Strange lands still bear common ground

Abel Shah
Bojana Jankovic & Nessa Finnegan
Saoirse Amira Anis
Peter Tresnan
Tom O’Dea
Mourad Ben Amor

Presented as part of Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo, this exhibition brings together works by Abel Shah, Bojana Jankovic and Nessa Finnegan, Saoirse Amira Anis, Peter Tresnan, Tom O’Dea, and Mourad Ben Amor.

Spanning installation, moving image, and text-based practices, the exhibition reflects on shared and divided spaces — geographic, cultural, and emotional — exploring how encounters across difference can generate new forms of understanding.

Image: Mourad Ben Amor, still from Bamssi, 2024, video, colour, 26 mins

This year’s TULCA is one of many contemporary art programmes that attempt to engage with our current global crisis, and its partitioning of us from our communities, our ecosystems, our inherited knowledge systems, and from even a shared understanding of ‘we’.

The island of Ireland has, in the last few years, been host to a series of cultural interventions that aim to confront this from multiple angles; whether that’s by examining the border as a core agent of separation, forming strategies for collectivity through international connections, or by entangling the nation with its colonial history, which is transposed like a spectre in our contemporary lives. Strange lands still bear common ground emerges from a desire to add weight to voices calling for an urgent, direct, and fractal strategy toward new ways of relating in our shared world.

In Conversations Across Place, Francis Whorral Campbell writes: “It is no longer possible to pretend that there are ‘other’ places and times untouched by the devastation at hand.” Taking this as a provocation, the festival asks us to question the value of separating the alien from the familiar. It also invites us to consider, with full awareness of our intertwined world, how we might move in concert with the land, the sea, the stranger, the creature, the here, and the elsewhere.

Mapping acts as a thematic framework and strategy for exhibition making. This work shown focuses on reorientation; unsettling an assumed stance and turning again toward others, in order to renegotiate how we inhabit the world together. The artists featured are from Ireland and abroad, and often work within broad collaborations, with their work too, foregrounding themes of interconnectivity, encounter, desire, and negotiation. It unfolds across sites in Galway, through its airwaves, and in a satellite exhibition in New York.

TULCA 2025: Strange lands still bear common ground runs from 7-23 November 2025 across multiple venues in Galway city.

See www.tulca.ie for full programme, including projects, events, workshops, tours & talks.