Scottish Art Events round-up: December 2021
December brings a series of excellent shows across Scotland, plus art studio Christmas markets happening through the weekends; whether you want to revel in festivity or not, there's plenty of art to see
It’s December, so as well as the exhibition openings this month, there are some fairs and markets happening around, too. While we’re not quite at pre-pandemic art Xmas art parties yet, there’s still a good whack of gallery activity happening in the next few weeks.
Cooper Gallery launches the openings with their new show, Sit-In #2: To Be Potential from Friday 3 December. It’s continuing their series The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-Ins Towards Creative Emancipation. This time, several different group and histories of alternative structures of education are part of the exhibition, bookings available online.
Also from 3 December, writer Joey Simons’ new show The fearful part of it was the absence opens in Collective. The exhibition is a sociopolitical and poetic enquiry into Glasgow’s 'periodic eruption and absence of rioting', with new writing, film and drawings by Simons and the photographer Jack Wrigley.
On Saturday 4 December, the new show in Tramway opens, Bring Me To Heal by Amartey Golding. In this work, Golding applies healing and restorative principles of a Rastafarian upbringing to the historical violences that exist in his Anglo-Scottish and Ghanaian ancestry, through film, photography, and an ornate and intricately designed centrepiece made from hand-knotted human hair.
On 11 December, DCA opens the first solo Scottish solo shows for artists Rae-Yen Song and Tako Taal. Song’s show is titled ▷▥◉▻, and using a complex large scale sculptural installation gives viewers a glimpse of an alternate dimension, shaped according to the ancestral logics and imagined futures of Song’s family, which serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge.
Taal’s At the Shore Everything Touches is set in her family’s home village in The Gambia – Juffureh. Across film, collage, painting and archive materials from Taal’s own personal photographs and documents, this new body of work centres on Juffureh, its geography, historical significance as a trade post and fort during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the ways in which its histories are used and instrumentalised in the present day.
On the weekend of 11 and 12 December Gather Studios, Grey Wolf Studios and Rumpus Room will all host markets across Glasgow. See their respective socials for the exact sweet treats and refreshments that will be on offer, as well as time, date and location.