This month’s books for our ‘Room for Reading’ have been recommended by the Grenfell Foundation, in conjunction with the presentation of Steve McQueen’s ‘Grenfell’ (2019) at Tramway from 8th – 23rd March.

‘Gold & Ashes’ (2022) by Feruza Afewerki

‘Gold & Ashes’ is a collection of photo stories of the local community of survivors and bereaved from Grenfell. Shot over 2 years, this affecting and poignant book - released on the 5th anniversary of the tragedy - highlights the true stories, the humanity and courage of the Grenfell community. All profits from book sales go to the Grenfell Foundation.

‘Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen’ (2022) by Peter Apps

Peter Apps meticulously exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused a tragedy. 72 people did not need to die, as the Grenfell Tower Inquiry makes clear. Here is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for justice.

The book won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

Further Info

For more about the work of the Grenfell Foundation, see here.

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

Over the next three years, ‘Grenfell’ by Steve McQueen will be shown in public art galleries in six major cities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will open at Tramway in Glasgow this spring, after which it will travel to Chapter in Cardiff, The MAC in Belfast, The Box in Plymouth, Tate Liverpool, and Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham through 2025, 2026 and 2027.

In December 2017, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (b. 1969, London, UK) made an artwork in response to the fire that took place earlier that year on 14 June at Grenfell Tower, North Kensington, West London. 72 people died in the tragedy. Filming the tower before it was covered with hoarding, McQueen sought to make a record so that it would not be forgotten. 

Following the fire, a Government Inquiry was launched that was conducted in two phases. The findings of the first and second phase of the Inquiry have been reported, the recommendations of which are yet to be implemented, meaning a similar tragedy could happen again. There is an ongoing criminal investigation. 

McQueen said, “I knew once the tower was covered up, it would start to leave people’s minds. I was determined that it never be forgotten.” 

‘Grenfell’ was first presented in 2023 at Serpentine in London’s Kensington Gardens, following a period of private viewings, prioritising bereaved families and survivors. The work was then placed in the care of Tate and the London Museum. 

The national tour is being coordinated by Tate in collaboration with the partner venues and is made possible thanks to support using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and from Art Fund. Each presentation is free to visit and will be accompanied by a public engagement programme.  

The film contains close-up imagery of the tower six months after the fire. Please let a member of our team know if you need space to pause, rest and reflect afterwards. 

About the artist 

Steve McQueen was born in West London in 1969 and studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College where he first became interested in film. Over the last 30 years, Steve McQueen has been influential in expanding the way in which artists work with film. He has made several feature films with many accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Film for 12 Years a Slave (2013). In 2020, he made ’Small Axe’, an anthology film series about London's West Indian community. As an artist, McQueen won the Turner Prize in 1999 and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. McQueen's work is held and exhibited in public museums around the world. He lives and works in London and Amsterdam.  

Project Details

‘Grenfell’ in Glasgow is a co-production by The Common Guild and Tramway and part of a UK-wide tour co-ordinated by Tate.  

For details of other venues and dates, please visit Tate.

How to book

Screenings are every hour daily between 12 and 5pm 

They are free to attend but booking is recommended to guarantee a place at your preferred time.  

Access

Screenings take place in the main theatre at Tramway, which is reached via the first floor. There is lift access to the first floor and accessible toilets. 

There is a limited amount of accessible seating for these events. Please contact Tramway box office directly. 

Read

‘Never Again Grenfell’, an essay by professor and author Paul Gilroy, written to accompany Steve McQueen’s ‘Grenfell’. 

Listen to Colin Salmon read ‘Never Again Grenfell’ -

Thanks 

The national tour is supported by: 

Art Fund, Arts Council England 

‘Imagining a City’ is a series of events developed by Laura Guy as part of the research project ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production', supported by Glasgow School of Art.  

'Imagining a City’ looks back across two decades of queer and trans cultural activity in Glasgow from 1980 to 2000, a period bookended by the Sexual Offences Act 1980 (which partially decriminalised homosexuality in 1981), and the repeal of Section 28 (2A in Scotland) in 2000, three years before England and Wales. Marking the midway point between these dates is Glasgow’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 1990, a pivotal moment in the city’s history, which instigated a period of confident, culture-driven regeneration, and shaped the character of the city’s civic identity. 

Guy’s research reexamines this period of cultural growth through the lens of concurrent queer and trans cultural production. Much of this activity deployed arts and culture to respond directly to the onset of crises surrounding HIV and AIDS, and advocated for the needs and rights of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Guy is working with invited collaborators who include artist and researcher Steven Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University Fiona Anderson, curator and writer Taylor Le Melle, and researcher, writer and artist Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell to bring this material into conversation with the present, exploring current queer and trans infrastructure, self-organising and its impact on contemporary civic identities. 

With The Common Guild, ‘Imagining a City’ unfolds initially through a closed discursive session in December 2024 with Fiona Anderson, Taylor Le Melle, Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell, who respond to the idea of queer and trans infrastructure through discussion of their own research and practice alongside invited participants. Through provocations focusing on archives of HIV/AIDS cultural production in the North East of England (Fiona Anderson), practices of building just infrastructure in the arts (Taylor Le Melle) and trans political horizons through returns to the1990s (Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell), the informal group discussion will reflect on how infrastructure limits, is worked into, and is reimagined through queer and trans practice. 

A public session, ‘Inventing vocabularies’ with Laura Guy and Steven Grainger, will follow on 27 February 2025. In parallel, Grainger’s site-specific poster project ‘Power from Things Not Declared’ which maps significant locations in Glasgow’s queer cultural history will be situated across the city from 27 February – 27 March.  Finally, a display of ephemera, archival material and selection of publications that trace queer and trans interventions within Glasgow’s public realm will be presented in The Common Guild library from 27 February – 27 March. 

Contributors

Laura Guy is a Reader in Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Glasgow School of Art. She is editor of Phyllis Christopher’s artist monograph Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Politics, 1988-2003 (Book Works, 2022) and co-editor, with Glyn Davis, of Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022). With Fiona Anderson, Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon, she is co-editor of a special issue of British Art Studies dedicated to ‘Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s’ (Spring, 2025). Between 2023-24, she was the project lead for ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production’. 

Fiona Anderson is an art historian based in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. Her work explores queer art histories from the 1970s to the present, particularly in the context of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and in relation to preservation and archiving practices, in the USA and Europe. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her writing has also been published in Third Text, Journal of American Studies, and Oxford Art Journal. From 2016-2019, she was UK lead for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), a collaborative research project which explored and reconstructed aspects of LGBTQ+ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and examined their significance for LGBTQ+ people, queer organising, and queer artmaking across Europe in the present and future.  

Taylor Le Melle works as a curator (of sorts) and certainly as a writer of ante-modern and anti-modern criticism; off-kilter catalog essays and more artistic subgenres of fiction; as an editor and publisher of several collections of science fantasy, theory and poetry; as a researcher into plants, property and physical experience — bodies, the social kind with reluctance, and the flesh kind with enthusiasm — cultivating perception and proprioception through experimentation.  Taylor Le Melle is one of several co-directors of London-based workers cooperative not/nowhere, whose primary occupation is with building a just infrastructure for artistic practice via the circulation and distribution of 8mm and 16mm moving image formats. Previous presentations include: Deviant Research, Van Abbe Museum (cur. Yolande van der Heide, N Aikens); Research Fellowship (org. F Dodzan/A Groten), Sandberg Instituut; Amant Foundation Residency, Brooklyn (cur. J Berrios); Text Exercises, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (cur. Richard Birkett); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (cur. Amanprit Sandhu). Recent Writing: Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up, Triangle Books; Otobong Nkanga: Unearthed, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Renee Green: Inevitable Distances, Hatje Cantz; DNA6: Carrier Bag Fiction, Spector. 

Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell is a researcher, writer and artist. They completed their PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2024, with a thesis on British trans cultural production and trans theory in the 1990s. In 2024-25 they are a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Their PhD combined historical and theoretical approaches to demarcate this as a period of radical practice and epistemic change, and to argue that the difficulty of thinking trans in the present originates with the political horizons of the 1990s. Informed by their creative work, Evelyn’s research attempts to develop strategies of trans theorising and practice that challenge the foreclosure of gender transition as material reality. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in British Art Studies, world picture journal, Art Monthly, and Cambridge Literary Review, amongst others. Evelyn is also the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a work of experimental fiction published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing. Their work has been shown, performed, read at TACO!, Kaunas Artists’ House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project and Kingsgate Project Space.  

Further Info

‘Imagining a City’ is supported by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant and by the Glasgow School of Art as part of the research project ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production’. 

Project Details 

Archival Display, The Common Guild Library

A display of ephemera, archival material and a selection of publications that trace queer and trans interventions.

Visit

Thursdays, 12–5pm, until 27 March 2025

Steven Grainger – ‘Power from Things Not Declared’ –

27 February – 27 March

A site-specific poster project mapping significant locations in Glasgow’s queer cultural history over a twenty-year period. 

Visit

A map of poster locations can be found here.

‘Inventing Vocabularies’ –

Library Session took place on 27 February 2025

About Library Sessions

Centred around books, readings, discussion and the sharing of research, Library Sessions take place in TCG’s library space and include one-off sessions and events in series led by invited artists, writers, academics and researchers. Sessions might use the library as a catalyst, or contribute something new to be added to our evolving library collection. 

Access

The Common Guild library is on the ground floor of 5 Florence Street.

The building has step free access.
Accessible toilets are available.

The nearest subway station is Bridge Street, a 14 minute walk away.

‘Power from Things Not Declared’ is a site-specific poster project that maps significant locations in Glasgow’s queer cultural history over a twenty-year period bookended by the Sexual Offences Act (1980) and the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland (2000). 

The posters recall Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘Glasgow Green’ (1963) and incorporate abstracted elements from a photograph taken at this location in 2024. Through their layered, abstract images, the posters function as marker points for geographic locations and as forms of coded language. 

Echoing the spirit of the exhibition ‘Read My Lips: New York AIDS Polemics’, curated by Nicola White at Tramway in 1992, which responded to the AIDS crisis through polemical artworks that activated locations across the city, ‘Power from Things Not Declared’ presents a series of interventions in public space. More fleeting than the polemical tone of AIDS activist graphics, the posters reconsider visibility, memory, and the relationship between Glasgow’s queer past and present. 

Steven Grainger is a Glasgow-based artist, researcher, and lecturer in Fine Art at City of Glasgow College whose sculptural and collage based practice is engaged with ideas of visibility, invisibility and queer history. Between 2023-24, he was the research assistant for ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production’. 

Further Info

‘Power from Things Not Declared’ is supported by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant and by the Glasgow School of Art as part of the research project ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production’. 

Event Details 

A map of poster locations can be found below.

In conjunction with Laura Guy and Steven Grainger’s event ‘Inventing Vocabularies’, Guy shares a selection of writing that has shaped the research project ‘Imagining a City’ for our Room for Reading.

Guy selects 'Leaving the Auld Toon' in Nothing Personal: Pilot Issue (2021) by Neil Clements; ‘All Shadows are Alive’ (2023) by Esther Draycott; 'Teneu’ (2024) by Rosie's Disobedient Press; ‘Ingress’ (2023) by Kate Morgan and ‘Apparitions (Nines)’ (2024) by Nat Raha.

'Leaving the Auld Toon' in Nothing Personal: Pilot Issue (2021) by Neil Clements

“I moved to Glasgow ten years ago, in 2015. I was working on my PhD, which looked at how queer feminist publics had been imagined by artists and activists through ephemeral print cultures, focusing on the manifesto form. Through this research, I was interested to come across the exhibition ‘Read My Lips: New York AIDS Polemics’, curated by Nicola White at Tramway in 1992. Histories of queer art and culture are often framed through notions of scarcity. Though it’s important not to understate the backdrop of homophobic legislation and government inaction against which ‘Read My Lips’ took place, it also happened at a time of relative abundance. The exhibition was well supported by public funding in the period immediately following Glasgow’s designation as ‘European City of Culture’.

Thinking about the implications of this exhibition for narratives of art and culture in the early 1990s, I have also been thinking about the cultural scene that I have participated in since 2015. This period has seen the emergence of a new institutional - or infrastructural, as the late Marina Vishmidt identified - critique. Neil Clements’ essay ‘Leaving the Auld Toon’, published in the pilot issue of Nothing Personal (2021), was instructive for me in this respect. Addressing Glasgow International and the story of the city it reinforces, Neil’s essay also provides a useful overview of transformations within the city’s funding landscape over the last two decades. Here paucity is not something that belongs to the past but the present. Yet he also identifies a ‘patchwork infrastructure’ of local practice. He writes, “if the city is to function in service of its local practitioners, we must pay closer attention to its internal rhythms”.”

‘All Shadows are Alive’ (2023) by Esther Draycott

“‘All Shadows are Alive’ is the outcome of Esther Draycott’s research project about the Glasgow drying green. The formal inventiveness of her approach to histories of the city is structured through multiple voices and was developed within her PhD. In her writing, Esther weaves different kinds of artefacts together in a process that could be likened both to excavation and to reconstruction. It reminds me of what Naomi Pearce calls a ‘forensic feminist methodology’, where evidentiary approaches are employed in ways that complicate the writing of history of women’s lives and work. It also brings to mind Glasgow-based writer and artist Shola von Reinhold’s ‘Lote’ (2020), which does amazing work in relation to the obfuscation and erasure of black figures in history. The poet Edwin Morgan is a figure who casts a shadow across Esther’s pamphlet. She writes about how he uses ‘the dirt that remains on billowing white sheets on the Green to speak to another obfuscated story, that of homosexual life in post-war Glasgow’.”

'Teneu’ (2024) by Rosie's Disobedient Press

“Adrien Howard and Lisette May Monroe founded Rosie’s Disobedient Press in 2020, to foreground writers working from perspectives that have historically been marginalised by both mainstream and artist publishing. Like Esther’s writing, Rosie’s recent collection ‘Teneu’ is a situated exploration of the city, one that invokes the deep histories and forgotten futures of the St Enoch Centre. Calling upon the eponymous saint, Teneu foregrounds non-linear, queer temporalities in ways that are reminiscent of Charlie Prodger’s video ‘Bridget’ (2016). Teneu is also a meditation on formal and informal infrastructures and in this way contributes to a broader landscape of practice investigating post-industrial and post-colonial lineages and legacies within the fabric of the city of Glasgow. Mason Leaver-Yap’s contribution to Teneu concludes with a question that seems to encircle much of this work. “Classing something as a ruin is less about the thing being labelled, and more a question of who has the power to manifest and name the ruination in the first place... A ruin for whom, ruined by whom?”.”

‘Ingress’ (2023) by Kate Morgan

“Both Kate and their writing came to me through sad circumstances and in those circumstances opened up material and tender descriptions of fractured intimacies. They wrote ‘Ingress’ from their tenement flat in Glasgow. It contains observations about living, working, relationships and architectures. Like other texts on this list, ‘Ingress’ helps me to think about infrastructure in ways that are both critical and expansive. The scaffolding for ‘Ingress’ is unsure, susceptible to leaks. Glasgow seeps into the text as an atmospherical state.”

‘Apparitions (Nines)’ (2024) by Nat Raha

“For some time now, my research and writing has predominantly attended to archives of post-1960s feminist, queer and trans cultural activity. There has been a tension in this work: the tug of the past on the urgent demands of the present. Along with others, I have been interested in this tension, in thinking through and alongside practices that make returns in ways that might allow the present to appear other than its dominant and dominating forms. But recently I’ve found myself less convinced by this desire to return to the archive. In part a consequence of regarding the genocide in Gaza, it’s also, not unconnectedly, because I’m compelled to write in relation to the counter-institutional and counter-infrastructural practices that are present in this city, some of which I’ve recorded here. Nat Raha’s scholarship is remarkable partly for the way it enfolds histories within practice and doing so expands the horizons of past(s) and present(s). Her poetry, most recently published in her book ‘Apparitions (Nines)’, does this too but with the greater immediacy and urgency, accumulation and interruption her form allows.”

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

Visit

Our library space is open every Thursday from 12-5pm between 27th February and 27th March.

The Common Guild’s reference library and public reading space is now located at 5 Florence Street.  

Our expansive and growing collection includes over 1000 artist books, monographs, and catalogues, with subjects from art writing and curation to theory and public art.  

The library collection has been shaped by the artists we have worked with and the many artists living and working in Glasgow. This includes our special collection ‘Room for Reading’, books recommended by the artists we work with. Our catalogues from international biennials, and books on theory and criticism reflect the most urgent discussions and pressing concerns addressed by contemporary art in recent years. Art magazines include the latest copies of Afterall, Art Monthly, Artforum and frieze. Further reading and resources relating to the current exhibition can be found in our library space. 

Our collection is catalogued and available to search online here. Publications are organised in the following categories.  

1 artists 
1.1 monographs
1.2 catalogues
2 artist books
3 group shows
4 biennials
5 theory / criticism
6 art writing
7 curation  
8 history of art
9 collections / surveys
10 public art
11 architecture

Our collection is continually updated as we acquire new publications. It is a unique and valuable resource that can be utilised by visitors.

The Common Guild bookstore is also available during library opening hours, including titles published by The Common Guild and a selection of artist monographs relating to our projects and exhibitions.  

The latest writing from our Commentaries series, commissioned texts responding to our exhibitions and projects, are available from the library and free to take away. 

Details

The Library can be found in The Common Guild’s new home at 5 Florence Street.

There is quiet space to ready, study and browse, and free tea and coffee available.

Browse Online

Our library catalogue is hosted by Libib. Browse our collection here.

Visit

Thursday – Saturday, 12–5pm, during exhibitions only.

Drop-in – no need to book.

Access

5 Florence Street has step free access.
Accessible toilets are available.

The nearest subway station is Bridge Street, a 14 minute walk away.

Location

Thanks

With thanks to Caterina Caulfield de Andres who digitised and catalogued the library as part of the University of Glasgow’s Internship scheme.

The Common Guild presents Tarik Kiswanson, ‘The Rupture’, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. ‘The Rupture’ is a significant exhibition of newly commissioned and recently conceived artworks, as well as the first exhibition to take place in our new permanent premises at 5 Florence Street, a former school building in Glasgow. 

In a complex practice spanning sculpture, film, sound, drawing and poetry, Kiswanson articulates legacies of war, geographical displacement, and trauma from the position of a second-generation immigrant growing up in a psychologically liminal state. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem for Tripoli, Tunis, and then Amman, before subsequently settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born in 1986. This seismic rupture fundamentally informs Kiswanson’s artistic enquiry. His interdisciplinary artworks speak of intimate, personal experiences whilst simultaneously reverberating with shared collective histories of diasporic movement and terrible loss. Conversely, rebirth, regeneration and a sense of becoming are leitmotifs of Kiswanson’s poetic material vocabulary.  

‘The Rupture’ (2024) which gives the exhibition its title, is one in a family of works in which objects are stilled and fortified in cast resin. At the centre of this work, weightlessly suspended in time and space, is a gold-plated Onoto fountainpen, manufactured in Britain in 1924. Black ink spilled from the pen is captured in the resin too, changing the atmosphere of everything around it. Symbolic of imperialism, governance, and class structures, this same pen was favoured by Winston Churchill, King George V and British military elites.  

For Kiswanson, objects such as these are suffused with history, memory and profound significance. The pen is representative of British administrative control and the signing, by Churchill, of the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan Memorandum, which in turn ratified the 1917 Balfour Declaration. These controversial and contested bureaucratic decisions forced Kiswanson’s family, and so many others into exile from their homeland. Many such treaties and state documents issued by colonial powers carved up territories creating conflict, division and forced displacement across North Africa and the Middle East, with these decisions continuing to reverberate in the present. The Onoto pen was a subtle yet important actor in this so-called statecraft. ‘The Rupture’ is commissioned by The Common Guild for this exhibition. 

‘The Wait’ (2024), also commissioned by The Common Guild, returns to a recurring formal motif for the artist, that of the cocoon, or as the artist titles them, a nest or cradle. With a matt-white surface and ovoid shape which seems to defy gravity, the cocoon is both a vessel and a shelter which often takes on the dimensions of the artist’s own body. Here, it is poised, almost levitating on the verge of a piece of post-WWII furniture, the Ercol ‘All-Purpose’ chair. Designed in 1956 by Luciano Ercolani, an Italian immigrant to the UK, the presence of this everyday symbol of British domesticity foregrounds immigrant experience, and the roles of support provided by immigrant presence. Ercolani would become one of the most important furniture makers in post-war Britain, greatly contributing to the reconstruction of the country on a national scale. 

Cocoons for Kiswanson, are places of gestation, transformation and becoming. Looking at metamorphosis through the prism of migration experience foregrounds many of Kiswanson’s works. The artist is equally fascinated by the transformative passage from childhood to adolescence. This in-between state in a child’s development towards adulthood is explored in slow-motion video ‘The Fall’ and accompanying sound work ‘Shatter’ (both 2020), where an 11-year-old boy is shown balancing on a tipped chair, neither falling to the floor or regaining stability.  

Transitory states of being and becoming, breaks in time, closeness and distance are all recurring narrative references that connect personal biography and collective experience. Kiswanson is “profoundly interested in what constitutes life, what it essentially means to exist”. Across the exhibition, artworks can be understood as articulating a series of ruptures through the temporal space of history and in the course of an individual life in an effort to apprehend the complexities of making meaning. 

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad) is a visual artist and poet based in Paris. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, most recently Portikus, Frankfurt, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (both 2024), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2023), M HKA-Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2022), Hallands Konstmuseum, Halmstad (2022) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2021).  

In 2023, Kiswanson was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and has recently been awarded the 2024 Fondazione Henraux International Sculpture Prize. Kiswanson’s current exhibition, ‘A Century’ is presented at Portikus, Frankfurt until September 2024.  

Further Info

Tarik Kiswanson ‘The Rupture’ is supported by Fluxus. 

With thanks to Portikus, Frankfurt, for co-production with The Common Guild, of Kiswanson’s ‘The Rupture’.

Additional links

‘The Rupture’ Exhibition Guide

‘Crossing: Tarik Kiswanson in conversation with Asad Raza’, Mousse, 25 August 2024.

‘Spotlight on Tarik Kiswanson’, review by Pablo Larios, Artforum, October 2024.

‘Tarik Kiswanson’, review by Chris Sharratt, Sculpture Magazine, November 2024.

Project Details

The Rupture took place at 5 Florence Street, G5 0YX, The Common Guild’s new, permanent home.

Exhibition Guide

View the exhibition guide here

Read the Commentary by Pelumi Odubanjo -

Thanks

Tarik Kiswanson ‘The Rupture’ was supported by Fluxus. 

With thanks to Portikus, Frankfurt, for co-production with The Common Guild, of Kiswanson’s ‘The Rupture’. 

Thanks to Assumption Studios, Alex Baggaley, Jonny Lyons, Maeve Redmond, Tiffany Dornoy Rezaei, Fritz Welch.

To accompany Tarik Kiswanson’s current exhibition ‘The Rupture’, the artist shares a selection of recommendations for our Room for Reading. 

Kiswanson selects ‘The Birds’ (1957) by Tarjei Vesaas, ‘Out of Place’ (1999) by Edward Said, and ‘Glass and God’ (1998) by Anne Carson.

“This is a list of three books from three different moments in my life, my childhood in Sweden, my teenage years in London at art school, and then finally, what I have read most recently.”

‘The Birds’ (1957) by Tarjei Vesaas

“This is one of the first books I read as a child growing up on the outskirts of the city of Halmstad in Sweden. The town is located by the sea and was a particularly fitting context to read the book The Birds by Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. Though, even at a young age, I often preferred reading poetry for its abstract form, this particular novel is quite extraordinary for its prose as we follow the psychologically troubled protagonist Mattias and the life he leads as a simple and quiet person whilst gaining insight into his rich inner world.”

‘Out of Place’ (1999) by Edward W. Said

“Many of course know Said’s writing very well, however less people are familiar with the autobiography he finished before passing away in 2003. Out of Place is one of the first books I read while at art school. Said recounts his life in a very captivating way, but what probably moved me the most in this memoir is how he asserts that feeling out of place is an active state of being, and inherent to intellectual and artistic thinking. Said gave me the understanding that this feeling of distance one might have, is a critical sensibility leading towards a continuous search for comprehension.”

Read an excerpt from ‘Out of Place’ here.

‘Glass and God’ (1998) by Anne Carson

“I have read many of Anne Carson books, but I found this one particularly moving. Its rhythmic nature and the poignant subjects Carson touches upon are direct and unforgiving. It’s the latest book I read of hers and it stayed with me because of the emotional immediacy of the texts. Her writings continue to be important for my own writing practice.”

Read an excerpt from ‘Glass and God’ here.

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

Visit

Visit our Library space Thursday – Saturday, 12–5pm, during exhibitions to view Tarik Kiswanson’s Room for Reading selection.

This July, The Common Guild moves into our new, permanent home at 5 Florence Street.

Following two previous temporary exhibitions in the building with Sharon Hayes in 2021, and Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in 2022, The Common Guild is the lead tenant and cultural partner in the building, which offers physically accessible space for our events and exhibitions, as well as our office and library.

5 Florence Street is currently being developed into a space for studios and creative businesses by Assumption Studios. We are very grateful for their generous support in making this possible. 

We will complete our move over the summer, opening our first exhibition in the new space, with Tarik Kiswanson, on 5th October 2024. 

5 Florence Street is situated on the south bank of the River Clyde in the former Adelphi Terrace Public School which opened in 1894. The category B-listed building has been used for occasional artistic activity, most recently in June 2024 when a number of Glasgow International ‘Open Programme’ projects were presented across the site.

Details

Access

5 Florence Street has step free access.

Accessible toilets are available.

The nearest subway station is Bridge Street, a 14 minute walk away.

Location –

Audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan weaves together urgent political narratives that pivot around acoustic experience and sonic memory. ‘Live Audio Essays’ presents three key live performance works by Abu Hamdan in which sound and politics intersect. Two of the three performances have never previously been performed in the UK.

‘Air Pressure’ (2021), ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ (2020), and ‘After SFX’ (2018), will each be performed for one night only, each in a different music venue. These performances, delivered by the artist in the form of a monologue or “live audio essay”, present Abu Hamdan’s practice of research and investigative analysis, which is centred around “forensic listening”, auditory evidence and the “ear-witness” as political and legal testimony. Performances feature live percussion and guitar, filmed footage and sound design, with audio conditions enhanced to support careful listening: a conceptual and political tool for the artist.

Performances present narratives and testimonies that detail violence, oppression and aggression, offering strategies for political critique and action. ‘Air Pressure’ draws on research, conducted between May 2020–21, into the aerial soundscape of Lebanon, documenting 22,111 instances of Israeli fighter jets and drones in Lebanese airspace. ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ draws its scenography from translation techniques deployed during the Nuremberg trials (1945–46) with Abu Hamdan re-performing the asymmetry between technological prowess and the limits of cognitive processing. ‘After SFX’ is prompted by Abu Hamdan’s investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen.

‘Air Pressure’ (2021/2024)

‘Air Pressure’ (2021), the first of the performances, is a diaristic analysis written between May 2020 and May 2021 into the aerial soundscape of Lebanon where, from 2006–2021, there had been over 22,111 instances of Israeli fighter jet and drone violations in Lebanese airspace. Deploying publicly accessible information uploaded to the UN Digital Library, Abu Hamdan’s research and analysis brings this data together for the first time, making clear the scale and intensity of these incursions, and the consistent atmosphere of violence brought to bear across the territory.

Residents of Lebanon live in a state of precarity with the constant background noise of hostile jets and drones overhead. The potential of full-scale aerial bombardment is a daily possibility. Whether they are actively ignoring the noise from above or determined to document the violent aerial machines conspicuously hovering in the near distance, residents have developed modes of resistance.

Abu Hamdan’s account unfolds with live audio processing and countless videos of the rumbling sky, both pulled from open source content and captured by the artist and his team. Abu Hamdan employs the 'atmospheric' both aesthetically and conceptually to explore the ways in which violence is made manifest, reading Lebanon's air as a high pressure nexus in a global weather system.

'Air Pressure' is performed by Lawrence Abu Hamdan with live sound design by Moe Choucair. It has never previously been performed in the UK. With thanks to SWG3.

‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ (2020/2024)

‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ (2020) is performed by Abu Hamdan with electric guitar accompaniments by Fabio Cervi. The scenography for this work – flashing red and yellow lights – is inspired by the system of simultaneous translation deployed during the Nuremberg trials in the aftermath of World War II in 1945–6. This newly developed electronic audio technology enabled simultaneous translation of the trial proceedings from their spoken languages into Russian, French, German, and English.

During the performance Abu Hamdan is illuminated by these lights alone, which command and direct the artist’s speech. The performance departs from this apparatus to examine the inextricable relation between testimony and the technologies by which it is disseminated and distorted. Here, Abu Hamdan re-performs the asymmetry between the speed of the technology – which allowed words to travel through copper cables at 4,600 metres per second – and the speed of the human mind to process what it sees and stores of a given event. ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ serves as a proposition that the true capacity to bear witness is measured not through acts of coherent testimony and seamless speech but rather through its interruptions and breaking points.

'A Thousand White Plastic Chairs' has never previously been performed in the UK.

‘After SFX’ (2020/2024)

‘After SFX’ (2018) is prompted by sonic evidence, acoustic memories, and Abu Hamdan’s investigations into crimes that had been heard but not seen. The performance explores a series of sounds deriving variously from legal cases and trial transcripts, transhistorical testimonies, and interviews conducted by the artist with earwitnesses. The artist’s earwitnesses include prisoners held in Saydnaya, a brutal prison operated by the Syrian government.

In order to facilitate their testimonies and determine what they heard, Abu Hamdan experimented with pre-existing cinematic sound effects libraries, before developing his ‘Earwitness Inventory’ (2018–ongoing) a self-constructed sound effects library specific to the witnesses’ acoustic memories. The inventory includes everyday objects like a car door, popcorn maker, coins and loaves of bread. These objects operate as sonic analogies, conjuring sounds but also referencing psychological states of mind. A number of objects from the Earwitness Inventory will be activated during the performance.

‘After SFX’ explores sonic recall, and the question of a shared experience of sound. The performance points towards the difficulty of translation and the limits of language, offering a new acoustic vocabulary to articulate witness experience.

‘After SFX’ is performed by Lawrence Abu Hamdan with live sound design by Adam Laschinger and percussion by Iain Stewart. It is presented for the first time in Scotland in a new iteration developed in 2023.

About the artist /

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an award winning artist, audio investigator and the founder of Earshot, the world’s first not-for-profit organisation producing audio investigations for human rights and environmental advocacy. 

Abu Hamdan's work on sound and listening has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions all over the world. He received his PhD in 2017 and has held fellowships and professorships at the University of Chicago, the New School, New York and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he developed his research AirPressure.info.

Additional Links

‘Glasgow International review – so how many art critics can you fit in an Opel?’ review by Hettie Judah, The Guardian, 10 June 2024.

‘Glasgow International has no title—but it certainly has a point’ review by Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper, 12 June 2024.

Project Details

Part of Glasgow International 2024 Open Programme.

‘Air Pressure’ was performed at SWG3 on the opening night of Glasgow International, ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ was performed at Audio, and ‘After SFX’ was performed at Barrowlands at the closing night of GI.

Watch an excerpt of ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’ here –

Read the Commentary by Neil Clements —

Listen to Neil Clements read the Commentary here –

Thanks

With thanks to Fabio Cervi, Moe Choucair, Adam Laschinger, Ambroise Leclerc, Jonny Lyons, Iain Stewart, Duncan Young.

Thanks to Audio, the Barrowlands, SWG3 and Inhouse.

Live captions were provided during performances with thanks to Marta Tycinska. 

Our Room for Reading offers further reading on the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, in tandem with his project ‘Live Audio Essays’, presented in June 2024 as part of Glasgow International Festival.

‘Live Audio Essays’ presents transcripts from seven of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works, which were originally presented as performances, films, or video installations. Texts from works performed in Glasgow include ‘After SFX’, ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’, and ‘Air Pressure’ and can be found alongside scripts from Abu Hamdan’s various performance and film works from 2014-present.

Using personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media, and transcripts rooted in historical and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. These live audio essays turn our focus to acoustic memories, voices leaking through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonant frequencies of buildings, the echoes of reincarnated lives, and the sound of hunger.

“In this piece[…] as in some before and many after, an important core of the artist’s work is revealed. It is much less about sound or the production of noise, but rather about listening - listening closely to spoken language, to noise and to silence.”

Fabian Schöneich

Published with Lenz Press to coincide with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, ‘Dirty Evidence’ provides a visual overview of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works of more than a decade, and elaborates on a formal vocabulary characterised by the aesthetics of sound and language. The artists’s first monograph, the publication presents a comprehensive overview of Abu Hamdan’s practice accompanied by commissioned writing by Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Theodor Ringborg, Yasmine Seale and Eyal Weizman.

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

Nicole Wermers’ ‘Day Care’ is an exhibition of new and recent sculptures set against the backdrop of Glasgow’s urban landscape. The works on show intertwine visions of women’s bodies at work or rest with the economics and politics of (urban) space, and the visibility and value of high art with the invisibility of care and maintenance work.

‘Day Care’ includes two newly commissioned sculptures, alongside sculptural interventions in the corporate office space of The Common Guild’s temporary premises on the seventh floor of 60 York Street. The exhibition marks Wermers’ most substantial institutional UK presentation to date.

‘Day Care’ presents work from the artist’s latest series, ‘Reclining Females’ (2022–2024). These sculptures bring together the familiar, art historical trope of the reclining nude, with readymade commercial products and the banal apparatus of the service industry to critically engage with the social, psychological and economic conditions of urban space and architecture.

Wermers’ lounging female nudes appear larger than life-size and are hand-formed in plaster over styrofoam. Striking poses that evoke Henry Moore’s reclining bronze women, these voluptuous figures have the rough-hewn appearance of largescale sculptural studies. Each of the female figures adopts a different posture of repose, heads angled to meet the viewer’s gaze from an elevated position. They balance on wheeled maintenance carts filled with mops, freshly pressed linen, plastic bottles and chemical products for cleaning and disinfecting spaces such as hotels and corporate environments: spaces like the temporary gallery where they will be displayed.

The formal juxtaposition of the figures and carts create tension between ideas of labour and leisure, undermining gestures of decadence and desire routinely expressed by (male) renditions of the female nude. Instead, the figures imply exhausted, overworked bodies: low-waged and typically invisible women’s labour that sustains commercial and business environments. At the same time their size and elevated position asserts their defiant presence and independent agency. In the particular white-collar context of The Common Guild’s temporary space, the artworks generate discourse on corporate structures and overlooked labour hierarchies.

About the artist /

Nicole Wermers (born 1971 in Emsdetten, Germany) lives and works in London. She studied at Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg from 1991–97 and received an MFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1999. Since 2017 she has been a professor of sculpture at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. Wermers was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2015. 

Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Reclining Fanmail’, Kunsthaus Glarus; ‘P4aM2aRF!’, Herald St, London; ‘Emscher Folly’, Urbane Künste Ruhr/ Emscher Kunstweg, Duisburg permanent public art commission, (all 2022); ‘Earring for Cambridge’ public commission for Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge University; ‘Women between Buildings’, Kunstverein Hamburg, (both 2018); ‘Grundstück’, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, (2017); ‘Givers & Takers’ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2016); ‘Infrastruktur’, Herald St, London (2015); ‘The London Shape’ Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston-upon-Thames (2014); ‘Manners’, site-specific commission for Tate Britain (2013). ‘Hotel Biron‘, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; ’Masse und Auflösung’, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2007), ‘Earring‘ public sculpture project, Camden Arts Centre, London; and ’Chemie’, Secession, Vienna (2004-2005).

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘13 Women: Variation III’, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California; ‘Phantom Sculpture’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry; ‘Your Home Is Where You’re Happy’, Haus Mödrath, Kerpen; ‘Homo Ludens / About the Game of Art’, Woods Art Institute, Hamburg; ‘ Concerning Nature‘, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; ‘Femmenology‘, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (all 2023). ‘Identität nicht nachgewiesen – Neuerwerbungen der Sammlung des Bundes’, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; ‘SSSSSSSSSCULPTURESQUE’, Kiang Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong; ‘German Caviar’, Kunstmuseum Bonn; ‘On Equal Terms’, Uferhallen, Berlin; ‘By A Thread’, Tenter Ground, London (all 2022).

Her work was also included in ‘Magical Soup‘, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; ‘More More More‘, Tank Shanghai, Shanghai; ‘Grace before Jones‘, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; ‘Museum For Preventive Imagination‘, MACRO, Rome; ‘Design by Time‘, Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco (all 2020); ‘Crack up Crack Down‘, 33rd Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw;  ‘Design by Time‘, Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee, College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, Ohio; ‘Tainted Love (club edit)‘, Villa Arson, Nice; ‘Das Ruhr Ding‘, different venues in Dortmund, Oberhausen and Bochum, ‘Mein Blick‘, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (all 2019); ‘ANTI‘, 6th Athens Biennale, Athens; ‘You Remind Me of Someone‘, FRAC Lorraine, Metz; ‘Die Zelle‘, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; ‘Dime Store Alchemy‘, Flag Art Foundation, New York (all 2018). ‘Elevation 1049‘, different venues, Gstaad; ‘Quiz 2’, MUDAM Luxembourg; ‘Home Is No Place‘, German Embassy, London; ‘Tainted Love (Where Did Our Love Go)‘, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; ‘In Awe’, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; ‘You Remind Me of Someone‘, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen; ‘An Idea of Boundary‘, S.F. Arts Comission Gallery, San Francisco; ‘Display Show’, Stroom den Haag; ‘Intensive Nesting‘, Division Gallery, Montreal (all 2017); Turner Prize, Tramway, Glasgow; ‘Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality’, Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna; ‘Überschönheit’, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (all 2015); ‘A Singular Form’, Secession, Vienna (2014); ‘Villa Massimo Stipendiaten’, Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); ‘Crazy House’, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2012); ‘The New Décor’, Hayward Gallery, London (2010-2011); ‘A wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans’, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2012); ‘Weltempfänger’, Galerie der Gegenwart/ Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2007); ‘Tate Triennale’, Tate Britain (2006).

Further Info

The exhibition is supported by The Elephant Trust.

With thanks to Sam Talbot PR and Herald St, London.

Additional Links

Day Care Exhibition Guide

‘Nicole Wermers Takes Us To The Cleaners’ review by Phin Jennings, Frieze, 25 March 2024.

‘Work hard or play hard? The art world can’t decide’ by Eloise Hendy in Plaster Magazine, 23 March 2024.

Nicole Wermers ‘Day Care’ reviewed by Rose Higham-Stainton, Flash Art, 18 March 2024.

‘Invisible Labour’, Nicole Wermers interviewed by Ellen Mara De Wachter, Art Monthly, March 2024.

Interview with Nicole Wermers with Melanie Ohnemus, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2022 (German & English).

‘Labour in Repose: Britt Barton On Nicole Wermers Reclining Fanmail’, Kunsthaus Glarus, Text Zur Kunst, 1 July, 2022.

Details

‘Day Care’ took place at 60 York Street Glasgow, G2 8JX, The Common Guild’s temporary premises.

Read the Commentary by Caitlin Merrett-King —

Listen to Caitlin Merrett King read the Commentary here -

Exhibition Guide

Day Care Exhibition Guide

Thanks

‘Day Care’ was supported by The Elephant Trust.

With thanks to Sam Talbot PR and Herald St, London.

To accompany Nicole Wermers’ current exhibition ‘Day Care’, the artist shares a selection of recommendations for our Room for Reading. 

Wermers selects ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ by Michel de Certau (1980); ‘The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women’ by Elizabeth Wilson (1991); ‘Koolhaas Houselife’ by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine (2013) and ‘Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open’ by Penelope Curtis (2017). 

‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ by Michel de Certau (1980) 

“I read this book when I was completing an MA at Central St. Martins back in 2000 and it is still relevant to me and my work now, although it is dealing with an entirely physical version of public space and urban life, which is different to our current situation. The ideas about (re-)appropriating architecture, and by extension infrastructure, through spatial acts, and the subversion of given structures and hierarchies, had a direct impact on my thinking about sculpture in relation to the built environment.”

Read ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ here.

‘The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women’ by Elizabeth Wilson (1991)

“I have for a long time been interested in the relationship of the (female) body to (urban) space and its infrastructure. The idea of the female flaneur somewhat awkwardly coined Flaneuse which has in the last 10 years been taken up in several writers of fiction, non-fiction and auto-fiction, is very interesting to me. This book from 1992, about how 19th century urban concepts and designs were closely linked to the question of how to control women in the city, paved the way for looking beyond the city as a structure which endlessly reproduces a male perspective. Plus: smashing title (with obvious references to my ‘Reclining Female’ sculptures).”

'Koolhaas Houselife’ by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine (2013)

“The basic concept of this film, to look at (great) architecture from the perspective of the people who clean and maintain it, is actually something that I outlined as a proposal for a film of my own back in 2006 when I applied for a residency at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. I didn’t get the residency and subsequently abandoned the project. A couple of years ago I happily discovered this film by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine who (obviously unaware of my project) documented the cleaner and caretaker Guadalupe Acedo of the Rem Koolhaas designed Maison a Bordeaux.”

Watch the trailer for ‘Koolhaas Houselife’ above.

‘Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open’ by Penelope Curtis (2017)

“Despite thinking about (hidden) structures in the socio-economic reality of today’s urban environment, I like to think my work is still all about sculpture. I first experienced this book by Penelope Curtis as a series of lectures given by her at the National Gallery in London in maybe 2014 or 2015. I love that it divides the fundamentals of sculpture into basic orientations of volume in space. It is written from an art historian’s perspective, but you can tell she is also a total fan of the medium. Naturally relating to the reclining females, I was particularly interested in the horizontal as a sculptural category, especially its origins in effigies and tomb sculpture, but also the literal ground or floor that she relates to the threshold of life and death. Visible and invisible thresholds, are something that I have referred to often in my work, especially between public and private space in our late capitalist cities.”

Watch Penelope Curtis speak at the Hepworth Research Launch on ‘Beyond Sculpture’ here.

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ is the final instalment of Corin Sworn’s project ‘Moving in Relation’, a series of events exploring social relations with ‘smart’ technologies: AI-enabled, consumer-grade products that attempt to learn and produce data from interactions with humans. 

 ‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ is an installation comprising video, atmospheric sound, vocal audio and sculptural collage. Both sound and image are dispersed across the exhibition space, creating a broad sensorial address. The video, ‘A Fuzzy Set’ (2023) presents a history of motion capture that aligns organic movement, such as gesture, to machinic ordering systems. Dancers are shown, testing the functional limits of video in AI enabled CCTV security systems that identify potential ‘life' through movement. Inventions by Charles Rees Wilson, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Marie Van Brittan Brown are presented as precursors of contemporary motion capture, in each case this moves the devices away from the inventor’s initial intention. A Fuzzy Set’ examines divergent forms of motion capture, challenging 20th century notions of efficiency as ‘the one best way’. 

Each instalment of ‘Moving in Relation’ has sought new ways of engaging and understanding technological systems and algorithmic thought. Over the course of an extended period of research Sworn brought together various collaborators in movement, sound, poetry and academia to establish ways of approaching and living with networked technology and machine learning devices. Attempting to apprehend these now ubiquitous devices on human terms, Sworn explores AI behaviours in emotive and playful ways, observing our intimate and attentive relationships with automatic tools.

'Moving in Relation' began in 2021 with 'eco-co-location', a live one-off performance exploring encounters with algorithmic thought that took place in a vacant office space within a suburban business park. ‘This Harmonic Chamber’, Sworn’s second performance – an incomplete, future film taking shape as a performance lecture with experimental sound – was presented in 2022 in a 19th century loom shed.

Further encounters in the series have included an interview with political philosopher Louise Amoore, and ‘The Virtual Boulevard’ – a gathering of poets from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Glasgow to work across geographies and alongside AI translation systems, supported by online tools for communication. Collaborators working with Sworn have included Luke Fowler, Jer Reid, nussatari, Cecelia Pavon, SPAM Zine & Press, George Hampton Wale, and Guy Veal.

Further Info

Exhibition Info

Project Details

‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ to place at 60 York Street Glasgow, G2 8JX, The Common Guild’s temporary premises.

Credits

Movement: Molly Danter; Caitlin Taylor and Isabel Umali 

Dramaturgy: Jeremy Reid 

Camera: Corin Sworn and Ambroise Leclerc

Sound Design: Luke Fowler

Sound: Jeremy Reid; Luke Fowler; Simon Weins; Feronia Wennborg; Duncan Marquiss; Phil Julian and Darren Hayman

Consultation: Timothy Lem-Smith and Louise Amoore

Thanks: Grace Jackson; Becheala Walker; Neil Grey; Bridget Fowler; Chloe Reith; Katrina Brown; Victoria Brooks; Ian Hameli; Eric Brucket; The Common Guild installation team, Jonny Lyons and Dan Griffiths.

Sean Edwards has made a series of intimate sculptures for three libraries: Cardonald, Hillhead and Ibrox. ‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ draws together Edwards’ own personal memories of time spent in libraries during childhood and adolescence, with fragments of material from Glasgow’s archival collections.

These small-scale sculptures are designed, like books, to be held in the hand and close to the body, and to sit on the shelves of the library. Each sculpture has been assigned a unique shelf mark and entered into the library system; catalogued, indexed and positioned according to Dewey Decimal Classification which organises items by subject. Enfolded into the mechanism of the library, the sculptures will be locatable in the stacks; held, supported and contextualised by neighbouring titles on the shelves.  

‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ recalls the act of browsing books; the sparks of interest and anticipation that compel a reader to pull a book off the shelf and enter into another world, revealing possibilities beyond everyday realities. The surface of each sculpture offers an abundance of narratives; some autobiographical, some social, others fictional, and full of imagined potential. For Edwards, the sculptures contain within them “the atmosphere, texture and sensibility of neglected people and places”, but also the promise of change. 

Formally, Edwards’ sculptures make reference to the Modernist architecture and design of the libraries where they are located. Cardonald, Hillhead and Ibrox libraries were designed and built by architects Rogerson and Spence from the 1970s–1980s, towards the end phase of post-war investment in civic infrastructures that was concerned with sustaining social frameworks and public services. For Edwards, these sometimes-underinvested spaces remain physical sanctuaries, imbued with a subtle and enduring political consciousness. Embedded with the principles of free access and shared ownership, the public library persists, continuing to position itself as one path out of an endless cycle of withheld opportunity.

The project’s title is borrowed from a library membership card found in Glasgow Libraries’ collection of ephemera. ‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ suggests an open offer and speaks to the plurality of the library space.

‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ is accompanied by a piece of fiction by writer Claire-Louise Bennett. Bennett’s limited text is available from Cardonald, Hillhead and Ibrox Libraries for the duration of the project.

Browse ‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ in the library catalogue here.

Sean Edwards (b. Cardiff 1980), graduated with an MA from the Slade School of Art in 2005, and is currently Programme Director for Fine Art & Photography at Cardiff School of Art and Design. Edwards’ work investigates the sculptural and political potential of the everyday, often using remnants and fragments of previous activities as a starting point. In many of the works there is a sense of objects being in-progress, indeterminate and open to change. The work intertwines simple sculptural objects, mixed media installations and audio-visual components with personal family and political histories.

He represented Wales at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and was awarded the Turner Prize Bursary in 2020 for the installation ‘Undo Things Done’.

Recent solo exhibitions include 'chased losses', Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2022) ‘distant borrowing’, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2021); ‘Undo Things Done’, Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham, Senedd, National Assembly for Wales and Bluecoat, Liverpool (both 2020); ‘Drawn in Cursive’, MOSTYN, Llandudno and Network, Aalst, Belgium; ‘Putting Right’ Limoncello, London (both 2014); ‘Resting Through’ Kunstverein Freiburg (2012); and ‘Maelfa’ Spike Island, Bristol (2011). Group shows include ‘British Art Show 9’, Hayward Touring and ‘The World We Live In’, Southbank Art Centre, London (both 2022); ‘Olaph the Oxman’, Copperfield Gallery, London (2019); ‘49a’, Limoncello, Woodbridge (2016); ‘This is Your Replacement’, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2016); ‘Un Nouveau Festival 2015’ Centre Pompidou, Paris; and ‘Finite Project Altered When Open’, David Dale Gallery & Studios, Glasgow (both 2015), amongst others.

Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of ‘Pond’ (2015), ‘Fish Out Of Water’ (2020), and ‘Checkout 19’ (2021). Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Harper's, The White Review, and frieze. Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied Literature and Drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, ‘Pond’, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Checkout 19 was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2021.

About the Libraries

Cardonald Library  

Built in 1968, Cardonald Library was the first of three libraries that would be designed by architectural firm Rogerson & Spence in a Modernist architectural style. The library was opened in 1970 and was refurbished in 2018, facilitating upgrades to the building and the creation of a new community space. 

Hillhead Library  

The most used branch library in Glasgow, Hillhead Library has been a fixture of Glasgow’s West End since opening in 1975. The building was designed in Modernist architectural style by architects Rogerson & Spence, and the library’s interior open plan arrangement with spiral staircases represents a shift towards fully open access libraries.  

Ibrox Library  

Designed by Rogerson & Spence, Ibrox Library was the last library to be built by the firm, opening in 1981. Ibrox Library was designed with access in mind, with a lift and an accessible toilet featured in the original plans for the building. Other amenities included a children's project room, a community room, and a public telephone.  

Project Details

Browse ‘FOR WHAT WE HAVE’ in the library catalogue here.

Locations

Cardonald Library 
1113 Mosspark Drive, Glasgow G52 3BU 

Google Map

Transport links: Cardonald Station

Ibrox Library 
1–5 Midlock Street, Glasgow G51 1SL 

Google Map

Transport links: Ibrox Subway

Hillhead Library
348 Byres Road, Glasgow G12 8AP 

Google Map

Transport links: Hillhead Subway

Open

Cardonald and Ibrox
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday:
10am – 5pm
Tuesday, Thursday: 10am – 8pm 

Hillhead
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 10am – 8pm 
Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Sunday: 12 – 5pm 

Access

All libraries are wheelchair accessible.
Accessible toilets are available.

Further details from glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries or contact info@thecommonguild.org.uk for more information.

Thanks

With thanks to staff at Glasgow Life, Alison Nicol, Ruth Hunter and Audrey Cairns; Hannan Jones, Erin Donnelly, Elena Grace and Rebecca Jones; and Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Dawn Vallance, Principal Librarian at the Mitchell Library, will lead a tour of the vast back stacks of the Mitchell, not usually accessible to the public. Spanning twelve floors and three distinct architectural periods, the tour will give a rare insight into the history and operations of Glasgow’s largest public library.

Event Details

Tickets

Free, booking essential (places are limited).

Thursday 22nd June 6pm – 7pm

Saturday 24th June 11am – 12pm

Access

The tour involves stairs and walking.

Tours will begin promptly at the allocated times.

Meet at ground floor reception desk at the Granville Street entrance to the library.

View Map

The Virtual Boulevard is an experimental translation workshop collaboration bringing together invited poets in Glasgow and Buenos Aires. It forms part of Corin Sworn’s experimental series ‘Moving in Relation’. 

Sworn is joined by Buenos Aires based poet, translator and tutor Cecilia Pavón who leads translation experiments between poets in Spanish and English, encompassing dialects and colloquial languages spoken in Buenos Aires and Glasgow. Through translation, the poets explore overlapping and imagined localities between the two cities, shared and contrasting sites of struggle and antagonism, roving intimacies and literary friendship across continents. No knowledge of either English or Spanish is required — the artists aim to probe the playful potential of ‘intra-languages’and miscommunication, as encountered through human relationships with technology. 

The workshop is organised by Cecilia Pavón, Corin Sworn and SPAM Zine. Participants include valentín etchegaray, Nasim Luczaj, María Muchut, Gloria Dawson, Camila Gassiebayle, Lucy Rose Cunningham and JJ Romero. 

Cecilia Pavón was born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1973. She holds a BA in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1999 she cofounded the independent art space and small press Belleza y Felicidad, Buenos Aires. She has published poetry and short stories in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. As a translator from German and English into Spanish, Pavón has translated Diedrich Diederichsen, Chris Kraus, Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, Werner Schroeter, and others. 

Pavon has published numerous books of poetry and short stories, in 2021 Little Joy, an anthology of 35 short stories was published in English by Semiotext(e) as part of its Native Agents series. 

A publication by SPAM, including poetry from the workshop and photographs from Alice Brooke and will be released in 2024. 

Project Details

This event took place online with invited participants selected by Corin Sworn and Cecilia Pavón.

‘open stacks’, a digital video installation by Yuri Pattison, is situated in the heart of one of the largest public libraries in Europe, The Mitchell Library. Unfolding across multiple screens, Pattison’s videos use the popular online format of ‘ambience videos’ which combine slow-moving visuals and soundscapes meant to aid focus and relaxation. Pattison’s ambient videos have been created in collaboration with an ambient YouTuber, animating base images produced by the artist using AI image generation tools to blend original and found photographs.

 A second soundtrack, audible via headphones, presents a series of essays voiced by disembodied AI-generated narrators who ruminate broadly on the consequences of a world steadily overwhelmed by the private, commercial interests of technocratic powers. These unidentified, yet somehow familiar, narrators postulate variously on creative homogenisation and increasing cultural degradation; the pillaging of our shared intellectual and artistic heritage; eroded workers’ rights and the status of labour economies; and the social and political consequences of the unchecked centralisation of knowledge.

The voices have been programmed to mimic an amalgam of accents and anachronistic speech patterns recognisable for their perceived intellectual authority. The words they ventriloquise, which are unreliable, meandering and sometimes bizarre, are also authored by AI tools (large language models), as with the images on screen. Slipping between sense and nonsense, the video essays, made up of poor copies and degraded data, expose the intellectual limits and biases of AI. They make clear AI’s necrotic tendency to endlessly resample scraps of past human endeavour – with nonetheless alluring effect.

‘open stacks’ explores recent digital trends involving the rapid encircling and extraction of knowledge by networked technology, artificial intelligence and corporate power. Pattison addresses the library space as a stage upon which linearity, time, and veracity are in a constant state of recirculation, reformation and collapse. Through critically confronting immediate concerns and current discourse on AI technology, Pattison speculates on what appears to be history’s closing chapter of individual authorship, and the opening of a new one dominated by corporate intellectual property. ‘open stacks’ asks what becomes of human intelligence, and our perceptions of history and the present, when information is confined rather than accessible to all. The installation demonstrates the seductive aesthetics of tech whilst hinting that it is not yet too late to reclaim freedom of knowledge from extractive neoliberal powers.

‘open stacks’ was accompanied by a piece of writing by writer and researcher Aurelia Guo. Guo’s text was be available from The Mitchell Library for the duration of the project.

The practice of Yuri Pattison (b. 1986, Dublin, Ireland; lives and works in Paris) connects and materialises the intangible spaces between the virtual and physical through video, sculpture, installation, and online platforms. It explores how new technologies such as the digital economy and online communication have shifted and impacted the systemic frameworks of the built environment, daily life, and our perceptions of time, space, and nature.

Solo exhibitions include ‘clock speed (the world on time)’, mother’s tankstation, London, (2022); ‘the engine’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2020-21); ‘trusted traveller’, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (2017); and ‘user, space’, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2016). Selected recent and upcoming group exhibitions include ‘Ruhr Ding: Schlaf’, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Germany; ‘Radical Landscapes’, Tate Liverpool (both 2023); ‘Post Capital’, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); ‘One Escape at a Time’, 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul; ‘No Linear Fucking Time’, BAK, Utrecht; ‘Proof of Stake' – Technological claims’, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg; ‘The Ocean’, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; ‘TECHNO, MUSEION’, Bolzano, Italy (2021); ‘Long Live Modern Movement’, CCS Bard, Hessel Museum, New York (2020) and ‘Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future’, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019).

Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher who lives in London. Her work explores interconnections between law and inequality. She is the author of ‘World of Interiors’ (Divided, 2022), a book of essays and poetry exploring contested histories of mobility, migration and displacement from social, legal, and biographical perspectives. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks, ‘2016’ (After Hours Ltd, 2016) and ‘NYT’ (Gauss PDF, 2018). She is a Lecturer in Law at London South Bank University.

About the Library

One of Europe’s largest public libraries, the Mitchell Library opened in 1911 and was designed by William B Whitie, a local architect who won a competition to design the building. The original Mitchell Library was established in 1877, after tobacco manufacturer Steven Merchant left £70,000 to establish a large public library in Glasgow. Andrew Carnegie laid the first foundation stone for the Baroque style building in North Street, which has benefitted from numerous extensions over the years.  

Project Details

Location

The Blythswood Room, 5th Floor
The Mitchell Library
North St, Glasgow G3 7DN

Google Map

Transport links: Charing Cross Station.

Access

The Mitchell Library is wheelchair accessible. 

Accessible toilets are available.

Further details from glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries or contact info@thecommonguild.org.uk for more information.

Production Credit

Claire Chen, ASMR Rooms

Thanks

With thanks to Dawn Vallance and staff at Glasgow Life.