GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL
Katrina Brown, director of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, talks about this year’s programme “I hesitate to use the word ‘unique’, but there is something unarguably distinctive about the GI Festival; not quite a conventional biennial, despite taking place every two years, nor simply a ‘fleeting event’ festival.
Stretching over two frenetic weeks, it is a more event-like creature than a biennial, and has many curatorial voices rather than one, the programme being comprised of both a curated segment and of numerous exhibitions and projects conceived and produced by a whole range of visual arts organisations across the city. And within its programme are a number of more ‘static’ exhibitions that run beyond the festival, some into September. It’s a format that seems to allow Glasgow to play to its strengths and foregrounds its very particular energy.This year’s festival will occupy the now familiar array of spaces and places in the city, from major museums and regular contemporary art venues to temporary sites and locations. For the first time it extends to Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, where David Shrigley will show a group of new sculptures and related objects in a specially commissioned installation. This is his first exhibition in Glasgow for over a decade.
For this outing of the Glasgow International, my first as director, we have been working around the theme of ‘past, present, future’. This was in part suggested by prevalent trends in contemporary art practice of recent years, and in part by 2010 being the 20th anniversary of Glasgow’s reign as European Capital of Culture, a fact which offers an interesting moment to look back, and, we hope, forward.
So much contemporary work has taken existent material as its starting point; whether film, found artifacts, design or architecture, the processes of reenactment, reconstruction and re-use are widespread. Elsewhere, other artists have looked more at how societies envisage, or speculate about, the future. Two key examples of the latter that will be at the heart of the festival are David Maljkovic and Gerard Byrne both of whom will be showing in a fantastic temporary venue on Miller Street in the Merchant City, itself a reflection of the theme, fusing as it does buildings old and new. NVA are contributing a brilliant example of the use of re-enactment with its ‘White Bikes Plan’ which re-creates a Dutch anarchist action from the late 1960s to provide free bicycles: the precursor of many a civic cycle scheme today.
There is a particularly strong range of work to be found across all of the spaces at Tramway: Christoph Büchel (showing in Scotland for the first time), our own Douglas Gordon (showing in Glasgow for the first time in too long) and Keren Cytter, as well as a busy programme of screenings and a symposium. And alongside so much work made in our current decade, we will be presenting (along with the Hunterian Art Gallery and Artist Rooms) a remarkable selection of unique works on paper and sculptures by one of the 20th century’s most enduringly resonant and influential figures: Joseph Beuys.
Among all this there are events a-plenty, with the fantastic and unquestionably unique Linder at the Arches presented by Sorcha Dallas Gallery. Three Blows will present a magical night by Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth at the magnificent Sloans Ballroom, and every evening during the festival there will be dada-esque goings on at ‘Le Drapeau Noir’, a temporary café/club orchestrated by Raydale Dower. Sign up to our website below and be sure not to miss a thing.”
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, 16 April–3 May