I am curating The Salvage Agency, the 2024 TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway.  In its 22nd edition, TULCA 2024 will be presented across multiple venues and locations in Galway in November 2024. Established as the west of Ireland’s key annual showcase of contemporary art, TULCA continues to embrace Galway’s art institutions, cultural initiatives and public space together, presenting Irish and international artistic positions vital to our understanding of life today.

The 2024 programme will feature over twenty commissions, artistic contributions and exhibitions in venues throughout Galway, and considers the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. I’ve written in the accompanying publication that “Galway, on the edge of the northeast Atlantic, is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake. Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent.

These are paths taken by our collective society in the shaping of today’s world and a contemporary Europe. Can art create an undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, haphazard formality, and change to offer new perspectives, provocations and empathy? From the wreckage, can art nourish a new reality?”

TULCA is realised with Galway City Museum, Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, The James Mitchell Geology Museum, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-run Gallery, Galway Civic Trust, University Gallery, Pálás Cinema and more off-site venues. A series of public events, screenings, performances and encounters will feature, and an exhibition catalogue with curator’s texts, novelist Walter Macken and contributing TULCA artists. See more at tulca.ie

Image: Glass model of a blue sea dragon by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, circa 1880. Courtesy of the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, University of Galway.