TULCA Festival of Visual Arts has announced the participating artists for its 23rd edition, taking place from 7–23 November 2025 in venues across Galway City.
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo, the 2025 festival, titled Strange lands still bear common ground, will bring together 26 artists and collectives from Ireland and beyond, presenting work across installation, film, performance, and sound.
The 2025 edition draws inspiration from the anonymously drawn “Burmese Map of the World”, a speculative artefact influenced by Medieval European cartography. The map depicts a teardrop-shaped island surrounded by drifting landforms and mythical territories, casting the periphery as both dangerous and alluring — a space of possibility as much as uncertainty.
Strange lands still bear common ground responds to this image and to the wider reverberations of a global crisis of capital that fragments people from communities and ecosystems. At its heart lies the idea of reorientation — unsettling assumed stances, turning again, and opening the possibility of contact.
Curator Beulah Ezeugo said that 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.”
Participating artists include Saoirse Amira Anis, Mourad Ben Amor, Susannah Bolton, Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Marie Farrington, Bojana Jankovi? 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.
TULCA 2025 will feature new commissions, exhibitions, screenings, and performances across Galway City, including the TULCA Gallery at Hynes Building, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-run Gallery, James Mitchell Geology Museum, University Gallery, Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, ATU Library, O’Donoghue Centre, ATU Wellpark Road, FLIRT FM, Electric Galway, and a satellite venue at 334 Broome Street, New York.
A series of public talks, events, and artist encounters will accompany the exhibitions.
The full festival programme will be announced on Monday, 20 October 2025.
Visit www.tulca.ie for more information and to join the mailing list for 2025 programme updates.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is supported by The Arts Council, Galway City Council, and Galway County Council.
