CLODAGH ASSATA BOYCE INTERVIEWS BEULAH EZEUGO, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2025. 

Clodagh Assata Boyce: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2025 is titled Strange lands still bear common ground. Can you explain why you chose this title? 

Beulah Ezeugo: I chose this title because I enjoy a statement that can gather its own kind of energy. I also enjoy the trend of past editions of TULCA that lean into the poetic by using longer, slightly awkward titles. When a phrase is repeated enough, it can act like a shared refrain that shapes a shared language for that moment in time. This feels suitable for something as quick and celebratory as a festival. 

The words in this title carry ideas that conjure very specific definitions that shift based on where you ask and who is speaking: the strange, the common, the land. When I am in Galway, the presence of the Atlantic feels significant. So, conceptualising the festival began with thoughts about Galway’s mercantile past, but also with the discourses taking place around migration now. Both of which make me wonder how arrival is felt on an island – a place that can feel protected by distance yet also vulnerable to outside forces. 

Earlier on, I came across an image of a medieval Burmese Map of the World. It depicts a teardrop-shaped island rising from the ocean, with smaller islands drifting below, detached from the mainland. Where the image shows up online it is captioned something along the lines of ‘The Himalayas are shown by a horizontal green line: above is the magical land of seven lakes and Mount Meru; below is where strangers come from.’ It suggested that to know the world is to expect strangeness, and that this encounter is not only inevitable but also vital. We meet the world through others, and in that sense, we are all strangers to someone else. 

CAB: This exhibition sets out to chart new ways of relation. Can you tell us a little bit about how this cartographical approach has shaped your curatorial and exhibition-building choices? 

BE: Maps and borders hold a decisive place in contemporary art. For this exhibition, I was drawn to their paradoxes. Maps have long served as instruments of colonial power, but they can also act as anti-colonial tools, capable of encrypting, concealing, and revealing the limits of hegemonic knowledge. 

In the curatorial process, I approached exhibition-making as a form of map-making: a search for pathways, a desire to document encounters, a projection of curiosity and intention across discrete spaces, and a pursuit of familiarity with the unknown alongside a willingness to be transformed by it. The exhibition follows this impulse, inviting audiences to navigate the worlds presented by the artists with openness and attentiveness. 

The festival also borrows from cartographic methods to define its guiding themes. Much of the work begins from a specific historical or cultural vantagepoint and then from there, documents situated encounters with land, the sea, the creature, the stranger, and so on. So, re-orientation became a central theme and is understood as the act of unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of encounter and contact. 

CAB: How do you see the role of ‘the other’ and what is the role of art in shifting that? 

BE: By evoking the idea of ‘the other’ I am evoking the ways of knowing and experiences that have been pushed aside or ignored by the dominant systems of power. The margin can also be an advantageous position. If every margin is someone else’s centre, then the task is to keep shifting our point of view toward the many centres that exist, noticing what becomes marginal from each new vantage point. Much of the work in the festival is a relational encounter with a powerful external presence, whether another person, another state, a non-human species, a mythical or spiritual figure. At times, the work itself shifts perspective from the margins, moving through overlooked or excluded positions to open new ways of seeing and being. 

Although art has the capacity to propose new considerations and ways of seeing, at the same time, it’s difficult to think of how exactly contemporary art makes significant shifts. I am aware that a festival, no matter how ambitious, cannot do that much. What it can do is create proximity and enable an artist or an audience into intimate relations with an idea, and then hopefully spark the impulse to act in a different way. 

CAB: What can audiences expect from this year’s festival? 

BE: The festival includes a performance, artist talks, various exhibitions in Galway and one in New York, a book, and several audio works shared online and broadcasted over radio. There are many films in the programme that move fluidly across different geographies, as well as cultural and historic points. I am particularly excited to share Kate Morrell’s film …Y el barro se hizo eterno (…And the Mud Became Eternal) (2021), which explores ‘guaquería’, a type of political resistance that involves excavating the earth to loot archaeological treasures and indigenous cultural property. 

I also look forward to the festival’s ephemerality. Many of the works are ongoing or exist as part of a larger continuum, so work in different states of completion will be able to converge and momentarily come into conversation with others. Marie Farrington’s Diagonal Acts (2025) appears here in its fourth, site-specific iteration, engaging with Galway’s Geology Museum and the knowledge embedded within it. There is also new work by Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan that brings together a living archive, related to crossing Ireland’s north-south border – a project that will continue to evolve during the festival and beyond. 

CAB: Can you tell us about the accompanying publication? 

BE: The publication extends the festival’s core questions around contact and proximity. It brings together several writers who explore the politics of place through poetry, prose, and experimental forms. Some of the writers involved in the festival also contribute to the publication, for example, the broader themes around Ireland’s revolutionary potential, presented in Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil’s film, Mirror States (2025), are extended through the publication in a more intimate register. Other contributors share writing that is rooted in research as well as personal experience, which reflect on how lived histories and places intersect. The publication includes responses to a range of environments, with particular attention to architectural and natural landscapes. 

CAB: To what extent does international collaboration play a critical role this year? 

BE: Through the open call, the festival emphasised collaboration and cross-border exchange – not to showcase a particular kind of work, but to create conditions for a certain type of exchange. In much art-making, the focus is on the final outcome or exhibited work, so the life of thinking and making, including the negotiations and the frictions that led to it, often remains invisible. Artists who work collaboratively are especially compelling because of their ability to establish through shared systems that support this way of working. Considering global interconnectedness felt particularly important, in order to invite reflection on the kinds of relationships that sustain solidarity and those that do not. 

Some of the festival’s collaborative duos were already established, while others developed through the open call or expanded from individual practices. Mair Hughes, who has been exploring dual identity through excavations along the Welsh border, began with a solo project but invited collaborators Emily Joy and Durre Shahwar, who are now contributing artists in their own right. Peter Tresnan, a painter based in New York, has created a project which explores diasporic identity, drawing connections between Galway and New York. This has led to a secondary outpost of TULCA; an exhibition at 334 Broome Street in New York, organised by Peter, which will feature his work alongside contributions from other TULCA artists, and local artists working within similar themes.

Clodagh Assata Boyce is a Dublin-based independent curator and artist, who is influenced by the radical traditions of Black feminist thought.

bio.site/Clodaghboyce

Beulah Ezeugo is curator of the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, which takes place across venues in Galway City from 7 to 23 November.  

tulca.ie

Source

ANTONIA HELD REVIEWS A RECENT EXHIBITION AT WÜRTTEMBERGISCHER KUNSTVEREIN STUTTGART.

In a time when images and their contexts are consumed and forgotten in the blink of an eye, the question arises: Are we still capable of truly looking? As streaming services flood us with endless content, and algorithms dictate our viewing behaviour, reality becomes increasingly blurred. It is worth pausing and reflecting on an artist who not only utilised the medium of television but radically questioned it: Samuel Beckett.

The exhibition ‘On Television, Beckett’ at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (19 October 2024 – 12 January 2025) presented for the first time all seven television plays that Samuel Beckett produced between 1966 and 1985 for the South German Broadcasting Corporation (SDR, now SWR) in Stuttgart: He Joe (1966), Geister Trio (1977), … nur noch Gewölk … (1977), Quadrat I and II (1981), Nacht und Träume (1982), and Was Wo (1985).

Curated by Gerard Byrne and Judith Wilkinson, the exhibition highlighted Beckett as a visual artist, portraying him as a precise designer of his works. Newly discovered photographs and production documents from the SWR Historical Archive, which document Beckett’s creative process over three decades, demonstrate that Beckett was not only an author but also deeply involved in the direction, visual composition, and editing of his films – pushing the boundaries of television as an artistic medium. His minimalist yet innovative aesthetic infused the medium with new depth and solidified his status as a visionary artist.

In the expansive exhibition space of the Kunstverein, the film works were projected within four cubes, which together formed an open, slightly offset fifth space, resembling a courtyard, the design of which borrows from Geistertrio. This was supplemented by two CRT monitors, one displaying Beckett’s film, Film (1965), the other a part of Alexander Kluge’s Deutschland im Herbst (1978), alongside a conversation with Otto Schily – lawyer for the far-left militant group, Red Army Faction (RAF) – and Eberhard Itzenplitz’s 1970 film, Bambule, which had originally been written by RAF member, Ulrike Meinhof, and therefore had for some time been banned from broadcast.

The exhibition vividly connected Beckett’s collaboration with SDR to the political history of Stuttgart. During the German Autumn of 1977, when the city was in the international spotlight, due to the actions of the RAF and the Stammheim trials, Geister Trio and … nur noch Gewölk … were created. Beckett’s themes – isolation, repetition, and the search for meaning – reflect the societal tensions of that time and touch on questions of freedom, control, and existence.

In Beckett’s television plays, he employed a radical reduction that questioned the very nature of the medium itself. That contemporary artists continue to engage with these works not only shows Beckett’s enduring relevance but also underscores the transformation and evolution of the media landscape since then. This was impressively addressed and expanded upon in the artists’ talks on 11 January.

The event included a conversation between Declan Clarke and Gerard Byrne about Clarke’s new film, If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up (2024), which had been shown to the audience the previous evening. Known for his cinematic investigations into modernity, conflict, and the hidden stories behind historical upheavals, Clarke brings a narrative sensitivity that can be compared to Beckett’s storytelling. While Beckett used television as a medium to abstract movements and question the structure of time, Clarke does something similar in his cinematic examinations of history and ideology.

Another engagement with Beckett’s ideas was found in the works of Doireann O’Malley, who merges virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and 3D technologies with cinematic and installation techniques. While Beckett explored television as a technological frontier, altering perceptions of body and space, O’Malley starts from a similar point, but in a world where machine intelligence and digital identities are already part of our daily lives. In their conversation with Judith Wilkinson, it became clear that their works address not only media transformations but also identity, gender, and perception, reflecting the changing narrative strategies in art. Beckett’s characters, often caught between dissolution and repetition, thus find a modern counterpart in O’Malley’s explorations of fluid identities and alternative states of consciousness.

The programme also addressed the artistic research projects of 2014 Turner Prize winner, Duncan Campbell, and the subsequent conversation between the artist and the curator bridged Beckett’s work with the present, opening up space for discussions. Campbell’s films, which deal with historical figures and political topics, explore the boundaries between documentary truth and narrative construction. This approach recalls Beckett’s staging of language and memory; where Beckett used forgetting, unreliability, and fragmentation as narrative strategies, Campbell questions the mechanisms by which history is constructed and passed down. Just as Beckett blended absurdity and seriousness, Campbell works with the tensions between documentary accuracy and narrative manipulation. In both, what appears as fact often remains a subjective and manipulable representation of reality.

‘On Television, Beckett’ made clear, through its combination of archival research, a comprehensive presentation of Beckett’s works, and conversations involving contemporary artistic reflections, that creative innovation often arises not from an abundance of possibilities, but from the conscious limitation to the essential – an idea more relevant than ever in times of information overload and manipulative media strategies. Perhaps herein lies answers to the yearning for authenticity in an increasingly simulated world. Beckett showed us the way – now it is up to us to truly look and continue his gaze.

Antonia Held is an art historian based in Stuttgart, Germany.

Source

Conor McFeely’s ‘Mariner’ is a permanent light installation in the old graveyard of Derry’s historic St Augustine’s church. The public artwork was commissioned by Art Arcadia, an artist-run residency organisation providing local and international artist residencies, whose premises are situated within St Augustine’s Heritage Site.¹ 

Thirteen cylindrical white LEDs tubes are installed throughout the grounds, among the tombstones. They are programmed to sequentially fade from sunset to midnight, as a light seeming to travel on an oblique course to dispersed coordinates. The title, ‘Mariner’, refers to NASA’s Mariner programme, a series of robotic interplanetary probes sent to explore and orbit nearby planets between 1962 to 1973, named as such to evoke the spirit of nautical exploration of the unknown.

The LED tubes are installed on the ground parallel to various gravestones, in reference to the “sculptural presence and history” of the monuments. A viewer primarily sees the work from outside the graveyard, from Derry’s city walls, through a black iron fence, its visual lattice segmenting the work. The lights of ‘Mariner’ are barely visible during daylight hours, then grow in dominance as night falls, the inky darkness punctuated by warmly lit geometric edges. The lights reflect and distort upon stone surfaces, highlighting a stark difference between the grand, ornate monuments of polished stone, and the weatherworn, craggy faces of humbler graves, provoking reflection not just on the diversity of life that has ended here, but on the way social positions are delineated even in death.

‘Mariner’ was originally installed in September 2021 and has since become part of a series with the more recent ‘Mariner II’, a development on the earlier installation. The notion of ‘Mariner’ as an older work that has been superseded – chronologically or artistically – by developments in the artist’s practice, brings to mind the recently deployed James Webb Space Telescope, the expressed purpose of which is to retrospectively observe the history of the universe through the medium of light. 

Space telescopes work not by viewing distance on our planetary scale, but rather by observing the spectrums of light emitted and occluded by distant objects in the universe. Distant light emissions must travel vast interstellar space to be observable by us, meaning the JWST isn’t observing light being emitted in real time, but rather light emitted eons ago, that is only now reaching us. The light of ‘Mariner’, travelling among the tombstones, can be seen to reference time, or rather an idea of time as an observable object.

This intentionality, this adherence to the physical logic of the space, promotes an awareness of connections both literal and symbolic, and invites viewers to look at the possible connections between the graveyard and the wider city. The location of ‘Mariner’ is a nexus of local and national history. Fronting onto Derry’s city walls, St Augustine’s Church stands on the site of Colmcille’s (Saint Columba’s) first known monastery in Ireland; the site is overlooked by the Apprentice Boys of Derry Memorial Hall, and directly opposite the now-empty plinth of the Governor Walker statue, destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1973. The itinerant lights moving around the space symbolically align with the nodal points of history found in all directions.

From where I’m standing, one light is aligned to a tall stone at the southwesterly edge of the site. If I look beyond, about one-hundred yards or so up the city walls, I can see a ghost rising from the corner battlement; a towering apparition of khaki-green rectangles, bolted horizontally around a pillar. It’s a British Army watchtower, dismantled in 2005. Today there are heritage signposts, groups on walking tours, and antique cannons poking through the embrasures, with people draped over the gun-barrels taking selfies – but I can still see it there. The theory of time as a physical presence – of light on a journey – prompts me to reconsider the nature of this memory I have. It’s as though the light that bounced from the watchtower into my eyes is still on a journey, creating a mental topography personal to me, overlaid onto that shared with everyone else.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Notes:

¹ Conor McFeely will undertake a residency at Art Arcadia in July. His exhibition will open at St Augustine’s Old Schoolhouse on 29 July (continuing from 2 to 6 August).

Source