The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ISSUE 1 January – February 2017Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Jane Rainey, Lost Beneath the Pastel Sky (detail), 2016; oil on canvas; 90 x 120cm; photo by Jonathan Sammon; exhibited at 126 Artist-Run Gallery as part of TULCA Festival 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet January – February 201730

Sorsha Galvin, Desire Paths, 2016

Rachael Campbell-Palmer, Curbed Comfort, 2016; concrete, casting plaster, polyester resin; photo by Jonathan Sammon

FESTIVAL

GIANNA TASHA TOMASSO REPORTS ON TULCA 2016, ‘THE HEADLESS CITY’, WHICH RAN IN VENUES AROUND GALWAY, 5 – 20 NOVEMBER 2016.

Materiality as Relic

Tony White performing with New Pope; photo by Jonathan Sammon

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Deflated Capital III, 2016, plaster, pigment, MDF; Helena Hamilton, Untitled (With), 2016, fluorescent lights, motion sensors, programmable circuit boards, audio; photo by Jonathan Sammon

31The Visual Artists’ News Sheet January – February 2017

FESTIVAL

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2016 was posited as a ‘container of ideas’. Based on a concept derived from the work of French writer and Acéphale cult founder Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962), the curatorial theme of the festival provided a theoretical framework with which to approach a diverse array of artworks and events. First produced in Berlin in 2014, curator Daniel Jewesbury asserted his concept of ‘The Headless City’ as an “attempt to devise a method for describing and understanding the contemporary city”.1 Jewesbury provided an extensive explanatory text to accompany the three-week programme of exhibitions and events in Galway.2 Articulations of urban theory, animalism, irrationality and machinic dystopia inspired a topography of discoveries far beyond the remit of visual art. One could be forgiven for questioning the adequacy of one’s own reading of Bataille against the curator’s extensive research interests. In posing the questions ‘What has gone wrong in our cities?’ and ‘What are we going to do about it?’ Jewesbury allowed for varying levels of commitment to the theme and provided age appropriate avenues of engagement through TULCA’s education programme T.Ed.

An unused commercial unit provided a temporary home for the main festival gallery. Extensive and noisy construction works adjacent to the Fairgreen unit provided perhaps fortuitous manifestations of the curatorial theme. The gallery was a large concrete box with seven-metre-high ceilings, possesing a distinctly minimalist feel. Hidden behind a printed curtain near the entrance, Sol Archer’s beautifully shot film Dispatches from Futureland featured a vast cargo port in Rotterdam. Unmanned vehicles and automated giants seamlessly distribute thousands of import and export containers, exposing the flow of consumer goods at an incomprehensible scale. This theme was revisited during ‘Capital’, a public talk by Professor Aengus Cameron which formed one of the many para-curatorial events, reaffirming the idea that our globalised, virtual financial systems are dependent on non-human programmes and algorithms.

Rachael Campbell-Palmer’s Curbed Comfort, Liam Crichton’s Sleeper and Doireann Ní Ghrioghair’s Shaft II each presented architectural materiality as relic. With a mix of concrete, plaster, sunken pillars and large-scale, rigid, site-specific drapery evoking a mausoleum or museum, each artwork spoke of distorted neoclassical architecture. In perfect contradiction, surreal post-human habitation occupied the periphery of the gallery with Helen Hughes’s two delicate jellyfish-like sculptures appearing to tease the ancient relics. Look Out and Curator Aquorum were strange and surreal paintings by Jane Rainey, both acting as a preview to one of the highlights of the festival: a duo of her larger landscapes presented at 126 Artist-Run

Gallery. Rainey’s bright, abstract and elusive landscapes provided visual fluency between venues, a curatorial strategy that Jewesbury utilised repeatedly with success. Julie Merriman’s large-scale architectural drawings at 126 and in Galway Arts Centre echoed the tropes of human development and the built environment while Anna Homburg’s C-type prints Berlin, Between The Walls provided ethereal views of urban ‘in-between’ spaces.

Méadhbh O’Connor and Dave Madigan’s installation Gridlock dominated the space at the recently relocated 126 Gallery. The towering structure, built with shelving struts and computer component casings, housed various materials including seeds, moss, peat and clay. Gridlock presented a megacity in progress – an expansive, skeletal construction driven by our new global economies – that articulated a 10,000-year cultural evolution towards ‘urbanomics’, whereby the propensity to generate economic wealth is suspended between virtual and architectural realms.

The risk of the curatorial theme overshadowing the artistic responses was decidedly thwarted by a pensive and skillful installation of artworks at Galway Arts Centre. Patrick Jolley’s film Corridor and an exquisitely illuminated installation of his Kola prints were a reminder of an Irish artist who has left an impressive legacy. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poem Urn Column reiterated Bataille’s concept that architecture serves as a literal manifestation of social structures, cementing authority and accepted norms. The Sun Swallowed in Holes by Adrian Duncan implicitly referenced Galway city. Using refracted moving images of a local streetlamp alongside a projection of text from novel The Ikon Maker, the work evoked eerie sentimentality and offered a gateway to experience Irish writer Desmond Hogan’s beautifully written prose for viewers who wished to engage further.3

Aisling O’Beirn’s creation of a new astrology in Light Years From Here was made in conjunction with Galway residents who provided dates of personal and cultural significance which were then matched with stars. The durational, otherworldly vocal performance OUTOFTHEBLU by Glasgow-based Michelle Hannah would have benefitted from its own space. Sharing a space with O’Beirn’s informational posters did not allow for the necessary immersive experience. However, with 15 artists showing in the Galway Arts Centre during ‘The Headless City’, such overlapping of works was probably unavoidable.

Nun’s Island Theatre was sparse in comparison. Helena Hamilton’s interactive fluorescent light and sound installation Untitled(with) generated soundscapes in response to the physical inhabitation of the space. Helen Horgan’s two-screen video installation

Rue de Flandres, 59240 Dunkirk and Doirean Ní Ghrioghair’s second architectural relic Deflated Capital III were engulfed by these sonic drones.

Off-site works offered a wealth of discovery. Miranda Blennerhassett’s corridor mural GUH left a permanent legacy at the city’s University Hospital. Viewers who travelled to the outskirts to see Mhairi Sutherland’s film Pronto at the usually restricted buildings of Dún Uí Mhaoilíosa barracks were rewarded with a private tour of the fascinating army museum. The para-curatorial events refreshingly omitted any form of symposia or panel events, opting instead for comedic performances and collaborative happenings including a reading by author Tony White accompanied by local musicians New Pope and a screening of Alan Phelan’s film Include Me Out of the partisans manifesto. A screening of Steve Oram’s disturbing film Aaaaaaaah!, coupled with a live performance by Two Ruins – who seemed to pleasure themselves in an illuminated vintage Citroën CX at various locations around the city – provided more than enough animalism for one evening.

‘The Headless City’ did not follow the trend for staged, pseudo-political discourse, or make meritocratic demands for art to be ‘useful’. Art/Not Art, a collaboration by Dobz O’Brien and Dr Fergal Gaynor, offered a ‘take it or leave it’ display of academic and theoretical texts with a free photocopying service. Sorsha Galvin used pigment to highlight the unofficial shortcuts and pathways formed by pedestrians, making visible the “deviant ethnography” of the city. Galvin’s citywide Desire Paths generated an effective proposition: that art can disturb simply by presenting us with evidence of our own rituals, in this case, our non-prescriptive usage of public space. Arguably, this intervention most effectively embodied the festival’s ‘headless’ inquiry, and most closely echoed the philosophies of Bataille, who stated that, at a certain point, there is a “need for sensibility to call up disturbance” because “no one is really touched emotionally unless there is some disturbance involved”.4

Gianna Tasha Tomasso is Scottish-born visual artist and writer based in County Galway.tulcafestival.com

Notes1. The TULCA 2016 programme is available at tulcafestival.com.2. ‘The Headless City’ project began at ZK/U, The Centre for Art and Urbanism in Berlin (danieljew-esbury.org).3. Desmond Hogan, The Ikon Maker, Braziller, New York, 1979.4. This Bataille quote features at the start of the documentary Georges Bataille – À Perte de Vue (As Far as the Eye Can See), directed by André S. Labarthe and narrated by Jean-Claude Dauphin.

Two Ruins, BLIND SPOT, performed 5 November 2016, various locations, Galway city; photo (detail) by Jonathan Sammon Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Shaft II, 2016; plaster, pigment, MDF; Liam Crichton, SLEEPER, 2016;calico, plaster, wood; photo by Jonathan Sammon