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), 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) 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’ (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.

Read the Commentary by Neil Clements —

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.

Access

Barrowlands

The venue is accessible by stairs only.

Performance is seated.

Age restrictions - 14 to 16 year olds accompanied by a parent or guardian (no under 14s).

Venue staff have disability training, including operating a stair climber.

A raised accessible viewing platform is available at the rear of the hall.

Live captions are provided during this performance.

The nearest train stations are High Street (10 minute walk) and Argyle Street (14 min walk).

Audio

The venue has step free access from street level.

Performance is seated.

Age restriction: 16+.

Due to the nature of the performance, this event will not be captioned. A transcript will be available.

The nearest train station is Glasgow Central (3 minute walk).  

Galvanizers, SWG3

Galvanizers is fully accessible.

Performance is seated with limited standing capacity.

A raised accessible viewing platform is available for concerts. This room can be accessed via 5 stairs, a platform lift or via a ramp.

Live captions are provided during this performance. 

Accessible toilets are available in all ground floor level bar spaces servicing this area.

The nearest train station is Exhibition Centre (20 minute walk).

‘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.

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.

Kate Davis has made a series of drawings that employ ‘frottage’ techniques. The frottages (or crayon rubbings) are taken from the interior and exterior of her local library in Pollokshields. These drawings are presented as a limited edition artist’s book which is freely available to anyone visiting Pollokshields library.

Davis’ frottage drawings take direct visual inspiration from the Surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891–1976) who further developed the method in 1925. Ernst published a collection of his own frottage drawings in 1926, titled ‘Histoire Naturelle’ (Natural History), and several of these depict animal forms. Other thematic starting points for Davis’ own ‘Natural History’ are Deborah Levy’s 2021 book ‘Real Estate’ and a 1973 small press publication, ‘An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Dirty Words: Volume One of the Feminist English Dictionary’, which includes a chapter of “woman as animal” idioms.

The term “high horse”, which is reclaimed in Levy’s book, provides a key motif in Davis’ new work. The Feminist English Dictionary offers further animal metaphors which are given form by Davis here.

Max Ernst described frottage as a means of making the unseen “visible” . This idea extends Davis’ interest in reconsidering histories and representations which are often absent, overlooked, or perhaps hiding in plain sight. Focusing on the library as a site for exploring language, ‘Natural History’ seeks to question how familiar phrases might be unpicked and reimagined.

Davis has also worked with children from Pollokshields Primary School to create their own fantastical creatures and imaginary beasts using collage and frottage drawing techniques. Their artworks will be on display at Pollokshields library.

‘Natural History’ was accompanied by a short piece of writing by author and journalist Charlotte Higgins. Higgins’ writing was available from Pollokshields Library for the duration of the project.

Kate Davis (b. New Zealand, lives and works in Glasgow) works across film/video, drawing, printmaking, installation and bookworks. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, Davis’ artwork is an attempt to reconsider what certain histories could look, sound and feel like.

Solo exhibitions include: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; A-M-G5 at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow; LUX, London; Stills, Edinburgh; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; The Drawing Room, London; Temporary Gallery, Cologne; GoMA, Glasgow; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Museo de la Ciudad and La Galeria de Comercio, Mexico; Tate Britain, London; and Kunsthalle Basel amongst others.

Recent group exhibitions and screenings awards include: ‘Termite Tapeworm Fungus Moss’, CCA Glasgow; ‘Chips and Egg’, The Sunday Painter, London; 35th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival; ‘Class Reunion’, MUMOK, Vienna; ‘A Slice Through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings’, Modern Art Oxford; ‘The Driver’s Seat’, Cubitt Gallery, London; The Margaret Tait Award 2016/17; Cinenova Presents ‘Now Showing’, LUX Cornwall; LUX/ BBC Artists and Archive commission; ‘GENERATION’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; ‘HOUSE WORK CASTLE MILK WOMAN HOUSE’, Glasgow Women’s Library; ‘Art Under Attack’, Tate Britain; ‘The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing’, Hayward Touring Exhibition; ‘Art Sheffield 10’ (collaborative commission with Jimmy Robert); and ‘Das Gespinst’, Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach.

Charlotte Higgins is the chief culture writer of the Guardian. She writes a regular column for the Opinion pages; articles for the Long Read section; and also contributes arts features, book reviews and magazine articles.

As an author, most of her books are about the classical world: ‘Under Another Sky’ (2013) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) prize, among other awards, and has been adapted into a play by David Greig; ‘Red Thread’ (2018) won the Arnold Bennett prize and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her latest, ‘Greek Myths’, with illustrations by Chris Ofili, was shortlisted for the Waterstones book of the year 2021. A further book, This New Noise (2015) was adapted from a series of Guardian essays about the BBC.

Born in the Potteries, Charlotte is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a former winner of the Classical Association Prize, and a trustee of the British School at Rome.

About the Library

Pollokshields Library was designed by architect Thomas Gilmour and officially opened on the 20th of February 1907 by Sir John Stirling Maxwell. The library was built with money from Andrew Carnegie, in an Edwardian Baroque style. On the outside of the building, three plaques inscribed with ‘The Arts’, ‘History’ and ‘Literature’ sit below large, arched windows. 

Project Details

Location

Pollokshields Library
30 Leslie Street, Glasgow G41 2LF

Google Map

Transport Links: Pollokshields East Station

Access

Pollokshields Library is wheelchair accessible. Accessible toilets are available.

Thanks

Kate Davis would like to thank: Effie Flood, Alison Nicol and all the staff at Pollokshields Library; Charlie Hammond, Patrick Jameson, Andrew Lee, Deborah Levy, Mara the Storyteller, Katherine Mackinnon, Dominic Paterson, Yvonne Quirmbach, and Jonny Lyons.

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.

‘anywhere in the universe’ is a new project that addresses the public library, looking at their present, past and future through a series of artists’ commissions by Rabiya Choudhry, Kate Davis, Sean Edwards, Onyeka Igwe, and Yuri Pattison. Launching in early 2023 with the work of Rabiya Choudhry, each of the commissioned works will be presented incrementally and sited in different locations across Glasgow.

Each artist will approach the library from differing positions and perspectives, from the nature of the buildings, or the systems that they use to organise information, to their social purpose. The project engages with libraries as essential spaces for knowledge exchange and community-building; as inspirational portals for imagination, belonging and civic identity; and as spaces for refuge and radical renewal.

Rabiya Choudhry has produced new illuminated signage for East-End libraries which are of particular significance to the artist. The signs borrow Carnegie’s motif of a flaming torch; a feature of many Carnegie library buildings as well as an emblem used as the bookplate for Carnegie’s own private library collection. In Choudhry’s work, the signs bear the words of African-American civil rights activist and organiser, Ella Baker (1903–1986) who worked to instigate societal change through individual and grassroots community empowerment. Baker’s words ‘give light and people will find the way’, invokes a spirit of togetherness and inspires hope for change.

Onyeka Igwe will develop a series of performances informed by pedagogical plays and socialist-realist participatory theatre to think through ways in which meaning is made collectively and examine how we tend to think about institutions. Working with a group of non-professional actors, the performances will address histories of institutional formation, revision and development within Glasgow’s municipal libraries, including early debates for and against free libraries, committees involved in selecting and banning books from the libraries, and recent community consultations.

Yuri Pattison’s sculptural video installation situated in the Mitchell Library will explore the shifting history of access to information. Paying attention to the establishment and management of libraries and various technologies that have systematised, contained and distributed knowledge, Pattison’s installation draws connections from the chained libraries of the Middle Ages, to the ‘open stacks’ model pioneered at Carnegie Libraries, encompassing more recent digital trends and the rapid reorganisation and encircling of knowledge through networked technology, artificial intelligence and corporate power. Speculating on the future trajectory and structural language of knowledge sharing, Pattison makes clear the political, material and social impacts of digital technology and the increasing privatisation of everyday life in our data-driven age.

Further details on projects by Kate Davis and Sean Edwards will be announced in 2023.

Glasgow has a particularly rich network of libraries, from many small, neighbourhood lending libraries, to the vast Mitchell Library – one of the largest reference libraries in Europe. Several of the local ‘district’ libraries were endowed by Scottish philanthropist and industrialist, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) in the early 20th century, some of the 2,811 lending libraries he created world-wide (Carnegie’s work during his lifetime was not without issue, with his extreme wealth built on aggressive industrial practices and racial segregation in US libraries). The district libraries were intended to provide free access to books and represented new technology in the distribution and systematisation of knowledge, whilst providing ‘relief from the pressures of daily life’ in specially designed buildings with high windows, vaulted ceilings, and ornate designs, described at the time by Carnegie as ‘palaces for the people’. The remaining Carnegie libraries in Glasgow, where still in use as such, have evolved and diversified to serve their contemporary communities.

Today, despite the drive to transpose many forms of knowledge online, there remains a distinct role for libraries. They are some of the last truly civic spaces in the heart of our communities: non-monetised, inter-generational spaces of exchange and refuge open to everyone, offering access to information, facilitating communal empowerment and advocacy, attributes that have been consistently brought into sharp focus over recent years and during the Covid-19 pandemic when many were closed.

Talking about his love of books to The Art Newspaper, American artist Charles Gaines explained that in his youth he had never been introduced to the true power and significance of African art; “but then I started reading some books,” he says, “and, obviously, books are the most ingenious invention in the history of anywhere in the universe.” It is through that notion, of holding books in the highest regard and valuing the possibility of discovery, of the adjacent, the tangent and the surprising, that our public libraries will be explored, unfolding as new bodies of knowledge.

About the artists /

Rabiya Choudhry was born in Glasgow in 1982 to Scottish and Pakistani parents. Choudhry studied at Edinburgh College of Art to MA level, graduating in 2006. She lives and works in Edinburgh.

Choudhry’s work explores the themes of identity and cultural displacement in contemporary British society with a darkly comedic approach. Her work expresses the complicated coupling of eastern and western cultures in richly vibrant portrayals of the different autobiographical portrayals. She makes paintings including large scale canvases, miniatures, murals, small painted sculptures, textiles and text-based artworks.

Recent exhibitions include ‘TESTAMENT’, CCA Goldsmiths, London (2022); ‘ambi’ with Fiona Jardine, Raisa Kabir, and Hanneline Visnes, CCA Glasgow; ‘Fabric of Society’ with Raisa Kabir, Jasleen Kaur and Rae-Yen Song, Glasgow International (both 2021); ‘BIG BROON STRESSED OOT EYES’ commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow (2020); ‘Coco!Nuts!’ (solo) Transmission Gallery (2018) and ‘DCA Thomson’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2016-17).

Choudhry’s work ‘Dad’ (2018) is on permanent display at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow after a major acquisition through the Contemporary Art Society’s Rapid Response Fund in 2020.

Kate Davis (b. New Zealand, lives and works in Glasgow) works across film/video, drawing, printmaking, installation and bookworks. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, Davis’ artwork is an attempt to reconsider what certain histories could look, sound and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical artworks and their reception.

Solo exhibitions include: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein; A-M-G5 at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow; LUX, London; Stills, Edinburgh; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; The Drawing Room, London; Temporary Gallery, Cologne; GoMA, Glasgow; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Museo de la Ciudad and La Galeria de Comercio, Mexico; Tate Britain, London; and Kunsthalle Basel amongst others.

Recent group exhibitions and screenings include: ‘Termite Tapeworm Fungus Moss’, CCA Glasgow; ‘Chips and Egg’, The Sunday Painter, London; 35th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival; ‘Class Reunion’, MUMOK, Vienna; ‘A Slice Through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings’, Modern Art Oxford; ‘The Driver’s Seat’, Cubitt Gallery, London; The Margaret Tait Award 2016/17; Cinenova Presents ‘Now Showing’, LUX Cornwall; LUX/ BBC Artists and Archive commission; ‘GENERATION’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; ‘HOUSE WORK CASTLE MILK WOMAN HOUSE’, Glasgow Women’s Library; ‘Art Under Attack’, Tate Britain; ‘The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing’, Hayward Touring Exhibition; ‘Art Sheffield 10’ (collaborative commission with Jimmy Robert); and ‘Das Gespinst’, Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach.

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.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She lives and works 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 ‘Ungentle’ (with Huw Lemmey), Studio Voltaire, London; ‘The Miracle on George Green’, Highline, New York (both 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). An upcoming solo exhibition, ‘A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver)’ will open at MoMA PS1, New York in March 2023.

Recent group exhibitions include ‘Reconfigured’, Timothy Taylor, New York  2021; Archives of Resistance, Neue Galerie, Innsbruck, Austria, (both 2021); ‘KW Production Series’, KW Berlin (2020); ‘New Labor Movements', McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; ‘[POST] Colonial Bodies II’, CC Matienzo, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); there’s something in the conversation that is more interesting than the finality of (a title)’, The Showroom, London (2018); and ‘World Cup!’, articule, Montreal (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.

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).

Project Details

Sean Edwards –

Yuri Pattison –

Kate Davis –

Onyeka Igwe –

Rabiya Choudhry –

Each artist project was accompanied by writing available from library locations for the duration of the project and from The Common Guild website for a limited time. The texts will be gathered together in a publication to be released in October 2023.

Video: Courtesy of The Ampersand Foundation. Realised by Piotr Sell.

Shop / Buy ‘anywhere in the universe’

The forthcoming publication is supported by –

Rabiya Choudhry’s new illuminated artworks for three East-End libraries have been created for places which hold significance for the artist. Their design is based on a painting by Choudhry, part of the artist’s ongoing project ‘Lost Lighting’ – a series of lighting artworks for public places intended to “act like a vigil in the dark”.

‘Give light and people will find the way (Ella Baker)’ (2022) is the first Lost Lighting artwork to be realised in public space. Taking shape as illuminated signs, they repurpose Andrew Carnegie’s flaming torch motif; a feature found on many Carnegie library buildings as well as an emblem used in the bookplate for his own private library collection.

In Choudhry’s work, the torch is encircled with the words of African-American civil rights activist and organiser, Ella Baker (1903 – 1986) who worked to instigate societal change through individual and grassroots community empowerment. Baker’s words ‘give light and people will find the way’, are a manifestation of power for ordinary people, invoking a spirit of togetherness and inspiring hope for change.

Choudhry says, “Ella Baker came to me through light. Her words felt like a special gift after years of contemplating life, loss, and light during one of the most difficult times. Her life, actions, and words are hugely inspiring and articulate what I wanted to echo in these public artworks for libraries at a time where light comes at some cost and hope is hard to put into words.”

Choudhry’s illuminated artworks were accompanied by a fragment of narrative non-fiction from the award- winning journalist and author, Chitra Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy’s writing was available to pick up from April 2023 from Dennistoun Library, Shettleston Library and Glasgow Women’s Library for the duration of the project.

Rabiya Choudhry was born in Glasgow in 1982 to Scottish and Pakistani parents. Choudhry studied at Edinburgh College of Art to MA level, graduating in 2006. She lives and works in Edinburgh.

Choudhry’s work explores themes of identity and cultural displacement in contemporary British society with a darkly comedic approach. Her work expresses the complicated coupling of eastern and western cultures in richly vibrant autobiographical portrayals. Recent exhibitions include ‘TESTAMENT’, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); ‘ambi’, CCA Glasgow; and ‘Fabric of Society’, Glasgow International (both 2021). Choudhry’s work ‘Dad’ (2018) was acquired by the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow in 2020 and is now on permanent display there.

Chitra Ramaswamy is an author and journalist. Her latest book,‘Homelands: The History of a Friendship’(Canongate) is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a 98-year-old German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga and winner of the 2022 Saltire Non-Fiction Book

of the Year. Her first book, ‘Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy’ (2016) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize.
She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio.

About the Libraries

Dennistoun Library was opened in 1905. Designed by architect James Robert Rhind in Edwardian Baroque style, Dennistoun Library was one of the first Carnegie libraries to open in Glasgow. The building was refurbished between 1967 and 1968 by Robert Rogerson and Philip Spence, who were the architects of Hillhead Library.  

Formerly Bridgeton Library, the building that is now home to Glasgow Women’s Library was also designed by James Robert Rhind and opened in 1906. The Women’s Library moved into the building in 2013, after the Bridgeton library relocated to The Olympia by Bridgeton Cross in 2012. Glasgow-based architectural studio Collective Architecture redeveloped the building which reopened in 2015. The Women’s Library is the only Accredited Museum in the UK dedicated to women’s lives, histories and achievements.

Shettleston Library was designed by architect Thomas Gilchrist Gilmour and opened in 1925. Situated in Glasgow’s East End, the library is built of red brick and blonde sandstone and features a stained glass portrait of Saint Mungo.  

Further Info

Additional Links

‘TESTAMENT’ Exhibition Guide, Goldsmiths CCA (2022)

Chitra Ramaswamy, ‘Homelands: The History of a Friendship’

Project Details

Location

Dennistoun Library
2A Craigpark, G31 2NA.

Google Map

Transport links: Bellgrove and Duke Street Train Stations

Shettleston Library
154 Wellshot Rd, G32 7AX.

Google Map

Transport links: Shettleston and Carntyne Stations

Glasgow Women’s Library
23 Landressy Street, G40 1BP

Google Map

Transport links: Bridgeton Station

Access

All libraries are wheelchair accessible.
Accessible toilets are available.

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

With thanks to staff at Glasgow Life and Glasgow Women’s Library.

‘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 –

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow, The Common Guild re-presents Gustav Metzger’s sculpture, ‘Mobbile’, a modified car that collects and stores its own carbon emissions, originally made in 1970 to demonstrate the destructive and harmful effects of manmade pollutants on the natural world.

Realised in conjunction with the Gustav Metzger Foundation, ‘Mobbile’ (1970/2021) will appear around Glasgow, culminating in a discussion event on 3 November in conjunction with the University of Glasgow, looking at Metzger’s work and the relationship between art and climate activism.

Project Details

‘Mobbile’ appeared at various locations around Glasgow.

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 –

Across multiple outdoor sites in the city, The Common Guild presents Sam Durant’s ‘Iconoclasm’ – a series of drawings depicting acts of destruction enacted upon public statues and monuments. Based on images gleaned from various historical and contemporary sources, including newspapers and television reports, Durant’s graphite drawings render moments of intense disruption and call on current debates about how we relate to symbols in public space.

Produced here as large-scale billboards and street posters, the 14 original graphite drawings use a fugitive, labour-intensive form to document fleeting yet significant moments of historical change, commemorating the action. Their appearance in various sites around the city draws attention to questions of representation on our streets: who gets to occupy them and why.

Scenes depicted include religiously motivated acts of destruction from sixteenth-century European Protestants to contemporary Islamic fundamentalism; politically and culturally motivated acts of image-breaking such as the 1871 toppling of the Column Vendome in Paris, in which the artist Gustav Courbet participated, and against communist statues in Europe and Africa; the cultural revolution in China; removals of colonial statues in the Caribbean, Central and South America; and nationalist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and Egypt, among others.

First exhibited in Detroit in 2019, Durant’s drawings are a reminder of the notion of a living history, reflecting humanity’s need to celebrate and commemorate, as well as the compulsion to destroy symbols of a past that come to be in conflict with current attitudes, concerns and awareness. The works are all the more resonant today, in light of the recent and on-going debates about public statuary, nowhere more so than here in the UK, where so many of our celebrated monuments commemorate battles fought on foreign soil and the repressive colonial actions of the British Empire. Given the current global rise in political polarisation, religious extremism and nationalism, this work presents a critical opportunity to explore humanity’s relationship with the symbols of the past and how to address them as society changes, as well as ways of reflecting on present-day image-making.

Sam Durant (b. 1961, Seattle, Washington USA) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Los Angeles, California, USA.

Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues that emphasise democratic ideals, racial equality and social justice. His works make connections with present and ongoing social and cultural issues, often taking up forgotten events from the past.

Durant’s interest in monuments and memorials began with ‘Proposal for Monument’ at Altamont Raceway (1999), continued notably with ‘Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions’ (2005) that recontextualizes memorials to victims of the conquest of North America, and more recently with ‘Proposal for Public Fountain’ (2015), a marble work depicting an anarchist statue being blasted by a police water cannon. He has recently presented major public art projects, ‘Labyrinth’ (2015) in Philadelphia which addressed mass incarceration and ‘The Meeting House’ (2016) in Concord, MA that took up the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England.

Durant’s latest public sculpture, ‘Untitled (drone)’, (2021) – a monumental fiberglass sculpture in the shape of an abstracted drone ¬– is the second commission for the High Line Plinth, New York City, and is on view from May 2021 until 2022. It raises the issues of drone warfare and surveillance in American society.

His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, the Venice, Sydney, Busan, Liverpool, Panama, and Whitney Biennials. His work can be found in many public collections including Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium, Tate Modern, London, England.

Durant teaches art at the California Institute of the Arts.

Further Info

Documents

Read the review by John Quin in Art Review
Read the review by Rachel Harris-Huffman in The List
Read the review by Donald Butler in MAP Magazine

Additional Links

Glasgow International Festival

Project Details

The project and its associated events were presented as part of Glasgow International Festival, taking place 11 – 27 June 2021.

Read the Commentary by Stacy Boldrick –

Read the Commentary by Amanda Thomson –

“Listening is not a passive experience. It doesn't just happen to us. Listening is an action. When I listen, I choose to direct my attention to an other. So, when I listen, the ‘I’ becomes a ‘we’. And I don't only mean listening with my ears, but my entire body receiving, sensing the other. I mean listening as a way of thinking, as an attitude and a way of being.”

‘Acoustics of Resistance’ brings together a range of sound recordings made by Mikhail Karikis made at different times and in varied locations over recent years. These are woven together with compositional fragments and a text written and spoken by the artist that reflects on the climate crisis and proposing listening as a form of solidarity, care and activism.

Karikis’ monologue, recorded in Lisbon, described a youth protest against climate change that the artist joined in 2019. Swept up by the crowd and enfolded in rushing waves of noise, Karikis tunes in to the sonic activity of socio-political change – the chants, shouts, drums and whistles – and the transformative power of communal voice.

Protest chants merge with choral recordings performed by primary school children and the Liverpool Socialist Singers whose collective whispers, hisses and gasps for breath fluctuate between a sense of crowded human presence, existential urgency and the sonics of a tumultuous and foreboding weather system.

Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-British artist, working and exhibiting internationally. His work in sound, moving image and performance develops site-specifically through collaborations mostly with communities located outside the context of contemporary art and, in recent years, with children, teenagers, young adults and people with disabilities. He employs listening, communal sound-making and video to question the power dynamics between the visible and the unheard and as forms of care and activism. His projects highlight alternative modes of human action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity and tenderness.

Karikis has exhibited in leading museums and biennials worldwide. Solo exhibitions include ‘Ferocious Love’, Tate Liverpool (2020); ‘For Many Voices’, MIMA, Middlesbrough; ‘Children of Unquiet’, Tate St Ives; ‘I Hear You’, De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; MAM Screen, MORI Art Museum, Tokyo (all 2019-20); ‘Children of Unquiet’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2019); ‘No Ordinary Protest’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018-19); ‘The Chalk Factory’, Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture (2017). He has shown at 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Genk (2012); 19th Sydney Biennale, (2014); 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016) and MediaCity Seoul (2015). He is professor at MIMA School of Art & Design.

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.

Credits

Voice by Mikhail Karikis, Lisbon, April 2021.
Dawn chorus fields recording, London, April 2020.
Liverpool Socialist Singers, Liverpool, March 2020. Extract of a recording appearing in "Ferocious Love”, 2020, by M. Karikis, commissioned by Tate Liverpool and Birmingham City University.
Climate protest, Luxembourg City, March 2019
Year 3, Mayflower Primary School, London, May 2018, extract of a recording appearing in “No Ordinary Protest”, 2018, by M. Karikis commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery.

References

LaBelle, B., Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance, (Goldsmiths Press: London) 2018.
Safran Foer, J., We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, (Hamish Hamilton: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa), 2019.
Bernard Lynch, Easter email message, 2021.

Rosa Barba’s artistic practice typically engages film as both a narrative and a sculptural medium. In ‘Faring with Faraway’ she visualises with sound, using cinematic language, and various elements like a series of images. Together, they produce a hybrid, layered experience in which notions of time are both stretched and compressed.

‘Faring with Faraway’ includes fragments of archival interviews with certain figures whose lives have captivated Barba, selected from the spoken word recordings and oral history archives kept by the British Library. Voices, predominantly of women, recount life stories, with memories of childhood, family and working life. The speakers include the socialist educator Hilda Brown; Katharine Ramsay, Duchess of Atholl, the first Scottish woman elected to the House of Commons; and Mary Chamberlain, an early proponent of oral studies and women’s history. All of the speakers were activists and campaigners for the welfare of women, and the rights of children and refugees. Within their personal stories are certain hints towards the pervasive context of British Imperialism in the first half of the 20th century, testament to a socio-political heritage that continues to reverberate in the present.

Voices intermingling with environmental sounds, musical abstracts, birdsong and animals. A field recording of a cargo train captured by the artist as it passes through the town of Marfa, Texas provides a rhythmic leitmotif, carrying the sequence along. Here the women’s voices function more like instruments in dialogue, overlapping, blending, harmonising and chattering together, allowing the listener to transcend the archival material itself and appreciate its tonal nature as part of a larger musical composition.

Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyse the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide (including Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); CCA, Kitakyushu (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall (all 2017); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015); MAXXI, Rome(2014); Tate Modern, London (2010); and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2016) and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale (2009 & 2015). Her work is part of important collections and has been widely published. In 2020, Barba was awarded the Calder Prize by The Calder Foundation.

Further Info

Part of ‘In the open’ series II

Project Details

‘In the open’ was available for a limited time during 2021 to listen to on Bandcamp and Podcast platforms. Each work was mastered for listening on headphones whilst walking and spending time outdoors.

Mastering by Stephan Mathieu /
Schwebung Mastering.
Design by Maeve Redmond.

Credits

‘Faring with Faraway’ contains extracts of recordings held by the British Library Sound Archive.

References

‘Life story interview with the late educationist, Hilda Brown (1909-1996)’, reference C468/011 (1991).
‘Life story interview with Mary Chamberlain, oral historian,’ reference C1149/27 (2012-14).
‘Life story interview with the late Kathleen Halpin (1903-1999) who was an active member of the London and National Society for Women's Service (now the Fawcett Society) until her death,’ reference C468/002 (1991).
‘Life story interview with the late British Labour politician, Norah Phillips, Baroness Phillips (1910-1992)’, reference C468/014 (1992).
Patrick Sellar interviewed by Mark Peter Wright, ‘The wildlife recordist discusses his personal history and the formation of organisations and archives he helped to establish,’ reference C1672/2 (2013).

All five interviews © British Library.
[Patrick Sellar’s interview is part of the Wildlife Sounds collection]

Items held in the collections of the British Library Sound Archive

Katharine Ramsay, Duchess of Atholl, ‘The New Outlook for Women’ (1929). Original issue number: Columbia 5340.
Constance Ripman, ‘Breakfast Time’ (1939). Speakers: Sally Latimer, Henry Oscar, Pamela Ripman. Issued as part of the Linguaphone 'Let's Talk English' series, published by Dents, October 1946. Original issue number: Linguaphone English 2E1.

With thanks to Mary Stewart, Oral History/National Life Stories British Library, Chloe Reith and Stephan Mathieu.