We aim to establish long-term relationships with artists through our residency programme and provide support and mentorship to emerging artists as well as logistical support from Galway Arts Centre’s programming, technical and front-of-house team.
Creating specific opportunities for early career artists in diversity and inclusion by working with local, national and international partners is another key aim of the programme.
Residencies last up to four months, and we provide an artists’ bursary along with access to a downstairs, desk-based studio with its own entrance in Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street. We are also developing models of residencies working with artists who do not require studio space.
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Artists in Residence 2024
Galway Arts Centre, in conjunction with Galway City Council, today (25.11.24) announced the awarding of three art commissions under an innovative new artist-in-residence programme.
The selected artists are:
● Leon Butler: Galway-based artist Leon Butler’s project Phosphene blends art and technology to transform air quality data into a community experience. By using sensors to track and interpret this data, Butler will create “data sculptures” that reveal the health of Galway’s built environment in new ways. The project invites the local community to participate in design sessions to shape how air data is visualised, making the often-invisible aspects of air quality engaging and accessible to all.
● Christopher Steenson: Multidisciplinary artist Christopher Steenson’s project I talk to the wind explores air pollution through the act of breathing. His work will incorporate sound walks using live air pollution data and community workshops that consider climate futures through writing and discussion. Drawing on Galway’s air quality data, insights from scientists, and ideas generated through community workshops, Steenson’s project will connect participants with the realities of air pollution and its impacts on daily life through the shared experience of breath.
● a place of their own (Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy): Art and spatial practice ‘a place of their own’ envisions Galway in 2054, where communities of insects, dust, microbes, and other “air dwellers” draft a new set of rights for the air: The 9 Freedoms for the Air. This project explores the knowledge and stories of microscopic communities in our atmosphere and builds a speculative future scenario in Galway. Through workshops, local residents will join scientists and environmental legal experts to create a collective textile artwork that reimagines air as a shared resource deserving of protection.
Colm Keady-Tabbal
Colm Keady-Tabbal (they/them) is an Irish-Lebanese artist from Kinvara Co. Galway. Their practice addresses epistemologies of sound, place and memory and their relationship to systems and architectures of control. Operating through sculpture, moving image, installation, performance and writing their work engages with processes of memorialisation and translation, often appropriating the forms and language of existing media and infrastructure. Their work has been exhibited and performed at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Douglas
Hyde Gallery, The Wallach Gallery, IRCAM, Ormston House, and Cork Centre for Architectural
Education. They received a BA in Fine art from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin and
an MFA from Columbia University School of The Arts.
Magdalena Hylak 2023 - 2024
Image Credit: Photo: Avi Ratnayake
Dancer in Residence 2023-2024 in partnership with Galway County Council and Galway Dance Project
Magdalena Hylak is a dance artist and choreographer. From June 2023 to March 2024, she will develop her dance practice in the city and the county, and lead workshops and performances to promote and open up ideas around contemporary dance for all to enjoy.
Born in Poland and based in Co Galway since 2004, she has worked with Michael Keegan Dolan, Liz Roche, Ríonach Ní Néill (IE), Catherine Young Dance, and Compagnie Nacera Belaza, among others.
Since 2022, she has been developing her work with movement and sound in collaboration with French composer Lionel Kasparian. Their first work, A DANCE, has already been shown in multiple festivals across Ireland and abroad.
Artists in Residence 2023
We are delighted to announce Rocío Grau as the recipient of the Galway Arts Centre ATU graduate artist in residence award 2023, supported by Galway City Council Arts Office.
Rocío Grau is a multidisciplinary artist interested in interactive installations. She works with video, virtual reality, interactive interfaces, holograms, generative art, painting, photography, sound, and music. Conceptually, she is interested in the tension between past and future, positioning our present as a liminal state, seeking to interrogate the notion of transition and transcendence through the aesthetic experience. Her theoretical and practical research aims to enhance the presence of our sensorial organs when engaging with art. Her practice could be defined as a multi-sensorial exploration where divergent cognitive processes may unfold by driving non-conventional interconnections between senses.
Museum of Everyone (MOE)
Museum of Everyone (MOE) Communal – The Art of Coexistence is a series of workshops, talks, public events, communal meals and interactive exhibitions taking place from the 15th – 22th of September 2023 at Galway Art Centre – Nun’s Island Theatre.
Through invitation and an open call process, Communal will endeavour to collaborate with artists/curators/performers and writers from diverse backgrounds and seek to develop a series of artworks, performances, exhibitions and events around ideas of community & coexistence in the city of Galway.
The MOE Communal residency will culminate in a day-long event on Culture Night at Galway Arts Centres Nun’s Island Theatre where local groups, artists and the public will be invited to a round table artists talk, with performance art, dance, live music and of course a glass of wine.
In the lead up to this event, Communal will facilitate a series of workshops and talks open to the public and local invited artists headed by its core artists and researchers – Éireann and I’s curator and researcher Beulah Ezeugo and cultural producer Joselle Ntumba, Irish-Iraqi multidisciplinary artist Basil Al-Rawi, Indian visual artist and filmmaker Pradeep Mahadeshwar, MOE writer in residence Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro, Swedish visual artist Ella Bertilsson, Hungarian visual artist and researcher Istvan Laszlo, Irish multidisciplinary visual artist Alan Phelan, Irish visual artist and educator Sarah Edmondson, Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Thaís Muniz and lead artist and curator Brendan Fox.
Bryan Gerard Duffy
Image Credit: Bryan Gerard Duffy.
Galway Arts Centre in partnership with Interface
Bryan Gerard Duffy is a multi-disciplinary artist working in paint, sculpture, lens-based work, moving image, and installation. He draws lines and also crosses lines, both physically and metaphysically, while investigating psychological and physical displacement.
He is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and is now based in Mayo. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including upcoming solo shows in the Ballina Arts Centre (2025), the Custom House Studios and Gallery, Westport (2024), and GOMA Gallery Of Modern Art, Waterford (2024). His work was also selected for the 193rd RHA annual exhibition (2023). Duffy has shown his work throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and the United States.
Duffy was a recipient of the PLATFORM 31 award (2022) from Local Arts Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland; the Mayo County Council Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award (2022); and the recipient of the Bolay Residency Award, Castlebar, Ireland (2020).
He has been awarded numerous grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, including the Travel and Training award to participate in Artifariti Arts Festival in Algeria and Western Sahara (2017). A recent public art project includes the “Art Roundhouse” G.E.T.N.S. Commission, Newcastle, Galway, Ireland, funded through the Irish Department of Education Per Cent for Art Scheme (2020). In 2021, he was elected to the Board of Trustees at the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Ireland.
Duffy has also been the recipient of multiple national and international awards for his films, including being shortlisted for the Best Irish Human Rights Short Documentary with Sumud, Everyday Resistance at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) awards (2016), and receiving Bronze Medal Award at the Global Independent Film Awards for his film Delivery. (2021).
Bryan Gerard Duffy will be artist in residence with the Galway Arts Centre from 17th to 31st July.
Pavithra Kannan
Artist in Residence 2022 in partnership with Create and Creative Places Tuam.
Pavithra Kannan is a Socially Engaged Artist from India, settled in Tuam, Co Galway, whose work seeks a narrative in relation to place.
In her most recent project A Sip and Beyond, Pavithra brings her personal experience of a place and the memories behind it into practice. Through A Sip and Beyond and socially engaged practice, Pavithra intends to address specific environmental, social, aesthetic and economic concerns within a located context involving the aspects of space and place.
REWIND<>RECORD (RFR)
Artists in Residence 2022
The REWIND<<FASTFORWARD>>RECORD (RFR – Han Tiernan, Brendan Fox, Sarah Edmundson), is an initiative is aimed at engaging with LGBTQ+ community groups to uncover queer histories and expand their retelling and relevance through a series of talks, tours, workshops and personal accounts.
As part of their residency in Galway Arts Centre Rewind Fastforward Record brough the Irish Names Quilt (1989) to the centre to be exhibited alongside the Array Collective ‘Druthaibs’ Ball” exhibition. They also developed a series of talks, workshops and events that explored queer histories in Galway, such as the development of Galway pride with activists Nuala Ward and the Irish names quilt with academic Padraic Kerrigan, Activist Liz Martin and Kate Drinane.
Eireann and I
Artists in Residence 2022
Beulah Ezeugo and Joselle Ntumba working as the collective Éireann and I, are a collaborative project that sources, contextualizes, and chronicles the experience of Black migrants in Ireland.
Beulah Ezeugo is an Igbo artist, curator, and researcher currently based in Glasgow. Her work centres Black postcolonial dreaming using collective memory and myth. Her practice is informed by a social science background from University College Dublin and an MLitt in Curatorial Practice from Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow.
Joselle Ntumba is a cultural producer of Congolese-heritage and who was raised in Galway City. Her work centers both community and memory work. Alongside this she has a background in social science from Trinity College Dublin.
During their residency in Galway Arts Centre Beulah Ezeugo and Joselle Ntumba working as Éireann and I, developed a series of community recording events documenting intergenerational Black migrant experience in Galway. The resulting work will be developed into a series of transmissions and events alongside an exhibition in the Galway Arts Centre.
About their Galway Arts Centre residency Beulah Ezeugo and Joselle Ntumba said “we are excited to have a space where the archive can grow and take on whatever form it needs to – particularly in Galway where there is such a vibrant black community with stories to share.”
