Glasgow International is Scotland’s biennial festival of contemporary art. The 2024 edition features a programme packed with thought-provoking projects and contemporary luminaries, such as Yoko Ono, Reiko Goto Collins and Sandra George. This year’s pieces touch on concerns that resonate with our 21st century lives: from how land and space is used and governed; to the act of listening as a social and political force; and the rituals, practices and forms of memory that define individual and collective identities.
Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies | Lenzie Moss | 20 June
Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies is a performance playing with the connections between trans bodies, boglands and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them. Led by contemporary artists, Belladonna Paloma, Oren Shoesmith & Rabindranath X Bhose, this project came out of their extensive research into the cultural significance and history of these wetlands. They’ve co-created this project, which explores what boglands can teach us about commitment to deep time and resistance to the tyranny of productivity.
Peace Arbour | Glasgow Women’s Library | 1 June – 31 August
Three visual artists respond to the themes hope and healing across a new orchard space in Glasgow Women’s Library. Reiko Goto Collins has created a fruit tree nursery and a forum, which centres the value of nature in neighbourhoods. Emerging artist Zana Araki also explores the soothing energy of trees whilst expressing their experiences of trauma as a neurodivergent queer survivor. Elsewhere, Yoko Ono addresses grief and peace in line with the long trajectory of feminist artists advocating Peace is Power.
Best of #9 | SWG3 Galvanizers | 8 June
Best of #9 is a new performance by the collective STASIS, commissioned to mark the opening of SWG3’s garden space. STASIS is a multidisciplinary group that explores notions of gender. Best of #9 is inspired by the idea of greatest hit compilations, meaning that each time the performance piece is brought to life, it surpasses the last performances to become number one. Devised and performed in situ, it features Isabel Palmstierna, Aniela Piasecka and Paloma Proudfoot, with Jordan Pilling and music by Ailie Ormston.
Anticipate, sublimate | 83 Portman Street | 7-23 June
Anticipate, sublimate brings together the work of artists and friends Alexis Kyle Mitchell and Ima-Abasi Okon. Alexis’s film relays experiences of living with and alongside disease and debility, tracing patterns across biological, physical and spiritual realms. Responding to Alexis’s cinematic presentation, Ima’s work highlights relationships with time, forms of individual and collective nourishment, as well as how institutional structures seek to administrate paths towards the sharing and ingestion of knowledge.
Radio International | Glasgow King Street | 7-23 June
Radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi suggested that sounds, once generated, never die. They fade but continue to reverberate across the universe. Radio International explores this idea by broadcasting sound works from a radio to a parked car in the city centre. It is inspired by Radio Interval Signals and Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1950), where the protagonist is obsessed with a similar phenomenon. The piece was created by Susan Philipsz, students from Dresden University of Fine Arts and Glasgow School of Art.
Image Credits:
- Rabindranath X Bhose Body of the Bog (2023). Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Sean Patrick Campbell.
- STASIS, Best of #9, 2023, performance documented at SWG3 and performed at Jupiter Artland. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Alice Meikle.
- Collins & Goto Studio HAKOTO | Speaking Leaf (2023) – Documentation of performance, Glasgow, July 2023. Courtesy of the artists.
- Alexis Kyle Mitchell The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024) Courtesy of the artist Co-commissioned by Glasgow International and The Vega Foundation.
- Susan Philipsz and Radio International Collective Radio International (2022) Installation view at Manifesta 14, Prishtina. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Paul Barsch.
