Obeying Durations considers political pressure, temporality, and subjective objecthood to delineate experiences of process and creation. 

Leah Capaldi presents ‘Overlay’, a continual performance sculpture about the visible process of objectification through a body becoming a static object. The changing situation of the performance evokes ideas of afterness through the knowledge of the previous spaces the performance occupied. This rupturing of expectations through the renegotiated condition of stasis reflects on the stretching and suspension of time while pressure is exerted on the body and by the body. While connecting with the legacy of twentieth century performance art, Capaldi involves the viewer and the gallery itself in an interrogation of the nature of spectacle and gallery practice. It has previously been exhibited at ICA, London and Crispr, Colombia. Performances will be on Saturdays and Sundays and ‘Overlay’ will travel to a different location in the gallery everyday. 

Ross Little presents Դուխով - Dukhov, a new film drawing upon the participatory action experienced during the recent Velvet Revolution in Armenia and the collective awareness seen in historical accounts of Faslane Peace Camp in Scotland. The film investigates zones of alternative governance and productive acts of emancipation, questioning existing choreographies of resistance through dialogical and self-reflective forms. Դուխով - Dukhov, an Armenian street slang word for self-belief / spirit is a recently popularised phrase that was written on protest leader (now Prime Minister) Nikol Pashinyan's baseball cap. Investigating the political nature of collective forms, this film reflects upon the rehearsal, care, and maintenance of the gesture of freedom, as an entanglement of socialities and intersubjective actions. Direct observations, personal involvement and encounters informed this document of the demonstrations and their inner strategies of alliance, questioning the methods in which we develop forms of resistance and our political imagination.

This film has been commissioned by Falte Projects as part of Knots of Resistance, a research-driven project supported by The European Cultural Foundation and initiated during a residency at The Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory Yerevan.

Ani Schulze’s Under Jaguar Sun is exhibited on the gallery’s top floor. Her film ‘Merchant’s Freely Enter’ explores artifice and the construction of identity through the exploration of agricultural afterworlds and underworlds. In contrast to the volume and the cultivation of modernity in landscapes is examined through the conflation of agriculture and technology to create a dreamlike space of temporal uncertainty. The treatment of environment and body as something undergoing a symbolic assimilation is made bodily through the environment created to view the film on the gallery’s top floor, with hung spacious drawings on a transparent film (playing with transparency and opacity) renegotiating the viewer’s occupation of the space itself. The film observes the contemporary representation of Western landscapes and agriculture through drone-mounted cameras to raise questions about the political implications of sight, land boundaries and ideological narrative.

 “Merchants Freely Enter“ examines structures and gestures of agriculture and nature in sharp long shots and exploratory aerial views. Simultaneously, Schulze embraces an enigmatic reading through the use of poetic yet psychedelic imagery. This specific way of storytelling portrays the ongoing interplay between a technologically controlled nature and a romanticization and longing for a self- contained nature." -Dorothee Mosters on Ani Schulze’s ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’, 2017

“Linking objects, the architectonics of the gallery space, the unwitting participation of the visitors and the history of 20th century art practices, Overlay poses questions which are at the crux of art and exhibition making. By forcing the viewers to re-evaluate their position as foreign bodies in the gallery, as spectators of a living object.” - Jack Smurthwait, on Leah Capaldi's ‘Overlay' at ICA, London 2015.

https://www.facebook.com/events/665056467178685/

Curated by Isabella Shields and Ben Soedira and supported by:

The Hope Scott Trust, European Cultural Foundation, Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory, and Falte Projects.

End of Year Exhibition including various photographic practices, as well as sculpture, installation, video, performence and sound pieces

Artists involved: Carlos Anguera, Neha Apsara, Jack Brown, Ella Campbell, Alesh Compton, Callum Diffey, Fletch, Kit Fletcher, Jake Gatehouse, Laura Goodman, Gosia Grant, Max Howarth, Eirini Kalogera, Andrew MacCrimmon, Isabella (Quianrun) Mao, Julia Navarro, Lucas Orozco, Maia Pace-Jackson, Jack-Lewis Petersen, Julie Rose Rahbek, Jessica Ring, Michael Skeen, Jack Taylor and Ada Wawer.

‘In Residence’ is a multi-disciplinary exhibition and symposium across three venues in Glasgow. Simultaneously an act of self care and an act of defiance, we are creating space for vital conversations while challenging the lack of visibility for artists and students of colour within this city. In Residence is the place for us to tell our stories; to form solidarities; it is by us and for us. 

Glasgow School of Art People of Colour Society was founded after students of colour voiced their dissatisfaction with the white, Eurocentric hegemony that the institution operates under. We have two main aims: to create space for students of colour during their time at the Glasgow School of Art and to create long term structural change.
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Opening Party (at The Pipe Factory): 16th March 18:00-23:00
https://www.facebook.com/events/594793687532625

Further information on events over the weekend: 
https://inresidence2018.tumblr.com/

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For trans-femmes of colour, taxi fare to and from venues for the opening party and throughout the weekend will be provided for by the society. Please contact us at gsapocsociety@outlook.com.

For unwaged people, people in the asylum system, people with refugee status, and people without papers please get in touch as we can cover the cost of transport.

The ground floor of 16 Nicholson Street is wheelchair accessible. If you have any queries about accessibility, please email us at gsapocsociety@outlook.com

Email: gsapocsociety@outlook.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gsapocsociety/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gsapocsociety?lang=en

Taking its title from Red Naomi, one of the most popular roses exported from Kenya to Europe, and celebrated for its “high petal count, improved longevity and resistance to transport”, Radek Brousil’s project deals with the symbolism and impact of our fondness for flowers. It circulates freely around Glasgow botanical gardens glass house and its marble sculpture of a ‘Nubian Slave’, touching on the Czech textile company VEBA and its textile designs for the African market, Naomi Campbell and the story of a pouch with “dirty looking” stones, and water as a connecting element and asset for both transport and production, the exhibition is interested in shifts, twists, appropriations, misinterpretation and the absence of the “natural” in current frames of cultural and economical exchange. Its aim is not just academic or critical: with humour and irony it allows certain elements to appear in new contexts, parallels and configurations, understanding cultural symbols as loose containers for adjustation and productive hybridity.

- Michal Novotný

Brousil will be showing new work developed during visits to Glasgow and his research into the floral industry in Africa and its exports to Europe for commercial reasons. The exhibition is an installation and a film with an accompanying text by Francis Mckee, curated by Michal Novotný and 16 Nicholson Street.

Programmed alongside ‘What is Life’, an exhibition by Markéta Othováand Aleksandra Vajd at Street Level Photoworks, which form part of the Czech Season Scotland supported by the Czech Centre London.

http://london.czechcentres.cz/programme/travel-events/ceska-sezona-ve-skotsku/

Accompanying events

October 28th: Walking Tour of Glasgow Botanical Garden with Marenka Thompson-Odlum from 12-2pm 

November 3rd: Talk by Lyndsay Mann with Tiffany Boyle @ 7pm in GSA's Reid Auditorium

November 4th: Conversation with Jennifer Martin from 3-5pm in 16 Nicholson Street

Image Credits: Tine Bek

For 'Les Pavés, La Plage', there’s mutual superimposing of different images and materials that are variously or simultaneously suggestive of sand, concrete, the beach, the pavement or an aestheticised postindustrial interior.

Bright images of posing and styled figures or stylised graphic text (reading “WANT”) are rendered with sensuously emotive facture and in intimate compositions, as figures extend past and are cropped by the edge of the picture plane. Set on bespoke built exhibition furniture, a relationship of mutuality is suggested between the hot closeness of the paintings and the tempting hapticity of their surrounding interior. Dichotomies of immediacy vs deliberation, or - alternately expressed - authentic expression vs staged artifice are displaced by a single tactile, colourful and textural experience.

The construction and joinery involved in the making of the floating floor and leaning walls is contextualised within a new video work titled Working Birthday that is included in the resource area. Subverting the dry form of the YouTube DIY video, Benmakhlouf and his close friend and artist Holly Moffat, camply and clumsily walk viewers (with many tangents) through the process of making a lo-fi frame. Polluting the frequently passive aggressive YouTube DIY presenters’ orderly and confident displays of tried and tested dogmatic technique, in Working Birthday anecdote and informality make for an excited and experimental take on web tutorials. Through this conscious and casual subversion of the instruction vid, Working Birthday embodies and furthers the kind of critical intimacy that appears throughout 'Les Pavés, La Plage' in its intermingling and reimagining of materials, settings and forms.

Image Credits: Jamie Crewe

An exhibition of works by David Roeder accompanied by a collection of found ephemera pertaining to some notion of drawing organised by Contemporary Secretary.

Read on…

For WHY DO ALL YOUR MANTRAS START WITH AN "I" consider the following

Firstly: painted furniture, to avoid questions of composition & to enter (the) space, to leave stuff on. 

Secondly: Starscapes, planets unfolding (like sheets) -"Inner Worlds Outside; shriveled". "Even the juiciest grape will one day turn into a wrinkly raisin" (Inge) - that is, if you put it into the sun, otherwise it might just dissolve in any other way. 
The issues with attaining the right point of view, always zooming in, zooming out:
Microcosm vs. macrocosm, cosmic feel, astral joy, universal nothingness.

Thridly: Cityscapes, a classic genre!

Also, conversations with two almost-mother figures: Mamma & Lee. Smoking with one, complaining with the other. Aiming to grow, but when, and why? 

Continue to read…

For & Other Drawings, consider further a return to the collection of found ephemera pertaining to some notion of drawing.

By drawing, we refer here to the practice or act of drawing, and so a literal object that was made with pencil/pen on paper - or as something that, in an expanded sense, is used or has been made to represent some ‘thing’, to speak a language, to trace, to outline, to make connections, to plan, to designate, to explain, to deface or to furnish.

This is a group side-note with contributions from Joshua Abelow, Dan Arps, Flo Brooks, Kirstin Carlin, Milano Chow, Joanne Dawson, Malcy Duff, Lotte Gertz, Laetitia Glenton, Jude Hagan, Charlie Hammond, Alex Heilbron, Jessica Higgins, Christopher LG Hill, Johanna Jackson, Adam Lewis-Jacob, Chris Johanson, Faye Coral Johnson, Lucy Jones, James Langdon, Camille Le Houezec, Alex Leach, Nick Lynch, Ewan McCaffrey, France-Lise McGurn, Peter Nencini, Hardeep Pandhal, RL Perry, Mick Peter, Owen Piper, Mike Redmond, Leon Sadler, Dave Sherry, Zin Taylor, Hayley Tompkins, Joey Villemont, Matthew Walkerdine, Fritz Welch, Gregor Wright, Honda Zamojski and Others.

I’ve been struggling, lately, to lay my head in the valley and slip sweetly into dreams of.

Of waste, of building, of re-arranging, of liberating, of owning, of subsidising, what’s outside, inside, upside, down and out.

Early records show that prior to industrialisation the people of the town and country slept differently. They would wake in the night to read for three to four hours. They would wake in the night and remember their dreams of skin, of realism, of spirits, of witches, of. 

Then they would sleep again. Until when? Until then?

I’ve been finding, lately, the weight of the tog to tug at my sides, causing aches in my legs, overheating on my back. One thing hurdles over another and over again I’m on my other side. I hear a noise, a disturbance. I see the detritus of earlier efforts at what? that? sprawled on ledges, planes of purpose left to ruin. I see the cables, the clicking, the squeaking, the sandstone and the steel. < Mostly dreams about work, actually. > It all comes out in the perspiration, seeping, collecting in the cornices.

Some cultures take naps, but this might be more to do with the heat of the sun. Some vocations require a very early rise. Some commitments require a very late rest. Some callings call for something in the middle. 

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Occupying the upper two floors of 16 Nicholson St, After Hours is an installation of sculpture, video, and print presenting a series of new work that considers the role of the individual and collective subject operating within systems of production, capitalised time, and the thin veil of individual freedoms (control) within a context of the theatre, or performed world.

The ground floor will be dedicated to a social (re)source built from anything that can be deemed ‘habitable’ from previous years of personal production to house a selection of research material and a new publication.

www.jessicasusanhiggins.info

Part of Glasgow Open House Festival 2017
Supported by Mary Hope Scott Trust

Image Credits: Tine Bek

Atelier Monday, The Mentorship Show is a group exhibition with our Atelier Monday mentorship group: Cara Bonewitz, Toby Mills, Liam Dunne, Leila Smith and Ewan Mitchell. These artists were paired with Matthew Walkerdine, Catherine Cameron, James McCann, Sarah Forrest and Florrie James over three months as a means of honing and developing their practices. The specific opportunity for objective criticism, a sense of community, and the free use of exhibition space in an emerging gallery is what created the framework for the programme.

Discussions were held by Adam Benmakhlouf, Amelia Bywater, and Kitty Anderson about the nature of curation, artistic collaboration, and community spaces.

The artists work in various fields and with a variety of materials, and presented video work, a performance, installations and mischievous sculptures.

The exhibition marked the outcome of a 3 month mentorship programme at 16 Nicholson Street.

Artists links:

http://ewan-mitchell.com/

http://leilaalicesmith.format.com/

http://www.liamdunne.co.uk/

http://carabonewitz.com/

Toby Mills

Image Credits: Tine Bek

For their inaugural exhibition, 16 Nicholson Street presents a group exhibition of photography and video works by Mads Holm, Scott Caruth and Alice Myers exploring the themes of urban and personal space. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of events and a text by Adam Benmakhlouf.

"We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.” - Italo Calvino, Lightness

Image Credits: Tine Bek