BIENNALS:Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
Glasgow International (GI) is Scotland’s largest festival for contemporary art, taking place over three weeks every two years across the city of Glasgow. Combining the characteristics of a visual arts biennial with an open submission model for artists and curators based in the city, Glasgow International is a truly unique event in the European cultural calendar.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Glasgow International Archive
Glasgow International provides a unique platform, combining a strong interwoven offer of commissions and exhibitions by both artists living locally and internationally, in both large-scale and familiar public venues as well as smaller less conventional sites. Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2021 now takes on a hybrid format comprising 38 exhibitions in 27 physical venues across the city, as well as a comprehensive online programme of exhibitions, podcasts, films, streamed talks and events. The festival’s theme is “attention”: a topic that has shifted in emphasis over the past year, and the significance of which has, in many respects, become amplified. Visitors will encounter a Commissioned Programme of exhibitions taking place in many of the city’s most well-known venues. Alongside this runs the Across the City Programme, selected from proposals by artists, curators and producers who live and work in Glasgow. In Commissioned Programme highlights include: New works and commissions by Jenkin van Zyl, Yuko Mohri, Ana Mazzei, Sarah Forrest, Nep Sidhu, and France-Lise McGurn. A Glasgow International and Tramway co-commission, a new episode in Martine Syms’ ongoing video installation project “SHE MAD: (2015- ), incorporating elements of the sitcom format and past TV series to explore the sign of blackness in the public imagination. One of the most in-depth presentations to date of work by the late Scottish painter Carol Rhodes, whose drawings, paintings and reference materials, many previously unseen, is displayed at Kelvingrove. A new film by Alberta Whittle, co-commissioned with Glasgow Sculpture Studios, which explores the colonial history of the Forth & Clyde canal and the role of waterways in the voluntary and involuntary movement of people. A major new film commission by Georgina Starr, “Quarantaine” continues Starr’s preoccupation with the otherworldly and the occult, as well as her longstanding interests in the visionary aspects of experimental cinema. The work is co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, the Hunterian and Leeds Art Gallery, with Art Fund support. Gretchen Bender’s “Total Recall” (1987) presented in Scotland for the first time. The 11-channel video installation, which predicted the “image saturation” of the coming decades, utilises 24 monitors and three projection screens. Duncan Campbell’s new work marks the culmination of years of research and involves a new approach to time-based work, encompassing animation, audio and sculpture. GI and the Roberts Institute of Art co-present a hybrid programme of live and digital events including performance work by Paul Maheke, Nina Beier and Lina Lapelytė. For “An Immeasurable Melody, Medicine for a Nightmare”, his first solo exhibition in Europe, Nep Sidhu presents a body of work embedded in Sikh metaphysics and histories to explore relationships between memory, memorial and the divine. At once personal yet also forged within a strong sense of community, the work is inspired by ancestral bonds and present-day resonances, bringing forward a sense of ritual, kinship and seva (selfless service). The program Across the City includes: New work by Ingrid Pollard at Glasgow Women’s Library, developed in response to its Lesbian Archive and Information Centre, the largest in the UK. “Tobacco Flower” a major body of new work by Jimmy Robert made especially for GI, which explores multiple traces left by Glasgow’s role within colonialism and engages directly with The Hunterian and its historical collections. Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores Black textual production and interdisciplinary storytelling in “Are We Reading Closely? (II)”. Working across a range of media, forms and contexts, Rasheed takes an experimental approach to the arrangement of letters, words, sentences, shapes, tones and textures. Her work frequently engages with the poetry, politics and pleasures of approximation as well as (mis)recognition, translation, privacy and dirty data. The first solo presentation in Scotland of Donald Rodney, whose work examines and critiques racialised identity and its socio-political consequences, at artist-run space Celine Gallery. Many others including Soufiane Ababri, Laura Aldridge, Rabiya Choudhry, Raisa Kabir, Jasleen Kaur and Rae-Yen Song, Jacqueline Donachie, Sam Durant, Graham Fagen, Luke Fowler and Eva Rothschild and Margaret Salmon. In the Digital Programme the work “Tell me, how do I feel?” challenges the positioning of people as unreliable narrators and inaccurate witnesses of their own bodies. Grounded in artist Annie Crabtree’s own experience of ill health and hospitalisation, and informed by numerous conversations, the work collages together archival imagery with new footage and excerpts from medical television dramas. With a voice-over formed from exchanges, quotations, and found texts, the work foregrounds personal testimony and storytelling in an attempt to dismantle the power dynamics inherent in medical practice. Also, the Digital Programme includes a newly commissioned film with Anne-Marie Copestake involving artists from across the programme in dialogue.
Info: Glasgow International 2021, Glasgow, Scotland, Duration: 11-27/6/2021, https://glasgowinternational.org
