The Salvage Agency

Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ Michele Horrigan curates the 22nd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, entitled The Salvage Agency, across multiple venues and locations in Galway from 1–17 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 new commissions, artistic contributions and exhibitions that consider the role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. A series of public talks, screenings, performances and encounters feature, alongside a publication with texts by Michele Horrigan, novelist Walter Macken and contributing TULCA artists.

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. From the wreckage, can art nourish a new reality?

See more here 

www.tulca.ie

Image: Seanie Barron performing as An Poc Ar Buile, early 1970s

Urgency Agency #1

Micol Curatolo, Peter Fend, Becky Nahom, Paul O’Neill, Stephanie Smith in conversation
Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin
Thursday 14 November, 6–7.30pm

Askeaton Contemporary Arts invite key curatorial and artistic voices to discuss the urgent values of culture and ecology needed for critique and expression in contemporary life.
 
Peter Fend and Ocean Earth have for almost five decades proposed speculative and visionary ecological projects that rethink the relationships between art, power and the planet. Fend sees potential for radical change, and his ideas have often led him into friction with the representatives of government agencies, Big Oil and energy suppression. Curator, artist, writer and educator Paul O’Neill is a global voice on the possibilities and energies that exhibition-making and contemporary art practice can achieve – he shares his recent findings. Becky Nahom, in her role as director of exhibitions at New York’s Independent Curators International, has developed numerous experimental exhibitions that challenge art historical narratives across the globe. Stephanie Smith’s curatorial work in Chicago and elsewhere is acknowledged for commitments to groundbreaking ecological thinking through art. Micol Curatolo highlights her work around borders, belonging and identity in Finland.

The event is the first in a series of events organised by Askeaton Contemporary Arts in the next year throughout Ireland that highlight the role of collective thinking and action in contemporary art.

Image: Peter Fend, INDEPENDENCE FROM BIG OIL?, 2003
Courtesy the artist, Finn Van Gelderen, Jenny Haughton and Artworking