTIVAL.COM/T-ED

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EXHIBITORS BIOS Aoibheann Greenan is an Irish artist working at the intersection of visual art and performance. She holds an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths University, London and a BA in Painting from NCAD, Dublin.

Greenan’s practice explores the role of the aesthetic in the creation of social imaginaries. She investigates the interweavings of fiction and power in public space using methods of staging, assembly and improvisation.

Past projects have drawn from protest, live action roleplay, historical re-enactment and street performance to propose alternate forms of encounter, play and resistance within the social structures we inhabit. Her work has been selected for solo presentations at, among others Import Projects, Berlin; The KW Institute, Berlin; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; The RHA, Dublin and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. She has participated in group exhibitions at IMMA Dublin and EVA International, Limerick. Greenan has received a numerous awards and grants for her work, both in Ireland and abroad.

Bassam Al-Sabah graduated from IADT’s BA Visual Art Practice in 2016 and was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards, curated by Alice Maher. He was awarded the RHA Graduate Studio Award (2016), and the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios Graduate Residency (2018). He was listed by Gemma Tipton in the Irish Times as an artist to watch in 2017. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Eight (2017) and Dublin City Council’s The LAB Gallery (2018).

Ciara O’Kelly is an Irish visual artist currently living and working in New York. Her work takes the form of large scale video installations incorporating both digital and physical entities. Throughout her process, she meticulously examines the systematic generation of cyberspace whilst constructing each piece, aiming to critique our relationship to corporate bodies within a largely capitalist and digitised world. O’Kelly is particularly interested in the individual’s dual role as both a consumer and a product within the system of data capitalism and its free labour nature. She primarily uses 3D modelling programs to create virtual environments to stage videos within, whilst using these grounds to challenge the capabilities of digital forms through carefully curated physical encounters. O’Kelly graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2017 with a Joint BA in Fine Art Sculpture and Visual Culture. Following this, she was the recipient of the Digital Media Graduate Award at Fire Station Artists’ Studios and later received the Young Artists’ Development Award from South Dublin County Council in 2018. O’Kelly will be commencing a ten-week residency in early 2019 at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado.

Ciarán Óg Arnold is an Irish photographer who studied at the University of Ulster (MFA Photography, 2012). In 2015 he won the Mack First Book Award for his diaristic project, I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed, but all I could do was to get drunk again. Arnold is also one of seven winners of the Solas Ireland Awards 2015 with accompanying exhibitions in The Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2015) and Fotohof, Salzburg (2016). His work was included in ‘An Irish View’ at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2009, and has featured in Source magazine and The Guardian.

Colin Martin is an artist and lecturer based in Dublin. He is currently Head of the RHA School and lectures part time in the NCAD Media Department. He is a graduate of DIT and NCAD and works in the medium of painting and film.

Recent solo exhibitions include Keyframe, Platform Arts, Belfast, 2014, Collection, City Assembly Building, Dublin, 2012, The Garden, curated by Kate Strain, Broadcast Gallery, DIT, Dublin, 2011, Cyclorama, Basic Space, Dublin. Recent group exhibitions include Surveille.e.s CCI Paris, curated by Nora Hickey, House Taken Over, Private House, Belfast 2018, This is Not Architecture, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda 2017, Far From Me, Josef Fillip Gallery, Leipzig, N.O.W.H.E.R.E.,Interview Room 11, Edinburgh 2016. He has received the Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary in 2015, 2012 and 2007.

Conor McGarrigle is an artist and researcher, a lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin School of Creative Arts DIT, and a research fellow at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media Dublin. His practice is characterised by urban interventions mediated through digital technologies, and data-driven explorations of networked social practices.

Projects include durational walking performances, large-scale outdoor projections, smartphone apps and generative video installations. He has exhibited extensively internationally including at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Fundació Miro Mallorca, Redline Gallery Denver, the Saint-Étienne Biennale, the Science Gallery Lab Detroit, SIGGRAPH, FILE São Paulo, SITE Santa Fe as well as EVA International Biennial, and the Science Gallery Dublin.

Cyprien Gaillard studied in Lausanne and lives and works in Berlin. He has been the recipient of a number of awards including Melbourne International Film Festival Award for Best Experimental Short (2016) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (2011). Solo exhibitions include K20 – Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf (2016), MoMA PS1 (2013), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2012), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2008), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Metz (both 2011), Zollamt, Frankfurt am Main, Kunsthalle Basel (both 2010), and Tate Modern, Trubine Hall, London (2009). Major group shows include Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2018), ARoS Triennial, ARoS Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark, The Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (all 2017), Hayward Gallery, London (2016), 13th Biennale de Lyon, La vie moderne, Lyon (2015), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2012), the 54th Biennale di Venezia, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (both 2011), MoMA, New York, Gwangju Biennal, South Korea (both 2010), Generali Foundation, Vienna (2009), and the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).

Dennis McNulty (b. Galway, Ireland) is an artist, music-maker and engineer. His work is informed by his background in electronic music, his training as a structural engineer and his studies in psychoacoustics (sound perception). McNulty works with a diverse range of media, often employing custom built hardware and software to produce AV Works, sculptural installation and performance. Recent projects include TTOPOLOGY at Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2018); TTOPOLOGY at VISUAL, Carlow (2018); anginging at Assembly Point, London (2018); Homo Gestalt at Bluecoat, Liverpool Biennial (2016); Lofoten International Art Festival: Disappearing Acts, Svolvaer (2015); A Leisure Complex, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh/Carnoustie (2014); and PROTOTYPES, Limerick City Gallery of Art (2014). Previous exhibitions include Performa 11 (2011), Encuentro de Medellin (2007) and the São Paulo Bienal (2008 and 2004). McNulty is artist in residence at CONNECT, Ireland’s research centre for future networks and communications where he is an active member of the Orthogonal Methods Group.

Eleanor McCaughey is Irish artist living and working in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include The blood-dimmed tide is loosed at The Complex Dublin, May 2018. Like Me, The Dock, Leitrim, February 2018 and There is a policeman in all our heads; he must be destroyed at Pallas Projects, Dublin, September 2017. McCaughey is a recipient of The Next Generation Award 2018/2019 and she is a past awardee of the Conor Prize for a figurative work from the Royal Ulster Academy and the KM Evans Painting Prize, from the Royal Hibernian Academy. Her work is represented in the OPW state art collection and private collections in Ireland, Europe, United States and Canada.

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Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and curator with an interest in research, cultural sites and histories. Solo exhibitions include Double Movement, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2017; In Art We Are Poor Citizens, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2014; Something New Under the Sun, Royal Hibernian Academy, 2012; Colophon, Oonagh Young Gallery, 2012; Remember, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2010; and Moving Deaths, The Lab, 2008.

Group exhibitions include Sea Change, IADT; 21 years of Art, Film and Animation, Lexicon, Dun Laoghaire, 2018; Selective Memory: Artists in the archive, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, 2015, Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio, BOZAR, Brussels, 2013, and After the Future, EVA International, Limerick, 2012. He has written for and been featured in several publications, and a monograph On Seeing Only Totally New Things was published by the RHA in 2013.

As co-director/curator of Pallas Projects/Studios, he has devised numerous artist-led projects and programmes, and he was co-editor of the publication Artist-Run Europe, (Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016). His work is held in the collections of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, the Office of Public Works, and several private collections.

Helen Hughes graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London in 1998 with an honours BA in Fine Art. Born and raised in Mayo, she moved back to Ireland, where she completed a Masters in Visual Arts Practices from IADT Dublin in 2007. She has exhibited widely and her work has received many commendations, both in Ireland and internationally. Recent shows include Amongst Other Things, a commissioned show at the new Lexicon Gallery in Dun Laoghaire, Veins (The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin), A Bounce Borrowed (The Dock, Carrick on Shannon) and a Process Residency (ArtBox, Dublin).

Jesse Jones is a Dublin-based artist whose practice crosses the media of film, performance and installation.

Often working through collaborative structures, she explores how historical instances of communal culture may hold resonance in our current social and political experiences. Jones represented Ireland at the 57th Venice Biennale with the work Tremble Tremble. Recent exhibitions and projects include the major new work In the Shadow of the State, commissioned by Artangel (UK) and Create with funding support from Ireland 2016, and made in collaboration with artist Sarah Browne.

Selected solo exhibitions have included NO MORE FUN AND GAMES, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2016); The Other North, Artsonje Centre, Seoul; CCA Londonderry (2013); Sleepwalkers, Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin (2012); The Struggle against Ourselves, Spike Island, Bristol; REDCAT Los Angeles; The National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2011); The Spectre and the Sphere, Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (2009). Recent group exhibitions include The Eclipse of an Innocent Eye, National Gallery, Prague (2015); Primal Architecture, IMMA, Dublin; Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers, Seoul Media City Biennial, Seoul Museum of Art where she showed The Predicament of Man; Invisible Violence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade and ARTIUM, Basque country; The Talking Cure, Oakville Galleries Toronto and IMA Brisbane Australia (2014); Salon der Angst, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; The Real DMZ Project, Artsonje Centre, Seoul, Korea. Jesse Jones has also produced two major public art projects: The Prosperity Project (2013-14) and 12 Angry Films (2005).

EXHIBITORS BIOS

PARTICIPANTS BIOS

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is a visual artist from Gorey, Co. Wexford. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (N.C.A.D.) with a first class honours in Fine Art Paint and is currently studying for her Masters Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University, London. Sculptural work, sound, writing and video are important elements of her practice. Laura is also a qualified teacher, visual art educator, and part-time lecturer at N.C.A.D., and the openended enquiry of visual art students is an influence on her art making processes. She is the recipient of numerous awards and bursaries, including an N.C.A.D Student Bursary, an Artlinks Bursary, Firestation Sculpture Studio Award and Catalyst Arts Residency. Laura facilitated participative projects, happenings and publications with community groups in Wexford, through Wexford Arts Office Community Outreach programmes. She was selected as a Creative Artist Associate on the Irish Arts Council, Creative Schools 2018/19 initiative. Selected exhibitions include: GoldX Deptford X, London 2018, Water jets were used on the four corners of the buildin’, London 2018, a speech that showed the chair in the middle, London 2018, Dodecagon, Seoul 2017. Lamellae, The Lab Dublin 2016, Precognition, Talbot Gallery Dublin 2014, Periodical Review 3, Pallas Projects Dublin 2013.

Paul Murnaghan works with the substance of belief, points of intersection between the spiritual, scientific and psychological. Interested in different ways of distributing ideas outside of the institution. He recently completed a solo album entitled titled Hammer Head Horse under the moniker ‘WolloW’ and a non-narrative video commission for Channel 4 Television in London which airs towards the end of 2018. As a curator he developed several arts festivals and exhibitions throughout Ireland and he was Artistic Director/Curator at 5th Gallery at The Guinness Storehouse (2000-03). Murnaghan is an Irish artist based in Dublin. Exhibitions include, All mountains are moving at Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2016, Penumbra at The Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Melancholy in Progress the 3rd Biennial of International Video Art at The Hong-Gah Museum in Taiwan, Blasphemy at The Oonagh Young Gallery in Dublin and Memorious as part of MOPE at The Kunsti Museum of Modern Art in Finland. Murnaghan is a recipient of several Arts Council Awards and has been a resident artist at The International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York in 2011 and Platform, Finland in 2008. He has exhibited extensively, including numerous international group shows, with solo exhibitions in Finland, Estonia, Germany, United States and Ireland.

Marcel Vidal. Forthcoming exhibitions; FUTURES, RHA Dublin (2018); Island Life, Custom House Studios and Gallery Westport (2018); Solo at Ashford Gallery, RHA Dublin and RHA Hennessy Craig Biannual Award Shortlist exhibition, Tony Ryan Gallery (2019); Recent awards Include; Fire Station Sculpture Workshop Award & Bursary (2018) and Temple Bar Gallery and studios, project and membership studio (2017/2020); Exhibitions include: Island Life, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Dublin (2018) SILVERFISH, The Dock, Carrick on Shannon, Leitrim (Solo, 2018); STREAM Limerick, The Sailors Home, Limerick City (2018); 188th RHA Annual Exhibition Dublin (2018); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2017); Atrium Space, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2017); Carnage Visors, curated by Paul McAree, RUA RED, Dublin (2016); Carlow Arts Festival, (2016); SHRED! curated by Michelle Doyle, Steambox, Dublin (2014); THE LUXURY GAP, site-specific exhibition curated by Padraic E. Moore, The Hacienda, Dublin (2014); The Carny, curated by Paul McAree, FLOOD Dublin (2014); Work is held in Public and Private collections in China, Spain, France and Ireland.

Rosie O’Reilly is an artist and maker. She is concerned with the rationalist-constructivist view of nature that separates it from experience. Working across audio, sculpture and drawing she makes site specific and responsive work. Recent collaborative exhibitions include: Guest Appearance - Trinity College Dublin, The Museum Building April 2018; ROSC: Fiction of the Contemporary, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) 2017; PIIGS: An Alternative Geography to Curating, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin, Italy 2016. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including Tombollo 2017, Seasons as Fluid Forms Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto Gijon, Spain (2014) NLA III at Museum of Contemporary Art Dublin 2013, 4/704 - The Fringe Theatre Festival, Dublin 2013, Science Gallery Dublin (2013, 2014). She holds an MA from IADT ARC (2018).

Mark Leckey was born in 1964 in Birkenhead, in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Ellesmere Port, on the outskirts of Liverpool, Leckey was keenly aware of his outsider status. He found acceptance as part of the “casual” subculture, which emerged from football hooliganism in the late-1970s United Kingdom, and demonstrated an early interest in the intersections between material culture, fashion, transformation, and identity. He received his BA from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990. Solo exhibitions devoted to Leckey’s work have been hosted by Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2007–08); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); the Hammer Museum, University of California Los Angeles (2013); and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2014).

Leckey’s performance-based works have been presented by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2009), and by the Museum of Modern Art at the Abrons Art Center, New York (2009). His work was featured in the Venice Biennale (2013) and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013). He was the recipient of the 2008 Turner Prize and a finalist for the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize. Leckey lives and works in London.

Stella Rahola Matutes trained in Architecture and is a Master in Architectonical Projects. She is currently attending her second year’s MFA at Goldsmiths University of London. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo shows: Shui at Chinese European Art Center, (Xiamen, China, 2013), L’altre paisatge at Galeria Carles Taché (Barcelona, Spain, 2014) or Utopias and Heterotopias at Maverick Space (London, UK, 2018). She has participated in several international fellowships and residencies projects including at European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC), (s’-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, 2012), CEAC (Xiamen, China, 2013 and 2016) or Seto International Glass Art Exchange Program (Aichi, Japan 2015). Stella has collaborated with multidisciplinary teams for large scale commissioned installations including scenography for Pau Aran’s dancer (from Pina Bausch Co.) at Iniciación a la sombra, a performance concert with Sira Hernández at Conde Duque, Madrid and at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona. She has also collaborated with CLOUD 9 Enric Ruiz-Geli Arch. to create a permanent installation at AMPO, located in Basque Country, The Cloud, in Ushuaïa Club in Ibiza.

Susanne Wawra is a German artist based in Dublin.

Upon graduating in Fine Art Painting at NCAD, she has been awarded the Talbot Gallery and Studios Most Promising Graduate Award 2016 and received a Highly Commended in the Visual Arts from the global Undergraduate Awards. Susanne has been named as one of the four artists of “50 People To Watch in 2017” in The Irish Times. In 2018, Wawra exhibited Portale (Portals) at Cube Space, The LAB, Dublin (IE) and her solo show Living in A Bubble at Luan Gallery, Athlone (IE). Recent group shows include Biennale Di Carta / Papermade 3, Schio (IT), 9th International Printmaking Biennial of Douro (PT), Concerning the Other, Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin (IE), HUMAN RIGHTS? #EDU, AIAPI Unesco, Fondazione Opera Campana Dei Caduti, Rovereto (IT) and OSTRALE, Dresden (GER). Wawra’s video work has been screened at Miami New Media Festival, Perez Art Museum (USA); Les Instants Video, Milan (IT) and Buenos Aires (ARG), KURZSUECHTIG, Leipzig (GER) and BIDEODROMO, BilbaoArte, Bilbao (SP). Her work is held in private and public collections such as the OPW, Mason Hayes & Curran (IE) and the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation (USA).

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Adam Curtis is a British film-maker, known for documentaries on “power and how it works in society”.

His documentaries often focus on less-explored sides of 20th and early 21st Century history, often discussing political and philosophical movements and ideas that were in play behind the scenes of mainstream media and political theatre.

Mark Garry’s practice stems from and is informed by a number of diverse fields of research. These inform his interest in observing and engaging with the many mechanisms that influence and effect how one navigates the world and the negotiation of defined space. In particular the complexity and subjectivity inherent in these navigations. His practice is multifaceted and incorporates a variety of media, mechanisms and material interests.

These include drawing, film making, photography, sculpture, sonic sculpture, performance and collaborative music projects. In many cases a number of these elements are combined in a singular exhibition situation to form installations. This practice is both research based and process driven. While there are consistent materials and methodologies he responds to a new set of conceptual criteria with each situation/opportunity. Mark has a specific interest in music as a cultural identity and has made nine musical releases to date. Most recently an album entitled A Winter Light. Mark has held exhibitions at museums and art venues in Europe, North America, Australia and Asia and was one of the artists who represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Sadhbh Gaston uses stitch to examine agriculture and labour. Interrogating ideas through the time and extreme focus inherent to the medium. She worked with the exhibition SKIN/NAKH/ODA in both Cork and Estonia.

She is currently working out of Sample Studios in Cork.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for, among others, Architectural Review, Dezeen, the Guardian and Prospect. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso 2016), The Chaplin Machine (Pluto 2016, based on a PhD thesis accepted by Birkbeck College in 2011), Trans-Europe Express (Penguin 2018) and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space (Repeater 2018). He is the culture editor of Tribune.

Dr. Conn Holohan is a lecturer in film studies at the Huston School of Film & Digital Media and Course Director of the BA in Film & Digital Media.

Declan Long is co-director (with Francis Halsall & Sarah Pierce) of the Master of Arts program, Art in the Contemporary World, at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He is a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze and recently published the book Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Deirdre O’Mahony’s art practice is grounded in collaborative engagements with rural publics and contexts, examining ideas of sustainability, food security and rural/urban relationships through food-based projects. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she received Arts Council project awards and bursaries, international residencies and fellowships.

The Domestic Godless were founded by artists Stephen Brandes, Mick O’Shea and Irene Murphy under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition Artists/Groups at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2003. Since then, it has been their mission to explore the potential of food (its taste, its presentation, its history and its cultural values) as a vehicle for irreverent artistic endeavour and experimentation. Through recipes, installations and public presentations they employ food as both a concept and a medium through which to convey humour, empathy and other qualities that distinguish art from purely craft.

Map TULCA Festival Gallery

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126 Artist Run Gallery

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NUIG Gallery

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TULCA Festival Gallery at Fairgreen House

Galway Arts Centre

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126 Gallery (6 minutes)

Columban Hall

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The Fishery Watchtower

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Sheridans

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The TULCA TRAIL helps you to plan your visit, taking in all our venues to maximise your time.

START

NUIG Gallery (10 minutes) Galway Arts Centre (10 minutes) Columban Hall (5 minutes)

Electric

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The O’Donoghue Centre

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The Mechanics Institute

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Sheridans (5 minutes)

Centre for Creative Arts & Media

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Electric (3 minutes)

The Fishery Watchtower (7 minutes)

River Corrib

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Galway Cathedral

ew N

Bo th ar na

St .B rid ge t’s Pla 2 ce

Bo he rm or e

3 New castle Ave

Venue Details Venue Opening Hours:

Event Venues:

TULCA Festival Gallery Fairgreen 1 & -1

Sheridans

Fairgreen House, Fairgreen Road, Galway.

Mon – Fri: 12-6 / Sat & Sun: 11-6

126 Artist Run Gallery

15 St Bridget’s Place, Hidden Valley, Woodquay, Galway.

Mon - Fri: 12-6 / Sat & Sun: 11-6

NUIG Gallery

Quadrangle, National University of Ireland Galway.

Mon – Fri: 12-6 / Sat & Sun: 11-6

14 Church Yard St, Galway.

The O’Donoghue Centre Cappa Villa, University Rd, Galway.

The Mechanics Institute Middle Street, Galway.

Centre for Creative Arts & Media GMIT, Monivea Rd, Galway.

Galway Arts Centre

47 Dominick Street, Galway.

Mon – Thurs: 10-5.30 / Fri & Sat: 10-5 / Sun: 12-5

Columban Hall

Sea Road, Galway.

Mon – Fri: 12-6 / Sat & Sun: 11-6

The Fishery Watchtower Wolfe Tone Bridge, Galway.

Mon: 11-3 / Tues – Fri: 10-4 / Sat: 11-3

Electric

36 Upper Abbeygate St, Galway.

Mon-Fri: 4-late / Sat & Sun: 11- late

Sheridans

14 Church Yard St, Galway. (outdoor installation)

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FUNDERS

SUPPORTERS

PARTNERS

CAFE

GALWAY

EDUCATION PARTNERS

ACCOMMODATION PARTNER

ARTISTS FUNDERS

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Thank You

TULCA Team

The Tulca board, core team and curator are indebted to our many friends, colleagues and supporters, without whom this year’s festival would not be possible. We especially want to thank the following:

Producer David Finn Volunteer Coordinator Sue Roche TULCA intern Allison Grey-Noble Venue Managers Hugh Murphy Adrian Ramos Education Coordinator Joanna McGlynn Education Facilitators Judith Bernhardt & Hilary Morley Education Documentation Soft Day Media Festival Documentation Jonathan Sammon Publicist Heather Higgins Technicians Noel Arrigan Darran McGlynn Eoghain Wynne Stephen Cunniffe Marcel Badia Carpenter Pete Nelson Electrician Michael Mee Sound Technician Frank McEvilly

Oisin O’Brien James Harrold Sharon O’Grady, Arts Officer, Galway County Council Eoin McGrath, Richard Kennen, John Gillen Deirdre Lydon Maeve Mulrennan Rita McMahon, Simon Fennessy Corcoran Jack Fitzgerald Michael Mee Michael Quinn, Galway Civic Trust Aine Macken Walsh, Teagasc/CERERE Chris Hurley, Cork Film Centre Deirdre O’Mahony Padraig Cunningham / Pure Designs Jim Higgins, Heritage Officer, Galway City Council Kate Howard & Denise McDonagh Eamonn Maxwell Julien Dorgere Eugene Finnegan Tom Flanagan Caroline Spollen Jasmin Finn David Donovan

TULCA Board Cyril Briscoe Lucy Elvis Andrea Fitzpatrick Margaret Flannery Paula Healy Austin Ivers Ann Lyons Gavin Murphy Josephine Vahey

Remembering two bright lights from our creative community, Keith (Disconaut) O’Hanlon & Stephan Roche, who recently passed away.

TULCA acknowledges the support of Galway 2020 in partial funding of team capacity training

General Contact Information TULCA Festival of Visual Arts Production Office, Centre for Creative Arts & Media, GMIT, Monivea Road, Galway.

Email: info@tulcafestival.com Education Coordinator: education@tulcafestival.com Media Relations and Press: press@tulcafestival.com Volunteer Coordinator: volunteer@tulcafestival.com

www.tulcafestival.com

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www.tulcafestival.com 48