CCA Highlights: February 2023

Benjamin Soedira: Jongen 

(Intermedia Gallery, 3-25 Feb) 
Through a series of striking photographs, Glasgow-based artist Benjamin Soedira unravels histories of colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and the ability of the ground to hold onto the past. His photographs balance on the line between familiarity and foreignness, the known and the unknown, encapsulating the immigrant experience of dislocation and return. Travelling through Indonesia to his father’s birthplace in West Papua, plantation sites to everyday stillness, Soedira’s artistic intervention into his own history is both a gorgeous mediation on a fraught and colonially underpinned past, and a wide-open future.

The Self Assembled 

(Theatre, Cinema, Clubroom, Creative Lab, Balcony and Foyer, 18 Feb) 
Who says being an adult can’t be fun? An immersive evening of performance, this unique theatre show invites its audience to play dress up along with its performers, with rails of costumes each with their own unique history stacked around the room. Transporting the audience through three decades of theatre, The Self Assembled is a delirious celebration of the work of Oceanallover, featuring fragments of shows including Ecdysis (In Vivo), Orographic and a new work The Scales of the World, featuring a costume collaboration with legendary couturier Mr Pearl. There’s also live performances created by Fionnuala Dorrity, Dylan Read, Suzi Cunningham and more, a Slam Poetry event curated by Carlos Hernan and dance tunes from Vixen Sound (aka Phoebe I-H).

Six Short Films About Housing (in memory of Cathy McCormack)

(Cinema, 22 Feb) 
Held in memory of the late veteran housing activist and campaigner Cathy McCormack, this short film programme put together in association with tenants’ union Living Rent and the Workers Stories Project is a strident examination of housing inequality and the factors that lead to precarity. Through the six short films, the event examines the ways in which film, and art more broadly, can be used as both political representation and political tool, how housing justice can be fought for in the creative world, and the importance of bearing witness and chronicling the realities of class struggle. All proceeds from the event will go towards Living Rent and striking CWU workers.

Jack Cheetham: Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do 

(Intermedia Gallery, 7-22 Apr)
This new installation by Glasgow-based artist Jack Cheetham offers a speculative look at the future of hometowns, families and communities through building an interactive relationship between audience and art. Taking the form of a forgotten puppet show that takes place in and around ruined castle grounds in the not-so-far future of 2066, Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do examines the potential and ongoing failures of a consumer-based creative culture, and the centrality of labour and community in manufacturing art, told through the tale of a puppeteer revolt and the exhibition’s audience who step in to reanimate the puppets.