Art Events in Scotland: October 2021

Opening October, Collective Gallery's artist mentorship program Satellites continues with an exhibition by Mina Heydari-Waite (until 27 Nov). The artist produces sculptures translated from the architectural embellishments of Persepolis, an ancient city in modern Iran. They’re transposed into flat-packed digital versions, and set in a soundwork on 'social dreaming', exploring the possibility of dreams to “uncover wider collective meanings”.

At Embassy Gallery, there’s a new film installation by artist India Sky until 17 Oct, which "maps the cycles of souls, spirit, space and nature, through Birth, Maturity, Death and the Ancestral World." Inspiration is taken from the permutations of the BaKongo Cosmogram, a cruciform shape used to signify the connections between the physical and spiritual worlds. Sky's exhibition considers the Cosmogram "within Afro-Diasporic music and dance traditions, particularly underground disco, house, and ballroom culture, The Life Cycle of Rainbows weaves a universe of sound, sculpture, elaborate costumery, dance, and storytelling."

Back at full pelt, The Ignorant Art School is an exhibition and series of events by Ruth Ewan and Dundee's Cooper Gallery about radical politics and education. We profiled the project earlier in the year, and it’s running all this month in Dundee. It’s a wide ranging programme, around differently themed “classes” on singing, design, performance, writing all coming in through the following weeks. Head to the Cooper Gallery website for all the info on dates and booking.

This month, The Common Guild hosts two new projects. First is one of this month’s feature interviewees, Sharon Hayes, whose exhibition Ricerche is in the former school at 5 Florence Street in Glasgow from 9 October to 7 November. In the same spot, there’s a roundtable discussion event on 28 October with Glasgow artists Ashanti Harris, Winnie Herbstein and Mathew Wayne Parkin. 

Marking the international climate conference COP26, Gustav Metzger’s 1970 work Mobbile will appear around Glasgow. It’s a modified car that collects and stores its own carbon emissions to show the harmful effects of pollution. On 3 November, there will be a discussion event on art and climate activism at University of Glasgow – details TBC.

It’s also the last chance to see Jupiter Artland’s programme before it closes for the season. This includes RESET by Alberta Whittle, in which she works with an impressive set of “accomplices” to produce a group show and a film in which she responds to the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic and climate emergency, “skilfully connect[ing] emergent fears of contagion, moral panic and xenophobia with a call to action – a demand – to face and heal injuries and cultivate hope”.