Glasgow Sculpture Studios Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 20th-June 12th 2012 4 stars Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ new work for Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old Whiskey Bond building, which sources a photographic archive in the now decaying Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from frontline Croydon during the 2011 London riots. In the small Project Gallery, three projectors quick-fire off more than 6000 images by Luis Alvarado that charts a historical landscape from the 1960s to the 1980s peopled by heroic masked wrestlers, politicians, wedding parties and street corner night owls, all captured in the throes of a thousand social rituals. In the main room, the phrase ‘A DIAMOND FOR THE CROWN’ is carved across the back wall like an epitaph. On another wall in a glass box sits the tiniest and loveliest of diamonds sourced from burnt wood and carbon from the riots and painstakingly buffed into beautiful life by Margolles. That something so sparklingly serene was born of a disenfranchised energy feels how a revolution is meant to turn out. The List magazine, April 2012 ends
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