Glasgow International Hits Its Stride

GLASGOW—Only a few years back, the Glasgow International Festival, established in 2004, seemed like a relatively small, local affair, in some ways adjunct to the Glasgow Art Fair and not something that captured the force and energy for which the local art scene was known. Last year the festival was postponed, but this year it has re-launched itself in a blaze of glory. Curated for the third time running by Francis McKee, director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts and a key figure in Scotland’s contemporary art scene, Gi 2008, which ran April 11–27, had an oomph that a few other art festivals could definitely use.

In four short years, Gi has evolved from an annual to a biennial event with a more ambitious international program, featuring exhibitions, performances, concerts, and talks in both traditional venues and an array of abandoned buildings around the city that even Glaswegians barely seemed to know exist. To see the festival, I traversed the city sidewalks equipped with a map and, crucially, a number of friends who could actually read it.

First stop was the CCA for a solo exhibition of noted English photographer and video artist Catherine Yass’s work. Yass filmed high-wire artist Didier Pasquette’s attempt to walk the wire between the two tower blocks of the ’60s Red Road housing development in Glasgow. I must admit that it was only after I spent some time in the exhibition’s “archive/library room,” reading a selection of books and looking at slides of Red Road, that I was able to understand what a delicate balance between the social history and urban landscape of Gi’s host city Yass portrays.

Next stop was Jonathan Monk’s exhibition at the Tramway, the city’s former main tram terminus, which since the late ’80s has been one of Scotland’s most acclaimed venues for contemporary visual and performing art. Monk’s gold leafing of the tramlines that run the length of the building was impressive, but in the end, the best part of the show was messing about with the records of his sound and film installation, Another Fine Mess Repeated (out of sync) (2007), and actually playing one by Perry Como, whose retro voice filled the otherwise sparsely set up show.

At the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art was a Jim Lambie exhibition. The floor was covered with black and white sticky tape; LPs entombed in concrete blocks shaped like ice cubes were scattered around; there was a funky arrangement of brightly painted wooden chairs and small handbags “embroidered”’ with pieces of broken mirror. In a kind of a Pop-will-eat-itself fashion, Lambie’s work managed to swallow the heavy architecture of the gallery space, turning it upside down and inside out.

Artist Douglas Gordon recently opened a gallery in his house, where commissioning organization Common Guild presented the first U.K. solo show by French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed, who recently courted controversy in San Francisco with his video of animals being bludgeoned to death. I liked seeing Abdessemed’s work in such a homey environment, but most pieces (with the exception of the video Talk is Cheap, where a microphone is crushed under someone’s foot, creating a disturbing sound followed by equally disturbing silence) left me with a dodgy “political” aftertaste.

One of the most compelling works of the festival I found in the claustrophobic basement of a disused shop. Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s 16mm film The Other Church, specially commissioned by the festival, presents two performances of a song written about the death of Angelika Kluk, a young Polish student raped and murdered in Glasgow in 2006. The song is performed first by Marcin Pryt, lead singer of the Polish punk band 19 Wiosen, then by a naked unnamed actress. It’s a concept that could be accused of overt sentimentalism or populism, but Sasnal’s piece avoided those traps, capturing the complexities of the tragedy and offering a moving tribute to Angelika.

Sorcha Dallas’s forward-thinking curatorial approach was evident both in her gallery space, where Alasdair Gray exhibited his 1975 collages that were meant to be used (along with a sound script by Liz Lochead) in a film that was never finished, and in the group exhibition “run run,” co-curated with artist Alex Frost at the Collins Gallery. The latter brought together a range of local and international artists who examine the uses of tools and crafts in society, often referencing digital technology, and there was some great work here, including a Roger Hiorns sculpture that produces white foam columns from dish soap, Rob Churm’s densely worked drawings, and Torsten Lauschmann’s quirky portrait of the eccentric Hungarian mathematician Pol Erdos (1913–96).