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.

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.

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. 

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.

Ahead of his commission as part of ‘anywhere in the universe’, our project looking at the present, past and future of the public library, Sean Edwards shares his recommendations for our Room for Reading.

Edwards selects ‘Index Cards’ by Moyra Davey (2020); ‘Acting Class’ by Drnaso (2020); ‘Libraries of Light’ by Alistair Black (2019); ‘Checkout 19’ (2021) by Claire-Louise Bennett and ‘Help for the Dyslexic Adolescent’ by E.G Stirling (1987). 

‘Index Cards’ (2020) by Moyra Davey 

“I always return to Moyra Davey’s writing. Particularly her writing about reading. There is something about her style and approach that is akin to reading itself. She places the reader in the context of her own reading which in turn informs the text, taking the reader on a research narrative journey guided by her. Until this collection was published the writings were spread across numerous books and catalogues, but to have this collection in one place is like a small gift and one that is never far from my side.”

Listen to Moyra Davey on the Magic Hour podcast here.

Watch ‘Hemlock Forrest’ (2016) by Moyra Davey here.  

‘Acting Class’ (2020) by Nick Drnaso 

“Graphic Novels and picture books in general were my way into reading, and as a child of the 1980’s I mined the library for the small selections of ‘comics’ that they had in stock. Thankfully for young adults there are now far greater selections of these books at libraries. I still prefer to read images and Drnaso’s ‘Acting Class’ published last year is one that has remained with me. The sparse artwork and disorientating narrative arc about a group of strangers collected together through their attendance at an amateur acting class is both beautiful and deeply unsettling.” 

Read an excerpt from Nick Drnaso’s ‘Acting Class’ here.

‘Libraries of Light’ (2019) by Alistair Black 

“Black’s book looks at the emergence of a new type of architectural design for British Public libraries in the 1960’s that broke with traditions and began to consider a new type of design. The book features a range of case studies, including Cardonald Library in Glasgow, to illustrate Black’s idea of ‘libraries of light’. Within the book, he proposes that the particular architectural design of these spaces convey the principles of a shared social egalitarianism.”

Read Alistair Black on the importance of public libraries in Apollo Magazine here.

‘Checkout 19’ (2021) by Claire-Louise Bennett  

“This is a book about books, and about reading. It is also about the transformative power of books as objects. Bennett’s writing is recognisable to me in its the repetitions, loops and fragmentation. I think of her style as being immensely physical and object-like. The writing on the page carries gravity.”

Read an extract from ‘Checkout 19’ here.

‘Help for the Dyslexic Adolescent’ (1987) by E.G Stirling

“I was diagnosed with dyslexia in the final year of my Masters. I found this book shortly after in a charity shop. It was first published in 1985 and the edition I own was reprinted in 1993 – the particular timespan when I would have, could have, needed it. Regardless, this absence has allowed it to be a tool ever since, one I mine regularly for work, thinking about reading, and looking. The techniques I self-developed to deal with dyslexia became a way to consider how the act of reading and looking can be used within my practice.”

British Dyslexia Association

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.

Onyeka Igwe’s play for libraries is informed by socialist-realist participatory theatre and educational plays to think through ways meaning is made collectively and how we tend to look upon the institutions we interact with in everyday life.  

‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ is a short play set in the near future. The play follows two individuals who join forces in an attempt to resurrect the now-lost tradition of the public lending library. Working through their own indistinct, hazy childhood memories, and instructions from a zine, they start to assemble what they think might be the essentials of a community library, in an old, empty warehouse building. 

Through dialogue and interaction with their new library visitors, the characters work through the assumptions, ideologies and complications of institutional formation. In enacting their new roles as librarians and custodians of an organisation, they call into question the ways institutions have developed and the structures and systems we have inherited in our own public spaces. Through a process of trial and error, they propose ways in which things might be different, and in turn speculate what is needed in society now and in an unknown future.

‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ points towards cycles of knowledge loss and reformation, and explores what is valued, inherited and saved for public use. The play highlights how information is accessed and exchanged, as well as changing notions of the civic, and habits of sharing in present times.    

Igwe’s play was accompanied by a short piece of writing by the writer and researcher Lola Olufemi. Olufemi’s writing was available from Hillhead Library, Langside Library and Woodside Library, for the duration of the project.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, living and working in London, UK. Her work is animated by the question “how do we live together?” with a particular interest in sensorial, spatial, and non-canonical ways of knowing. She uses embodiment, voice, archives, narration and text to create structural “figure-of-eights”, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives.

Solo exhibitions and commissions include ‘A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver)’, MoMA PS1, New York (2023) ; ‘The Miracle on George Green’, Highline, New York (2022); ‘a so-called archive’, LUX, London; ‘THE REAL STORY IS WHAT’S IN THAT ROOM’, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada, (both 2021), ‘There Were Two Brothers’, Jerwood Arts, (2019), and ‘Corrections’ with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada (2018).

In 2022 Igwe was nominated for the Jarman Award and shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2022–2024. She was awarded the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize; the 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film; and was the 2019 recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of ‘Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power’ (Pluto Press, 2020), ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’ (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. 

About the Libraries

 Located in Battlefield in the southside of Glasgow, Langside Library was opened in 1915, the last of the Carnegie libraries to be built in the city. Built on the principle of open access, the library was designed by architect George Simpson. The library features a mural of the Battle of Langside, which was painted by staff and students at the Glasgow School of Art and completed in 1921. 

One of the largest Carnegie libraries in Glasgow, Woodside Library was designed by J R Rhind and opened in 1905. A large, glazed dome on the roof is a distinctive feature, and sculpture on the front of the building is attributed to William Kellock Brown. After a refurbishment, the library reopened in 2022, and is now home to a flexible community space, new study areas and a colourful woodland-themed children’s area stocked with books chosen by pupils from local primary schools. 

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.  

Project Details

‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ was performed in Langside Library, Woodside Library and Hillhead Library across three days.

Performed by Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Louis Pearson.

It is now available as an audio play - listen below.

Listen to ‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ –

Thanks

With thanks to staff at Glasgow Life.

Onyeka Igwe would like to thank Gordon Douglas; David Allan; Elly Goodman and Neil Packham at the Citizens Theatre; the Citizens Theatre Community Collective Group; February Workshop participants; and the Red Sunday School.

Thanks to the performers, Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Louis Pearson, and to Chizu Anucha for the sound mix.

Kate Davis shares her recommendations for our Room for Reading, ahead of her forthcoming commission as part of ‘anywhere in the universe’.

Davis has recommended Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography Trilogy (2014–2021), Ruth Todasco’s 1970’s Feminist English Dictionary, and a lecture by artist Amy Sillman. Read more on Davis’ recommendations and their relationship to the development of her new work, below.

Deborah Levy, ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ (2014), ‘The Cost of Living’ (2018) and ‘Real Estate’ (2021).

“On the back of my copy of ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ there is a quote from Levy: ‘Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December”. Levy’s questioning of how to pursue a creative self alongside everyday life is a key theme in this trilogy. It helped get me through the period before, during and after the pandemic and ‘Real Estate’ provided a direction for my ‘anywhere in the universe’ project.”

Listen to ‘The Cost of Living: Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing’, London Review Bookshop Podcast, April 2018 here.

‘An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Dirty Words: Volume One of the Feminist English Dictionary’ (1973) by Ruth Todasco.

“I discovered this excellently-titled publication when doing research for ‘anywhere in the universe’. It was made by a group of women in Chicago and has a bold urgency that seems characteristic of much of the feminist activity being generated in America in the early 1970s. The ‘dirty words’ of the title are ‘english words and phrases reflecting sexist attitudes toward women in patriarchal society, arranged according to usage and idea’– and many of these derogatory terms are still so familiar.”

Read ‘Feminists Find That Words Fail Them’, a New York Times review of ‘An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Dirty Words’, January 1974, here.

‘Conversation with Amy Sillman: Drawing in the Continuous Present, The Menil Collection’ (2017).

This generous lecture fizzes with Sillman’s intelligent curiosity and humour. Drawing is key to my practice and I am often questioning what certain forms of mark-making mean today. I appreciate how Sillman manages to both critique and embrace such a wide range of approaches to drawing. I am also grateful to Sillman for introducing me to Manny Farber’s ‘Termite art’ and its articulation of ‘a bug like immersion in what is close to hand’. I am regularly seeking that sort of immersion in the studio. 

Watch Amy Sillman’s lecture ‘Drawing in the Continuous Present’, The Menil Collection, February 2017, above.

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.

‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ (2020-ongoing) by the New York and Ramallah-based artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme is an evolving multipart project featuring sound, moving-image installation and live performance.

The project foregrounds Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s remarkable personal archive of found video clips and ephemeral recorded footage, collected by the artists since the early 2010s and the beginning of the Arab Revolutions. Posted online and on social media by ordinary people living in and around Palestine, Iraq and Syria, the video clips, often ad hoc and recorded on mobile devices, focus on song, dance, protest and performance – affirmative acts of vocalisation and physical gesture.

This collected material forms the foundation of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s multi-layered installation 'Only sounds that tremble through us' (2022). The digital traces of these performing bodies are brought together with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, working in Ramallah, Palestine. Footage is looped, manipulated and superimposed upon images that include solarised landscapes and destroyed dwellings. Projections are rhythmic and augmented with a fragmentary script in both Arabic and English, detailing experiences of violence, trauma, displacement and resistance. The sound, composed by the artists, shifts between the solo voice, singing dirge-like, and a reverberating audio, heavy with bass notes. As sound and moving image accumulates, a testimony of shared experience begins to emerge, and in turn a collective body of knowledge.

‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ bears witness to geopolitical upheavals, forced migration and community disintegration whilst simultaneously enacting modes of survival for those marginalised by colonial-capitalist conditions – reclaiming space for alternative political logics to persist. The project’s overarching title, ‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ is borrowed from the English translation of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Infrarealist Manifesto’ (1976), used here by Abbas and Abou-Rahme as a reminder to resist forgetfulness and the erasure of personal, political and community histories that disappear all too quickly from consciousness.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme will activate the installation with the live performance ‘an echo buried, buried, but calling still’ (2022). Drawing upon further sound, video, and text from the artist’s larger archive and combining this with live vocals, electronics, sound sampling and projections. This new work examines the significance of voice and embodiment through song as a testimony to the resilience of communities under threat.

This is the most substantial presentation of the work of Abbas and Abou-Rahme in the UK to date. The project has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the DIA Art Foundation, New York City, and presented at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983) have had solo exhibitions at, among others, the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018); Art Jameel Project Space Dubai (2017); Alt Bomontiada, Istanbul (2017); and Carroll / Fletcher, London (2016).

Their work has been included in major international biennials such as the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015), the 10th Gwangju Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennial (both 2014), the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013), and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). They are currently participating in the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022).

Further Info

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Dia Artist Web Projects Series – ‘Postscript: after everything is extracted’ and ‘Part 1: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’

Documents

E-flux Announcement – May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth

Interview: In the studio with… Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Apollo Magazine, September 2022

Interview: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme ‘On The Search For A New Language’, Something Curated, September 2022

Review: Greg Thomas, 'Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’, Art Monthly, October 2022

Project Details

‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us’ (2020–2022) was presented at 5 Florence Street from the 9 September to 9 October 2022. The exhibition was open Thursday – Sunday, 12–6pm and free to enter.

Read the Commentary by Priya Jay –

Listen to Priya Jay read the Commentary here –

Location –

American artist Sharon Hayes’ new project with The Common Guild is a suite of three films, shown together for the first time. It is the continuation of Hayes’ on-going ‘Ricerche’ project, including a new commission. ‘Ricerche’ (meaning ‘research’) is comprised of several video works that use the 1964 film ‘Comizi d’Amore’ (Love Meetings) by Italian director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, as a guidepost and framework for an examination of gender, sexuality and contemporary collective identifications.

‘Ricerche’ constitutes an inquiry into the relations between sex, sexuality, gender and politics in the United States today, with nonetheless striking resonance with contemporary discourse across societies elsewhere. It continues Hayes investigation of the act of public speech, and its intersections with history, politics, activism, queer theory, love and sexuality, through both the collective and the individual voice.

Filmed by Hayes at different times since 2013, including during 2020’s critical election year in the US, the works feature a range of individuals, from students at an all-women’s college in Massachusetts, to children of queer or gender non-conforming parents, and members of two women’s tackle football teams. Each film is presented as ‘ricerche’ or research. The most recent, ‘Ricerche: two’, was filmed in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, just before the onset of the pandemic. It was commissioned by The Common Guild. The extended interview asks the players what they like about the sport, whether they feel different on and off the field and how playing football relates to other aspects of their lives. This new work will be presented alongside the two existing works in the series; the single-channel video ‘Ricerche: three’ (2013), and a diptych, ‘Ricerche: one’ (2019).

‘Ricerche’ is presented in the former Adelphi Terrace Public School, south of the river Clyde, opposite Glasgow Green. Originally opened in 1894 following the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, which made schooling free and compulsory for five to thirteen year olds, the building was used as a site of education for children and young adults until 2010. With thanks to our venue partner Urban Office.

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) lives and works in Philadelphia, USA.

Hayes is one of the most influential politically and socially committed artists working in the United States. She has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Hayes’ work is part of the public collections of Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Warsaw; among many others. Hayes’ 5-channel video installation 'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You’ (2016) was co-commissioned by The Common Guild and Studio Voltaire, London.

Sharon Hayes holds the position of Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Further Info

With thanks to Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.

Documents

E-flux Announcement – Sharon Hayes: ‘Ricerche’

Sharon Hayes interviewed by Adam Benmaklouf, The Skinny, October 2021

Commonwealth: Sharon Hayes Ricerche: two

Maddie Klett, ‘Sharon Hayes Turns the Camera on People Who Have Found Their People’, Frieze, May 2021

Project Details

‘Ricerche’ was presented at the former Adelphi Terrace Public School from 9 October – 7 November.

Read the Commentary by Nat Raha –

Listen to Nat Raha read ‘Love is the Message’ –

Project Location –

'A Place for the Work and the Human Being’ runs throughout 2019 and takes place in a range of venues, new and old, around Glasgow. The series explores the needs, expectations and possibilities of the space for art today and speakers include artists, architects, curators and others.

The title is borrowed from the sub-title of a text by Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943 – 2005), ‘The Art Museum of My Dreams’, written in 1986, translated into English in 2013 and now out of print.

Conceived to run in parallel with our transition, having drawn our exhibition programme at 21 Woodlands Terrace to a close after 10 years and 30 exhibitions, the series takes place while we develop plans for projects and exhibitions in new locations.