Remarks: International Detours

Director of Glasgow’s visual art organisation, The Common Guild, Katrina Brown outlines her plans for ‘Detours’, a series of talks running from March 2008 through to 2010—24 Thursdays over 3 years.

“ ‘Detours’ is about the idea that in order to understand and better appreciate your own place you need to go elsewhere, and that sometimes places you come across en route become really important or influential to you. It seemed that with The Common Guild being a new organisation and thinking about what sort of structures and mechanisms we need to put in place in order to suppport contemporary visual practice today, we ought to look at lots of existent models beyond our immediate context—visit other places, before settling on our own. What shape would a new public platform form contemporary art take if you were to make a new one today? What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would it do? How would it do it? We wanted to bring as many different possibilities and ways of doing things into the discussion as possible, to begin to try to answer these questions.

So we’re bringing the journey to Glasgow by inviting leading museum directors and curators, people at the top of their field in the visual arts, to come and talk about how their work has developed in relation to the place in which they work.

We’ve chosen to use the Trades Hall on Glassford Street for the first events. It was built in the late 18th century and designed by Robert Adam as a gathering place for the associated trades of Glasgow. It is, the medieval cathedral aside, the oldest building in the city still in use for its original purpose. So it seemed to offer the perfect backdrop – a long-standing gathering place, designed and built with care, purpose and ambition.”Speakers include: Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in Istanbul; Juliana Enberg, artistic director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne and Richard Flood, senior curator at the New Museum, New York.
To book, visit www.thecommonguild.org