08 Feb 2019

CCA Glasgow announces gallery programme for 2019

Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts' 2019 exhibition programme includes shows from Katherine MacBride, Shadi Habib Allah, Emilia Beatriz, Grace Schwindt, Basma Alsharif, a sixteen-week summer programme exploring contemporary performance and performativity, and the launch of a new Seed Library for Scotland.

Ainslie Roddick, CCA Curator, said: 'We're really looking forward to bringing a new series of programmes to fruition. The main focus for us this year is to test out different methods of thinking and hosting differently with our gallery spaces, with many of our projects exploring how the institution or gallery space performs, inherits or behaves - working across many kinds of cultural practices. We're changing the rhythm of how we work a little in response to the conditions we find ourselves in, and working with really exceptional, generous artists who are bringing really special, rigorous projects to the city.'


Katherine MacBride: having been breathed out / patriarchy over and out
Saturday 9 February – Sunday 24 March 2019

Katherine MacBride's work explores different forms of hospitality, thinking about how listening and attentiveness can happen in conflicted spaces and times. While Katherine's interests focus on relational entanglements, listening across difference, and working creatively towards an ethics of inseparability and interdependency, the work also poses questions about the space of its host institution CCA; how it can think and host differently.

She is interested in how the structures of CCA can offer different modes for interpreting and accessing artworks, beyond pieces of paper or wall texts – how the work can involve itself in more material ways of speaking and performing. This new exhibition brings together a series of large-scale textiles – using a range of fabrics and forms which support different sensory capacities – installed as spaces for encounter, response, and rest: soft and tactile architectures, day beds, quiet acoustic interventions.

A key part of the exhibition is a new performance, a speculative re-memory of a porous Europe based on feminist solidarity and queer care, making reparations for its colonial violence and ecological wastage. Made with access input from Collective Text, in collaboration with Angelica Falkeling, Anna Frei, Clara J:son Borg, and Raluca Croitorui. Three workshops with Azahara Ubera Biedma, Emma Haugh, and Naomi Pearce make space for embodied and embedded forms of shared study – thinking and doing together.

Shadi Habib Allah
Saturday 20 April – Sunday 2 June 2019

A new project by Shadi Habib Allah in two of CCA's three gallery spaces will examine the disparities and dependencies brought on by government welfare policies. Shadi Habib Allah works across film, sculpture, and installation, often drawing on a process of deep research and on-the-ground engagement in specific locales. Varied in form and focus, his projects range from reimagining a ghost story from 1930s Jerusalem to travelling along illicit trade routes with Bedouin smugglers. While each project defines its own terms based on research and physical engagement, a common thread is opening up suggestive modes of navigation across circulation networks of people, technologies, objects, images and economies to examine ideas of use and value and the structures that hold them in place.

Presenting new sculptural and sound works, he will present a new body of work that has grown out of his ongoing immersion in the communities of Miami's Liberty City and local corner shops, in an attempt to examine government welfare policies and their impact. In this neighbourhood marked by racial and economic inequality, the artist locates active economies of goods and services that exist independently of, and at times elude or exploit, state-sanctioned systems such as welfare and property zoning. Serving as hubs for local communities and centres for non-monetary forms of exchange, the corner shops maintain an interdependent relationship with their clientele by allowing customers to buy goods on credit or exchange food stamps for cash.

This exhibition is part of Mophradat's inaugural Consortium Commissions - a pioneering model for co-commissioning ambitious new artworks by emerging artists from the Arab world. Elements of the project were also on display at Hammer Museum LA until 20 January 2019.

Emilia Beatriz
4 May - 26 June 2019

Straddling Shadi Habib Allah's exhibition and the summer programme is a new eight-week project by Emilia Beatriz in the CCA2 gallery space. An artist from Puerto Rico's diaspora Emilia's practice moves between photography, moving image, text, sound and performance. Recent work explores embodied practice at intersections of 'care, cure and crisis' through textual, visual and sonic meditations on communication and listening tools, diasporic/multiracial experience and collective healing practices. Since 2007, Emilia has actively contributed to the visual arts scene in Scotland including serving on Transmission's committee, organising with Arika and most recently starting a freelance collective providing captioning and audio description access for Scottish arts and archives.

Emilia has been commissioned to make a new speculative fiction narrative based on oral histories from Scotland and Puerto Rico, with beekeepers, sustenance farmers, and herbal medicine practitioners from Scotland and Puerto Rico. This commission draws on two years of research in both countries in site-specific locations related to military occupation, infrastructural systems, environmental toxicity, and ecological or political resistance. These sites, as well as domestic spaces, will form the scenes/backdrops of the narrative. Emilia is utilising archival research from land and community health struggles, undertaking research with beekeepers in Vieques and Cape Wrath.

This two-month installation includes the launch of an autonomous seed and herbal library based at CCA, and a dual language 2HB in Spanish and English (CCA's journal for creative writing) with Scottish writer Daisy Lafarge and Puerto Rican poet Nicole Delgado.


Summer Performance Programme
Saturday 22 June - Sunday 13 October 2019

A new sixteen-week summer project marks the beginning of a new way of working with CCA's gallery spaces, shifting the rhythm of CCA's exhibition programme from six stand-alone projects. The three downstairs gallery spaces will host various forms of practice over the summer period, centring on the potentials of performance practice, and will include an ambitious installation of film works, spaces of production and live performances which explore the ethics and behaviours of the exhibition spaces. From 4 May to 13 October, there will be always be at least one exhibition space open to the public, with no 'down time' between shows. Participating artists will be announced in early 2019.


Grace Schwindt
Saturday 14 September - Sunday 13 October 2019

Grace Schwindt is a prolific sculptor working across disciplines. Her works question the systems and standards that constitute contemporary society to explore the position of the individual under capitalism, connected by an interest in the role of bodies, language and objects in the construction of history and memory.

This new exhibition in CCA2 intends to explore how mental health has been perceived and treated in Modern and contemporary Western society. The basis for the exhibition's research is The Socialist Patient Group, a radical 1970s intellectual and political collective from Heidelberg, Germany, as well as Ronald David Laing and David Cooper, key exponents of the anti-psychiatrist movement which emerged in the 1960s.

The exhibition intends to question how protection correlates with control by exploring the apparent intentions, conventions and values manifest in both the architectural and design structures of mental health institutions, and those of the gallery space. The show will reflect and challenge assumptions about how patients and gallery visitors navigate such spaces and interact with the objects contained within. It includes a brand new film work alongside the commissioning of an ambitious series of glass, resin and architectural sculptures whose material, formal and architectural properties provoke discussions on feelings of observation, fragility, isolation and control.

Basma Alsharif
Saturday 2 November - Sunday 15 December 2019

Basma Alsharif is an artist and filmmaker, born in 1983 in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, raised between France, the US, and the Gaza Strip. Basma presents a new project The Philistine, which is centred around a handmade book that exists in English, Arabic, and French. A sixty-page novella incorporating history, science-fiction, and eroticism, it is accompanied by six stand-alone drawings and three photographs, two chairs with a coffee table, carpeting, and warm lighting. The viewer becomes a part of the work by sitting down to read the book. The book tells the story of a character, the Philistine, taking the train from Lebanon to Egypt via Palestine after learning of her estranged father's death; she is setting out to retrieve his belongings along the route. Beginning in the present and ending in 30 BC, the narrative rewrites the historical Haifa-Beirut-Tripoli Railway and Palestine Railways, suggesting what such a journey would be like today given that both lines were discontinued with the state of Israel's creation in 1948.

This exhibition is part of Mophradat's inaugural Consortium Commissions - a pioneering model for co-commissioning ambitious new artworks by emerging artists from the Arab world. The project is also on display at MOCA Toronto from 14 February 2019.


Intermedia Gallery, Creative Lab & Residencies

An Opposites Programme: Gordon Douglas
Performance artist Gordon Douglas has been working with CCA since May 2018 towards a performative audit of CCA's open source policy, a programming model that offers free and temporary public use of many of the organisation's spaces and facilities. An Opposites Programme will be the realisation of this audit – a series of announced and unannounced events taking place throughout 2019.

Buzzcut / CCA Live Art Associateship – Mamoru Iriguchi
This new initiative between Buzzcut and CCA supports an artist working in Live Art and contemporary performance which experiments with the possibilities of the live event with a commitment to exploring liveness and the possibilities within it, pushing their forms to previously unexplored territory. For the inaugural associateship performance artist Mamoru Iriguchi was selected from an open call to undertake a three-week residency in May/June 2019 to develop a new performative work 'What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed / What You Don't See When Your Eyes Are Open' that aims to investigate what an audience does/doesn't see and what performers do/don't see.

CCA's Intermedia Gallery and Creative Lab programmes for 2019/20 will be announced soon.


Publications

2HB - CCA's journal for artist creative writing

2HB: 23 – Katherine MacBride
Launching in March 2018, with a text about shared knowledges responding to the acknowledgments section of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. Edited by Ainslie Roddick.

2HB 24 – Gordon Douglas
Launching in spring 2019 this edition explores the politics and changeability of the use of the word 'collaboration' in art practice. Edited by Ainslie Roddick.

2HB 25 – Nicole Delgado and Daisy Lafarge
Launching in May 2019 to coincide with Emilia Beatriz's CCA gallery project, exploring ecology, and climate-as-metaphor, with poems by Puerto Rican writer Nicole Delgado, and Scottish poet and critic Daisy Lafarge. Edited by Ainslie Roddick.

Small Black Reptile - CCA's new journal for critical writing:

SBR 2: Launching in winter 2019, this new compilation looks towards alternative practical imaginaries for a space in which the idea of North can be transformed to signify new working methods, alternative ways of seeing and holding positions of relation. Acknowledging a North which is a force of delineation, a subjectivity, a cause and effect, a structure of power and an already happening banal catastrophe of meteorological and militaristic proportions, this new book brings together a series of artists and cultural thinkers working within different spaces to propose different Norths globally and locally. Edited by Ainslie Roddick.

Tongues – Rehana Zaman

Since Speaking Nearby, Rehana's 2018 exhibition at CCA, the artist has spent the year compiling a new collection of texts by Aditi Jaganathan, Chandra Frank, Shama Khanna, Gail Lewis, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Marissa Begonia, Louise Shelley and Laura Guy, with a foreword by Ainslie Roddick and afterword by the artist. Launching in early 2019 and edited by PSSS, this new book brings together images of the show and thoughts by the people who have been part of Rehana's collaborative practice. Funded by Goldsmiths University of London, The Elephant Trust, Tenderpixel and CCA Glasgow.

The House That Heals the Soul - Long Tail

In July 2017 CCA hosted an exhibition called The House That Heals the Soul, which focused on the political and social status of libraries and books. The exhibition explored the intrinsic connection between the public gallery space and public library, brought together in the same 19th century UK law giving free access and the same weighting of knowledge between both of these spaces. The exhibition included the work of The Book Lovers, Beatrice Catanzaro, Curandi Katz, Sean Dockray & Benjamin Forster, Emily Jacir, My Bookcase, OOMK, Publication Studio Glasgow, The Serving Library, Temporary Services and Nick Thurston, and also hosted a selection of library and self-publishing resources alongside artworks that looked at various histories of, and approaches towards, the protection and presentation of libraries' collections, infrastructures and their users.

One of the core intentions of this exhibition was to examine how the sharing of knowledge in recognisable social spaces such as the gallery or library, could instigate new forms of behaviour, obligation and trust within different publics. We were interested in how public libraries have become one of the last remaining spaces where people can gather without certain expectations or requirements, and how the future of libraries and their buildings have become increasingly precarious. Aiming to expand an understanding of the potential of libraries as sites of resistance, shelter, preservation, creation and restitution, and to do so in a dynamically public way as a functioning library of libraries, the exhibition was an important stepping stone for CCA to focus our future programme more concisely on three areas: the politics, social function and form of libraries; the forms of knowledge produced in library spaces; and continued exploration in to radical and independent publishing and dissemination of books.

The public programme for the long tail of The House that Heals the Soul includes the founding of a new autonomous Seed Library for Glasgow, a series of workshops and inductions with Publication Studio Glasgow, lectures and visits with other international organisations exploring new economies for publishing as a practice, and the expansion of library spaces, and spaces for reading throughout CCA's building.

Glasgow Seed Library

In May 2019, CCA will launch a new autonomous Seed Library – a mobile seed library resourced and founded by CCA, but produced and activated by the public. Allowing CCA to think about the forms of cultural activity it supports and categorises, the Seed Library will form the basis for a series of talks and events exploring the politics of collecting and collections, also tying in with our ongoing interest in the function of libraries as public spaces. The Seed Library aims to be a permanent project, which intervenes in the programme at different moments.