Image: Steven Grainger, Detail from ‘Power from Things Not Declared’, 2025.
‘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 locations will be circulated here.
