CCA Highlights: March & April 2017

Literary bonanza ahoy! Glasgow Book festival Aye Write is on the horizon and coming in to moor at the CCA from 9-19 March. There is a veritable trove of literary loot for you, dear adventurer, to plunder. Treasures such as Welcome to Lagos author Chibundu Onuzo is just one of many famous authors appearing at a roster of events. There’s a focus on the burgeoning graphic novel form and LGBTQI+ representation as Aye Write looks ever outward on the good ship CCA.

Glasgow Short Film Festival is back for its 10th year at its ancestral home from 15-19 March. As article 50 becomes the last and only minutiae of European diktat we ever care about again, this year there is a focus on sovereignty, with three programmes in conjunction with Kosovan film festival Dokufest and ImagineNATIVE. Relax with a range of screenings, masterclasses and competition with fun for all the family.

It’s not the matrix; GLITCH really is happening a second time round, and these agents of change are coming once again to bring you a quirky and bizarre arsenal of LGBTQI+ art. Queer Black Vampires. We need say no more, but we will: with premieres of films, performance art and documentaries, and Q&As with the directors, see things from every imaginable side at GLITCH, starting Friday 24 March.

LGBTQI+ art is further represented by the marvellous PWR BTTM. American college buddies Ben Hopkins and Liv Bruce bring their cavorting queer punk ebullience to the CCA stage for an assault on your nervous system and your preconceptions. Bombastic, ballistic, and catchy as hell, go find what you truly want on Saturday 15 April.

Oddly sensual 1970s pig masks hammer in the pathos in hippie bildungsroman The Telephone Book, where a Woodstock rejectee seems to find dirty phone jokes the very height of amore and tries to track the ribald Romeo down. Although largely forgotten, the work is a seminal piece from the New York underground film scene by writer/director Nelson Lyon. Go give it the appreciation it’s always deserved on Thursday 20 April.

Twitchingly rich in melancholy, endlessly hazy as it fans out with its ambulant chords, yet filled with – in his words – “a hopeful, utopian element that reminds you of the possibility of a different life.” Ulrich Schnauss is playing live at the CCA ready to let the audience swim in his hypnotic river of melancholy electronica following the release his fourth album. Be part of the tide on Wednesday 22 March.

Don’t forget Forms of Action – and if you went, you couldn’t – to witness how art survives contact with the absurdity of our real world, and what on earth we can do as we watch reality end. The exhibition takes on everything in a superb array of storytelling, photography and performance that tackles the socio-cultural implications of food and agriculture, second-wave feminism and the simple hope of being alive.