Red Road, Civil War and Macho Maidens: This Week in Scottish Art
First off, let’s start with some news about a promising new initiative to support disabled artists in Scotland. The new initiative has been planned and devised by art organisation flip, and will nurture and develop nine artists from a range of artistic backgrounds from all across the country. We’ll be keeping a close eye on future events as part of the initiative and look forward to featuring interviews with the participating artists.
This Wednesday there’s an event to accompany the Ponte City exhibition currently in the National Portrait Gallery, with an interesting comparison of international politics posed by inviting Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller to discuss their three year project 'Red Road Underground'. Within their 2012 exhibition of the same name, they displayed their photographs and slideshows which documented the many residents, employees and emigres within the infamous Red Road buildings in Glasgow. There’s a clear parallel between Leslie and Millers' interests and those of Ponte City photographers Michael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, who spent five years documenting the huge Johannesburg apartment building.
Both sets of photographers sought to push past the mythologies that surrounded these buildings, both inhabited by a diverse range of immigrants, and emphasised the personalities and surprises within their respective buildings. Leslie and Miller's event will take place at 12.45pm on Wed 17 Dec in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre (no booking required), and look out for a feature on Subotzky and Waterhouse’s new exhibition in our January edition.
This Might be a Place for Hummingbirds
On Thursday at Glasgow's CCA, there is a screening to accompany the exhibition This Might be a Place for Hummingbirds, the joint exhibition of Guatemalan artist Manuel Chavajay and Glasgow-based artist Rebecca Wilcox. The exhibition features a series of earthenware pots in eccentric shapes with incongruous and disturbing crime scenes as decoration. In this vein, the 2010 film Distancia by Sergio Ramirez, which follows the true story of Tomas Choc's search for his daughter who was kidnapped by the military during the Guatemalan civil war twenty years earlier, will be screened from 7pm on Thu 18 Dec.
This next week in Dundee, there is a screening of films under the title Christmas Winter Wonderlands. Curated by Generator members Ruth Aitken and Becca Clark, the night will suit a variety of tastes. Billed first is Deimantas Narkevičius, whose work is currently being exhibited in Generator as part of To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which featured in last week's art news round-up. Based in Vilnius in Lithuania, his work pivots on an experimental approach to film and video as conduits for a variety of narrative structures. In the seven minute work which will be screened this Friday night, Narkevičius works with already existing footage of the removal of the statue of Lenin from Vilnius, taking clips from the National TV archive, as well as from a freelance video reporter. There will then be a screening of Jim Henson’s The Muppets Christmas Carol, as well as the GENERATORpublications Issue 4 launch. This free event will take place from 6pm in the Hannah Maclure Centre at Abertay University. For our video of the week, here's Narkevičius in his studio in Vilnius.
Rounding off this week on Friday at 1pm, Rachel Maclean will give her take on the Alasdair Gray season at the GSA, in a talk titled Brawny Bachelors and Macho Maidens. Specifically, Maclean will discuss the Spheres of Influence series of exhibitions that track Gray’s artistic predecessors, contemporaries and successors, riffing on the Peter Howson works included in the Reid Gallery exhibition Spheres of Influence II. All welcome, no need to book.
MORE FROM THE SKINNY:
• The Mysterious Island: Interview with Collette Rayner
• Video: An interview with Rachel Maclean
• Fly by Night: Two Sides of Copenhagen