Open Call: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2023

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2023 Open Call curated by Iarlaith Ni Fheorais,  ‘honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise’.

Ireland had the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the mid-20th century, built upon the criminalisation of certain types of disability, pregnancy, gender, sexuality, behaviour, class and mental illness. The majority of those imprisoned – many for life – were patients of mental health hospitals such as Ballinasloe, and were used by every group in society as a means of welfare, punishment and even settling disputes over land and inheritance.

How can we take ownership over our own bodies and learn from the politics of disability justice, abolition and bodily autonomy, that build solidarity between institutionalised peoples? How has this shaped landscapes and peoples? In reflecting on this history, how do we remember the lives shaped by these places and think critically about how they still impact us today? Through that, how can we recover the voices of those historically made voiceless by these institutions and resist the power of these institutions’ inheritors today?

Taking its title from the description of an Irish folk cure, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise gestures towards evolving notions of cure and care and their relationship to land. In a region transformed by holy wells, pilgrimages, folk cures, myths, factories and institutions, medicine, illness and disability are profoundly enmeshed into the fabric of this region. From this telling, what narratives can be told that deepen our understanding of being in a body and a place?

In 2023, TULCA and Arts & Disability Ireland are entering into a new partnership to create multifaceted access provision across Galway city and in presenting venues. 

Open Call Process & Guidelines:

TULCA is curated through direct invitation and an Open Call process. The final selection of artworks will be based on thematic connection, artistic quality, and feasibility. Selections are made by the curator in consultation with the TULCA producer.

Artists are invited to propose the presentation of existing artworks, or the production of new work. Works can be proposed for exhibition in the festival, or as one-off performances / events / workshops / screenings comprising part of the public programme. Work must not have been previously exhibited in Galway.

Application Deadline: 19 March 2023, 5pm

This years Open Call is available in English, Irish, Easy Read English and Audio Recording English. See TULCA’s website here.

An Easy Read version is available here.

Iarlaih Ni Fheorais has previously curated an edition of ADI’s online exhibition portal, Curated Space, where she presented Pathology of Energy which featured work by Day Magee, D Mortimer and Panteha Abareshi. She also presented Oh – Infamy – we eat electric light, a new film and exhibition at the Oonagh Young Gallery, with Emma Wolf-Haugh and in response to Circe, Episode 15 of James Joyce’s Ulysses as part of Ulysses 2.2, in partnership with ADI.

Image: Graffiti on lavatory paper, JJ Beegan. Courtesy of the Adamson Collection and the Wellcome Collection.