Once upon a time in the West

TULCA IS AN annual, early winter visual arts festival that began in Galway in 2002. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s still going strong. Surprisingly because, while international in scope, it has consistently been run on a budget that’s minuscule by most standards. Then there’s the fact that Galway lacks a substantial visual arts venue. The Arts Centre (where the festival originated) is a really nice gallery space, but it is domestic in nature and scale.

Yet, here is is again, Tulca, and curator Megs Morley has put together a very strong, richly textured season of shows and events.

The overall title she's chosen is After the Fall. "Obviously," she explains, "I wanted to reflect what's been happening here and abroad. It has been a particularly interesting year, I think, and I wanted the work to deal with that, but not just to settle for navel gazing. I don't see the theme as necessarily negative. It's to do with that state of aftermath, it offers a chance for assessment, a chance to say well, what is our history really, as opposed to a received version of it, and to ask where we go from here."

Recent history threatened to disrupt the project just when it was coming together. While it occupies every available arts venue in the city and more, for its main space, Tulca was due to take over the outstanding shopping centre venue on the Headford Road that served so well as the Galway Arts Festival gallery this year. This was made possible thanks to the lull in mainstream commercial activity. At the last minute – “The very last minute,” Morley says, recalling moments of utter panic – Tulca was told that it was all off, a retailer had taken on the space. Fortunately, the owner offered a nearby alternative.

“But it was a huge challenge. We’d planned everything. The problem was we not only had to rethink what was going in and where, we had to physically fit out the space and install in about a week,” Morely says. “One of the best things to come out of this whole experience is the way artists began to turn up, Galway-based artists who had nothing to gain, because they weren’t in the show, and said: ‘Can we help?’ And they did. Tulca depends on a lot of voluntary effort anyway, but it was fantastic that people were willing to be so generous.”

Morley is both a highly regarded practising artist and a curator. She was for a time, when the position existed, public arts officer with Galway City Council, and After the Fallis closely attuned to the interface between personal artistic endeavour and the wider public realm, in general and in specific, local terms. As she puts it, Tulca's intricate, consistent involvement with "local art organisations, local businesses and like-minded institutions" throughout the years "has created a platform for an engaged and critical contemporary art practice in the West of Ireland."

Of the international artists involved in the festival, Morely says: “They were without exception very understanding of the limitations we had to deal with. And they were keen to come to Galway. I think the fact that here in the West we are on the edge of Europe appeals to many artists. They like the idea of being on the edge, of doing something alternative.”

THERE IS A HEADYfeeling of possibility and idealism about the festival she's devised.

Tulca’s chairwoman, Maeve Mulrennan, points to Chicago-born Amie Siegel’s prize-winning, feature-length film, DDR/DDR, screened continuously at Nuns Island Theatre, as being the conceptual heart of the project for Morley.

The curator doesn’t demur. “I think it provides links between various other things included, not least in the way she [Siegel] bridges the gap between film and fine art. She really does produce something in-between that redefines both. And that’s something that comes up a lot in the work I’ve included.”

Through multiple, fairly leisurely strands, Siegal’s film explores the one-time East Germans’ present-day views of their former country. Personal testimonies provide unexpected insights. It’s not a straitlaced documentary at all. Stasi surveillance comes into it, but so too does the cult focused on Native Americans, with role-playing re-enactments based on Hollywood westerns. “Because, when it came to cowboys and Indians, politically the East Germans identified with the Indians,” Morley notes. “It’s a wonderfully indirect but revealing exploration of how a society and a community works.”

There's an echo of Siegel's approach in Seamus Nolan's Oral Hearing, a re-enactment of part of the public hearing on the Corrib Gas pipeline in Mayo, and in Northern Irish artist Allan Hughes's Point of Audition, a mixed media video installation built around Jane Fonda's opposition to the Vietnam War and her contentious visit to Hanoi in 1972.

Elaine Byrne's Message to Salinasis also comparable. Made during Byrne's residency in Mexico City, her participatory video gives Mexicans the opportunity to send personal messages to their ex-president, Carlos Salinas, who moved to Dublin after leaving office in the mid-1990s, and who remains a controversial figure in recent Mexican history.

There's a noticeable sci-fi strand running through the exhibits. Speculations on future possibilities are, as Morley says, one way of figuring out contemporary realities. Chto delat? is a Russian collective of "artists, writers and performers". Their Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XXis a brilliant short film based on a hypothetical incident: a group of refugees targeted for deportation take refuge in a contemporary art museum in The Netherlands.

Jesse Jones's short film, Against the Realm of the Absoluteis derived from Joanna Russ's feminist sci-fi novel The Female Man, published in 1975. Jones situates a group of women in a bleak, post-industrial, post-everything landscape. The striking location was an "ash lagoon", a desert-like setting formed from coal-ash from an electricity generating plant on the east coast of Scotland. In a series of ritualistic, stylised, choreographed episodes, Jones sketches a picture of a post-male, post-capitalist, post-culture future.

With eight main listed venues and spaces, a great deal of durational film and video exhibits and a lively programme of talks and other live events, Tulca presents a challenge for the dutiful viewer, as Morley acknowledges. For example, to see everything, she notes, you’d spend about 10 hours looking at screens and projections. In practice, as with any contemporary exhibition, you edit as you make your way through the spaces, investing time in some works and not others.

And not everything is durational. Gareth Kennedy makes his point very well with is just two small pieces of inscribed wood. His The Mean Palletillustrates the notional measurement of worldwide economic activity by tracking the centre of gravity of all the pallets in the world. Currently, it is over the Caspian Sea but "drifting in a south-easterly direction at a rate of 0.24 km a day".

Nilu Izadi's Yellow House Series, an ingenious photographic exploration of a battle-scarred building in Beruit, strategically positioned on the dividing line between East and West.

Filippo Berta’s allegorical video is a little heavy-handed but visually amazing. In a wasteland, wolves happen upon an Italian flag laying flat on the ground and proceed to rip it to shreds as they squbble among themselves. It’s hard to imagine a piece more of the moment.

Tulca Festival of Visual Arts continues until November 20. See tulca.ie