TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to announce the participating artists for its 23rd edition, taking place from 7–23 November 2025 in venues across Galway City. Find out more here...
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo, this year’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, titled Strange lands still bear common ground, brings together 26 artists and collectives from Ireland and beyond working across installation, film, performance, and sound.
Contributors to TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2025 are Saoirse Amira Anis, Mourad Ben Amor, Susannah Bolton, Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Marie Farrington, Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan, Caoimhín Gaffney, Mair Hughes, Francis Jones, Emily Joy, Jericho Mars, Bint Mbareh, Hussein Mitha, Kate Morrell, Thais Muniz, Tom O’Dea, Seán O’Riordan, Enya Moore and Kate O’Shea, PATHOS, Abel Shah, Durre Shahwar, Peter Tresnan, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, and Jess Zamora-Turner.
The 2025 edition takes inspiration from the anonymously drawn 'Burmese Map of the World', a speculative artefact shaped by traces of Medieval European cartography. The map depicts a teardrop-shaped island, drifting landforms, and mythical territories. Like other ancient maps, it casts the periphery as both dangerous and alluring, suggesting that the unknown can also be a space of possibility.
Strange lands still bear common ground responds to this image and to the wider reverberations of a global crisis of capital, which fragments people from communities and ecosystems. At its heart is the idea of reorientation: unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of contact.
Photo of Beulah Ezeugo by Chaz Scott
TULCA 2025 Curator, Beulah Ezeugo explains; "This year, TULCA engages artists whose practices move across personal, physical, and psychic boundaries. Much of the work documents situated encounters with land, the sea, the creature, the stranger, the here and the elsewhere. The programme aims to create space to reconsider inherited structures of power, drawing attention to the residues that surface at points of intense contact, and to the possibilities that arise when conventional ways of separating and categorising are unsettled."
The festival will feature new commissions, exhibitions, screenings, and performances unfolding across Galway City, including the TULCA Gallery at Hynes Building, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-run Gallery, the James Mitchell Geology Museum, University Gallery, the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, ATU Library, the O’Donoghue Centre, ATU Wellpark Road, FLIRT FM, Electric Galway, and 334 Broome Street, New York.
A series of public events, talks, and encounters will accompany the exhibitions. The full festival programme will be announced on Monday, 20 October 2025.
Visit www.tulca.ie to learn more and join their mailing list to stay up to date on 2025 programme announcements.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is supported by The Arts Council, Galway City Council, and Galway County Council.
Feature Photo by Bojana Janković & Nessa Finnegan, An entry from the Shared Migrants (Archive).
