Palazzo Flitting, The Pipe Factory and Protest Posters: This Week In Scottish Art

Looking quite far ahead and reasonably far away to start this week's round-up, the Scotland + Venice programme has announced its new venue for the 2015 Venice Biennale. Next year, Graham Fagen will represent Scotland in the Palazzo Fontana – our interview with him from earlier this year is at the foot of the page. Speaking with Hospitalfields director Lucy Byatt, she confirms that it has not before been used as an exhibition space, and that Fagen will exhibit new sculpture, video and drawing across four rooms inside the 4,000 square feet palazzo. Dates for the diary – 9 May to 22 Nov 2015.

• Palazzo Fontana, Venice

If that first paragraph of Venetian news has set some Biennale cravings in motion, head to the Tramway in Glasgow this Friday from 7-9pm for the opening of Mike Nelson's Eighty Circles through Canada (the last possessions of an Orcadian mountain man). Nelson represented the UK in Venice in 2011, when he completely reconstructed the interior of the British pavillion to resemble the Büyük Valide Han, a 17th century roadside inn in Istanbul. In Tramway, Nelson will present work inspired by his friendship and work completed with the late artist and mountaineer Erlend Williamson and Canadian archaeologist and cultural anthropologist Wilson Duff. 

• Eighty circles through Canada  (the last possessions of an Orcadian mountain man), Mike Nelson

Tramway will also host the Artists’ Moving Image Festival this Saturday and Sunday. The weekend’s screenings and live events will include works from a variety of artists, including Ryan Trecartin, whose work sidles alongside the grotesque without dulling its own criticality. Providing a platform for debate and dialogue, there will also be two discussion groups titled Sound and Music in Artists’ Moving Image and Contemporary, and Historical References in Artists’ Moving Images. For ticket enquiries, please phone 0845 330 3501.

In Dundee, in the Duncan of Jordanstone’s Centrespace, the William Latham exhibition Mutator 2 is into the second week of its run. Latham has been a key figure at the avant-garde of computer art since the 1980s. Sharing the title of the exhibition, the centrepiece Mutator 2 Triptych is across three projectors which show changing forms, growing more complicated as they hybridise, bloat and entangle in themselves. This Thursday, at 5.30pm, there will be an artist’s talk by Latham, introduced by Professor Nigel Johnson, chair of interactive arts at University of Dundee.

• Mutator 2, William Latham

Also in Dundee this week, A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution launches on Thursday in the McManus. On display in the show are posters ranging from the early 20th century through to contemporary struggles in Turkey and Egypt. This exhibition can be seen in the wider context of a renewed interest in protest materials, following last month's Cuban Revolution Posters show in the Glasgow School of Art and the Disobedient Objects exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Duncan of Jordanstone Alumnus Christopher Orr’s show The Beguiled Eye will open this Saturday in Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. Orr builds his compositions from a range of slides, old photographs, printed publications and art historical sources. Orr’s well constructed sleights of scale and perspective are rendered in an elegant obscurity with elements often in landscapes that compete with their own collapse into oblivious and enchanting emerald fogs.

Finally this week, the Pipe Factory’s first resident curator Francesca Zappia presents East End Transmissions. This group show takes a reflexive point of view at its own context, looking towards the history and future of Glasgow’s East End as the Commonwealth Games' plan for The Clyde Gateway suggests efforts towards a gentrification of the area. Exploring this complex social history, Zappia has selected a range of artists working across print, photography, sculpture and collage. The show previews this Thursday 6-9pm and is open from 14 Nov to 7 Dec.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:

“We were made to recite Burns at school; we were taught that that was our cultural heritage; but to me it was always a heritage which came with a biscuit-tin aesthetic.” – Scotland's 2015 Venice Biennale artist Graham Fagen on Scottish culture, and the GENERATION project