Bulletin

Alex Frost, Alan Michael and Alex Pollard
are showing work with Sorch Dallas at Art Brussels’ latest initiative, First Call 20-24 April 2006. This art zone appeared at the contemporary art fair last year and is returning as a space dedicated to international emerging artists. Only 14 galleries have been selected. Meanwhile, Sorcha Dallas is swapping exhibitions with Anke Kempkes of New York gallery Broadway 1602. Kempkes has curated the next show in the Scottish space, All Dressed Up With Nowhere to Go, 20 May-24 June, while Sorcha Dallas mounts If Not Now at the New York venue in late June, including the artists Alex Frost, Sophie Macpherson, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson, Henry Coombes and Gary Rough.

Lucy Skaer
is showing work in Art Basel’s Statements . The doggerfisher artist is one of 22 selected to present a solo show as part of the Swiss art fair’s series. The solo section has expanded from last year’s 17 spaces, which featured Katy Dove and Venice Biennale duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan.

Roderick Buchanan
will be host and player once more in the Artcup football match which takes place in Huntly on 25 June. Buchanan will arrive there as Deveron Arts’ artist-in-residence, where he, Artcup curator Nuno Sacramento and Danish artist Thomas Zeest will be responsible for picking the teams. Huntly FC will be supporting this year’s venture, following previous international matches in Lisbon, Helsinki and Belgrade. ‘This is not a project about art and football—it is art and football,’ says captain Buchanan.

Ellsworth Kelly
is one of a clutch of sculptors whose work will feature in Seattle’s new $85 million sculpture park, to be erected on the city’s downtown waterfront. Combining a mix of works by Kelly, as well as Richard Serra and Alexander Calder, alongside new commissions from Louise Bourgeois and Mark Dion, the park will open to the public this July. Represented by Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, 83-year-old Kelly is also finishing his triple run of shows in the UK, where Ingleby showed his prints from the last 30 years in March and April. Tate St Ives is still showing lithographs and paintings until 7 May, while the Serpentine presents 25 paintings until 21 May.

Bill Thompson
inflamed public opinion when he set fire to a harpsichord on a beach in Aberdeen. The second part of his performance piece was created with the assistance of Peacock Visual Arts on 11 March. The night before, the sound artist used the harpsichord, along with live electronics, to explore some of the previously unexploited sounds that lay dormant in the instrument. After spending two days trying to free it from its past traditions, he staged the final bonfire as performance send-off.

Claudia Zeiske and Glenfiddich
have been nominated for the British Council Arts & Business International Award for their collaborative work on the Artists at Glenfiddich programme. The much-praised residency annually brings together eight international artists to work at the distillers. Zeiske and Glenfiddich were the only Scottish entry shortlisted for the prestigious award, which recognises arts/business partnerships successfully promoting international understanding through the arts.

Rosalind Nashashibi
has been awarded the fifth Glenfiddich UK residency this summer. The film-maker will spend four months at the distillery’s Dufftown studios. She will be joined there by South African hip hop artist Mustafa Maluka and Annie Pootoogook from Cape Dorset, Nanvut.

Rosalind Nashishibi, Gary Rough, Nathan Coley, Douglas Gordon, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jim Lambie and Lucy Skaer
have been selected by curators Charles Asprey and Kay Pallister to show at Bethlehem Peace Centre’s international exhibition As If By Magic 23 May-31 July. They join 18 other international names, including Wolfgang Tillmans and Damien Hirst. However, neither the artists nor their work will visit the site. Instead, instructions for new work will be sent and then assembled by friends of the exhibition, including staff, curators and local artists. Asprey co-founded ArtSchool Palestine, while Pallister co-curated Zenomap, Scotland’s first official presentation at the 50th Venice Biennale. www.artschoolpalestine.com

Collective Gallery
in Edinburgh has replaced its Project Room with a new video space, Black Cube. Inaugurating it with films by Jimmy Roberts, 22 April-3 June, the Collective has lined up an international showcase for the forthcoming year, with help from curators Emily Pethick, Polly Staple, Deborah Smith, Lesley Young and Beatrix Ruff. Originally established in 1995 as an experimental arts space for Scottish artists, the Project Room closed with a show by artist Val Norris.

Jim Lambie’s
vinyl, concrete and electric-lit work ‘Dubronic’ is up for sale at the Armory Fair in New York. Sold by the New Museum of Contemporary Art to drum up funds, the work was purchased by Wrong Gallery curator Lisa Ivorian Gray for $7,500. The Turner nominee will be making his second Japanese outing at Mizuma Art Gallery., Tokyo with a solo show, P.L.L. 12 April-13 May.

Erica Eyres, Mick Peter and Becky Beasley
were among the many artists selling work at Artfutures, the alternative to the Glasgow Art Fair held on 8 and 9 April. The new event, organised by Market Gallery’s Richard Hopkins, ran for two days in George Square’s Millennium Hotel, featuring nearly 200 works by contemporary artists currently working in Scotland. It is hoped that this free event will complement the art fair proper each year.

Get a Fucking Job
has been causing a stir in Aberdeen. Subtitled ‘The Truth About Begging’, it is the most recent publication from New Social Art School’s Eva Merz and Bob Steadman, and compiles interviews with Aberdeen’s street beggars. Ottaker’s has refused to stock the publication on the grounds that its title might cause offence to some people, so buy it from Peacock, Fopp or Waterstone’s instead.

Joyce Laing
opens a new gallery at 27 High Street, Pittenweem, Fife. Over 500 pieces from the Scottish collection of Art Extraordinary, amassed by Laing while working as an art therapist for 32 years, are finally collected together here. Some work dates back to the mid-1800s but the gallery will also feature invited contemporary artists. Open 6 May-end October by appointment. Newly appointed curator Ann Copland or Joyce herself can be contacted on 01333 311 425.

David Shrigley
has been working on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as moving studio at home in Glasgow. He joined 16 other artists, including Peter Finnemore, Erwin Worm and Vik Muniz, for the Humor Me exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute 28 January-18 March. Later this year, the illustrator shows at Dundee Contempoary Arts and releases a DVD collaboration with Chris Shepherd Who I Am and What I Want on Slinky Pictures. This features tiny deleted scenes banned from early TV showings. www.davidshrigley.com

Karla Black
is the first artist in the Mary Mary gallery’s new premises, which has relocated from Alexandra Park Streeet to Suite 2/1 6 Dixon Street, Glasgow. The space opened on 14 April and Black is showing there until 19 May. Nantes-based artists Lili Reynaud-Dewar was also invited to fill 148 Bell Street as part of the Glasgow International off-site project.

Alison Watt
has been selected for the two-year artist-in-residence scheme at London’s National Gallery and has already moved in. The initiative’s seventh associate artist, Greenock-born Watt will make work related to the National Gallery collection, to be exhibited in the Sunly Room in spring 2008. Concurrently, she is completing her Scottish Arts Council-backed project, Dark Light .

Calum Stirling
had his Nroth American debut at TPW Gallery in Toronto as part of a co-presented show between New Media Scotland, Images Festival and Toronto Photography Workshop 6-29 April. The Glasgow-based artist will install two of his sound scultpres in his exhibition One Revolution Per Minute, which runs as partof the city-wide Images Festival.

Susan Collins’
work at Threshold, Perth has been selected for three international exhibitons in Toronto, London and Hobart, Tasmania. ‘Glenlandia’ was commissioned by Threshold as a pixel-by-pixel landscape of a fictitious place, broadcast both in the gallery and over the internet for six months. Collins’ digital artwork is part surveillance, part landscape painting. She tours Framed 23-25 March at Slade Centre for Electronic Media in London; Timeless 24 March-8 May at York Quay Art Centre in Toronto and Remote 2-21 June at the University of Tasmania’s Plimsoll Gallery in Hobart.

Free Association
is the new publication edited by Street Level Photoworks’ Malcolm Dixon. Printed to coincide with the opening of Glasgow Internatinal in April, it aims to uncover emerging critical practice in Scottish contemporary art and will be published at irregular intervals, both in print and on the web. The project is supported by GI and Arts Development at Glasgow City Council and is produced with the collaboration of artists and writers.

Becky Beasley
hosts a dinner party to celebrate the opening of Decors du Silence! her first British solo show and the inaugural exhibition at Ubu Gallery in Glasgow’s East End. The photographer, whose work relates to her tenement home, will ask six guests to dinner prior to the opening, with a further six being invited randomly through the glalery mailout. www.beckybeasley.com

Tobias Berger and Lise Nelleman
were the keynote speakers at an artist-led study day held by the British Council in March at the Scottish Natinal Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. A report on this international event can be found at www.britishcouncil.org/scotland

The Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen
are joining forces to promote the Artists’ Film and Video Funding initiative. The scheme offers £5,000-£15,000 to support innovative and experimental work by visual artists using film and video. The deadline is 3 July. Application forms can be downloaded at the SAC website www.scottishartscouncil.org.uk