TULCA 2025: Strange lands still bear common ground | 7-23 November 2025

This year’s TULCA is one of many contemporary art programmes that attempt to engage with our current global crisis, and its partitioning of us from our communities, our ecosystems, our inherited knowledge systems, and from even a shared understanding of ‘we’.

The island of Ireland has, in the last few years, been host to a series of cultural interventions that aim to confront this from multiple angles; whether that’s by examining the border as a core agent of separation, forming strategies for collectivity through international connections, or by entangling the nation with its colonial history, which is transposed like a spectre in our contemporary lives. Strange lands still bear common ground emerges from a desire to add weight to voices calling for an urgent, direct, and fractal strategy toward new ways of relating in our shared world.

In Conversations Across Place, Francis Whorral Campbell writes: “It is no longer possible to pretend that there are ‘other’ places and times untouched by the devastation at hand.” Taking this as a provocation, the festival asks us to question the value of separating the alien from the familiar. It also invites us to consider, with full awareness of our intertwined world, how we might move in concert with the land, the sea, the stranger, the creature, the here, and the elsewhere.

Mapping acts as a thematic framework and strategy for exhibition making. This work shown focuses on reorientation; unsettling an assumed stance and turning again toward others, in order to renegotiate how we inhabit the world together. The artists featured are from Ireland and abroad, and often work within broad collaborations, with their work too, foregrounding themes of interconnectivity, encounter, desire, and negotiation. It unfolds across sites in Galway, through its airwaves, and in a satellite exhibition in New York.

TULCA 2025: Strange lands still bear common ground will run from 7-23 November 2025 across multiple venues in Galway city.

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council, and Galway County Council.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie

Video edit: Jonathan Sammon