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Two big names may dominate this year's programme, but there's plenty of work by other artists to whet the viewing public's appetite, writes Aidan Dunne

A COUPLE OF BIG names dominate the visual arts programme of this year's Galway Arts Festival, one predictable, the other distinctly less so. Bill Viola is one of the foremost artists at work in the world today and Joni Mitchell too is renowned, though obviously more for music than visual art. But that's what she's doing in Galway, with her exhibition Green Flag Song, and, rather than the domestically scaled oil paintings made in a Post-Impressionist style she has made in the past, her new work is photographic, big, and fairly in-your-face. It consists of a series of triptychs of grainy images, some in negative, snatched from television broadcasts and processed so that natural colour is distorted.