Richard Parry has clearly been paying attention while putting
together the programme for this year’s Glasgow International, the city’s
bi-annual festival of contemporary art. Indeed, following Parry’s inaugural
tenure as festival director in 2018, Attention is the theme of GI’s three-week
city-wide trawl through venues great and small, with the latter including a
former strip club and a garage.
“The way we see things is changing,” says Parry of GI’s theme.
“We’ve got 24-hour news, we’re seeing things constantly through a screen, and
we’re living in a world where we’re required to be constantly ‘on’. Our
attention is changing because of that, and that has both physical and mental
consequences. Looking at art in the flesh rather than through a screen, you’re
going to see it differently. The sign of great art is that invites you to look
at it again and again and get something different from it each time, and that
requires attention.”
This year’s GI programme will see some marked differences in
structure. While The Director’s Programme will see a series of major
commissions from the likes of Duncan Campbell, Georgina Starr and Sarah Forrest
in some of the city’s major venues, Across the City will showcase and support
artists, curators and artist-led spaces working at ground level.
This year, a panel of artist Alberta Whittle, head of exhibitions
at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Eoin Dara, and director of Kunsthal Stavanger,
Hanne Mugaas, has worked alongside Parry and Poi Marr of GI to select the
programme. This includes work by familiar names including Graham Fagen and
Jacqueline Donachie, as well as a plethora of younger artists seizing the means
of production.
Beyond the wealth of work on show, the biggest change to Across
the City is about money. Artists have become increasingly vocal about the day
to day economics of their practices, and institutions have similarly been
called out for not paying fees. With this in mind, the Scottish Government Expo
Fund, designed to support and promote artistic innovation in Scotland, has
supported GI for the first time. This will enable GI to pay all projects by
freelance artists and curators and artist-run spaces selected for inclusion in
this year’s programme a minimum of £1,500. Awards of £3,000 and £5,000 will be
paid out to other projects, with a top award of £10,000.
This year, that will go to an
exhibition curated by the Chapter 13 collective for a group exhibition that
will include work by French artist Kadar Attia, Japanese video artist Hikaru
Fujii and New York-born film-maker, Margaret Salmon. Elsewhere, those receiving
funding include Transmission, for a show co-curated with Brazilian artist and
performer Ana Beatriz Almeida, and for the non-profit based Many Studios for an
exhibition by Nigerian-based artist, Ndidi Dike. The GI Bursary Award of
£3,000, given to a recent graduate, has been awarded to Iman Tajik for his
proposal, Bordered Miles, a performance-based walk linking Glasgow city centre
and the Dungavel immigration removal centre. Other events include a series of
walks by Walker and Bromwich and a group show of tableaux vivants in a city
centre garage.
This is barely scratching the surface,
however, of the vast array of activity demanding attention. In terms of
providing tangible support for artists, the signals the move sends out are
positive.
“I’d love to do more,” says Parry, “but
this feels like a really important first step. These are challenging times,
both for artists and for society as a whole, and I’m not going to pretend any
of this is easy. We’ve made a big change to the model of GI, and we’ve only
really gone through the first part of the process. We’ll find out how that goes
as it happens.”
Glasgow, of course, has a rich history
of DIY artistic happenings (and Happenings) long before GI existed, and helped
put the city on the international art map. This is something Parry is aware of,
and seems to relish both GI’s umbilical links with that history and being part
of its ongoing evolution.
“I think it’s a really inspiring place,”
he says. “It feels now that Glasgow is one of the key centres in Europe for
contemporary art. There is such strength and depth in some of the things
artists are doing, and what’s great is that it’s from the ground up rather than
top-down. It’s very much about artists doing things on their own terms and
making things happen. I’ve not been to too many places with that sort of
energy, where artists with more experience are happy to share that with younger
artists. What you’re seeing now are new voices with different sets of concerns
right across the board, and I think what’s great is that people aren’t afraid
to ask questions, and that’s really energising.”
Glasgow International 2020 runs from April 24th to
May 10th.
The List, February 2020
ends
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