Three trippy days at Glasgow International

Wednesday

It’s 3pm and I’m with the press at the bar of the CitizenM Glasgow Hotel. Richard Birkett, the director of Glasgow International, is telling us about his vision for this year’s event, the tenth edition of the contemporary art biennial. It’s his first time running GI, previously he was the chief curator of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. This year, he promises, GI will be more international, more collaborative, more willing to confront the past and more responsive to criticism. According to those who know him, these aren’t just words, he really means it.

The first works we see fit this brief: at GOMA, once the city’s colonial-era stock exchange, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien are showing their documentary Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth) covering the aftermath of a 1985 massacre in the city of Escalante, the Philippines. A few minutes’ walk away, Cameron Rowland’s intervention at Ramshorn cemetery (chaining the gates shut without council permission, blocking access to public space and the graves of 18th-century slavers) is poignant and anarchic, but perhaps too subtle. In a country inured to failing services and privatisation, will anyone notice?

We take a taxi to the Southside. In a damp, dilapidated church squeezed between anonymous red brick warehouses and the M8 motorway, curator Mason Leaver-Yap has brought together two works concerned with health, knowledge and its preservation: Ima-Abasin Okon’s dried and vacuum-packed oxtail soup, plus the council health certificates to prove it’s edible, and a film by Alexis Kyle Mitchell, whose family suffer from myotonic dystrophy, a rare degenerative genetic disease that intensifies with each generation. Mitchell’s 16mm film, developed in a mixture of bodily fluids and MDMA, mirrors her relatives’ bodies, falling apart as it progresses. Mason tells us that almost everyone on screen is already dead. It’s a sobering thought.

We wind down at Florence Street School, a new ‘creative hub’ in the Gorbals, where the GI artists are gathering for cocktails. I get talking to a number of them about living and working in Glasgow, they include filmmakers Bobbi Cameron and Owain Train McGilvary whose work I’d seen downstairs. The pair paint a picture of something like ‘British Berlin’ – cheap and sexy – a city with prestigious art schools, a small and connected social scene and a distinct lack of commercial interest in either property (low rents, cheap gallery spaces) and in art (no commercial pressure to sell out). However, things are changing. The pandemic pushed many people out, landlords are moving in and culture funds are being cut. A generational gap is opening up… I want to stay and hear more, but I have a dinner reservation. They ask if I’ll be at the GI launch party tomorrow? Of course.

Thursday

Govanhill is a residential neighbourhood in the Southside that in recent years has become the go-to place for artists to call home. You have the usual: vape shops, charity shops, Asian bakeries, pubs and evangelical churches, and then you have an unusually high number of artist-run spaces. Rosie’s Disobedient Press, run by Adrien Howard and Lisette May Monroe, is one of them. I’d met Lisette at last night’s drinks, and today we catch up. She tells me they’re conscious about where they are and what they’re doing. She talks about contributing to a growing circular economy: commissioning unpublished writers, hiring and spending within the same postcode where possible, holding regular advice surgeries to help with form-filling, grant-writing, finances and advice – the works.

Next up, it’s one of the latest to open in the area: cinema / exhibition space Offline. Co-director Lydia Honeybone tells me that they got a good deal on the rent because the former shop space used to be a grow house. “Bad for the landlord, good for us!” It’s easy to see why this could be a controversial move. Lydia stresses that Offline is paying particular attention to the local community with low ticket prices and diverse programming. A third of Govanhill residents come from minority ethnic backgrounds. Their screening of Mina Heydari-Waite’s semi-fictional journey through Iran, Farang / فرنگ, is just one way of widening the appeal.

At the other end of the road, up three flights of stairs, is apartment-gallery Celine. Co-director Adam Jacob takes us around their show of Sarah Cameron’s new photography and paintings. He asks if we’ll be about this Friday –that, he says, is when the real party begins. The nine or so galleries in spitting distance stagger their openings and people hop from space to space and gather together to carry on the night. I like the idea. I like it a lot, but unfortunately I won’t be here.

We leave for Tramway, the largest arts venue in the area. It’s not artist-run, but it has an independent spirit. A poster near the entrance announces, “This Glasgow International Artist Supports Palestinian Liberation.” Glasgow Life, the quango that oversees the city’s cultural events and venues, including Tramway, has banned any statements on Palestine. Now, they’re facing a coordinated, popular petition campaign. Almost every venue features one of these posters. Tramway evidently isn’t afraid to bite the hand that feeds. But that would be a whole other article.

I take a welcome break to walk around Turner Prize 2024 nominee Delaine le Bas’ installation and sat through Tako Taal’s play After Kintei (a good performance, the script could be tightened up) but I kept returning to Camara Taylor’s exhibition revealing the “fugitive undercurrent” of Black people in Scotland: the cloud of rum kicked out by the dark rum fountain is figuratively, literally intoxicating. The steel lecterns made by the Slaghammers feminist welding collective echo the old tram tracks still embedded in the gallery floor.

Back to central. King Street car park is a pockmarked gravel wasteland. Somewhere around here is a short-range radio transmitter broadcasting sound work made by Susan Philipsz in collaboration with students from Glasgow and Dresden. The individual works draw on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus and recordings of pulsars. We jump into the shitty Opel Corsa of one of the Dresden students to listen in. Clicks, whines, snatched conversations. It’s almost meditative.

Later that night, more noise. We’re at SWG3, a music venue to the west of the city, listening to Lawrence Abu Hamdan deliver an outstanding spoken word performance reeling off facts and figures about the Israeli airforce’s frequent incursions into Lebanese airspace, $400B of real estate, as Hamdan calls it, ideal for testing military hardware – drones, helicopters, fighter jets – with the added benefit that high decibel sound pollution can raise heart rates, damage ears and generally fuck with you. Throughout the talk, Hamdan is periodically drowned out by the recordings of roaring jets. It’s only when I leave that I realise how tensely I’ve held myself. We were there for an hour, imagine a lifetime.

Dinner, then out again. The official GI launch party at the Centre for Contemporary Arts; the city’s entire art scene under one roof. I park myself on the balcony above the atrium and soak up the atmosphere. A few familiar faces from the past couple of days pass by me. I get a Tennent’s lager from the bar and we head out to the smoking area. If there’s anywhere people feel free to speak their minds, it’s here. The only way to maintain that momentum is to talk off the record. I get some vital intel about the art scene and the issues facing it. What I can say is that it’s the same old story: funding, generational conflict, rising rents. Is nowhere safe?

At around 2 am some kind of clown performance takes over the downstairs dancefloor. Nobody can get to the bar, nobody can get to the stage. A wasted girl chants alone, “START THE MUSIC!” I agree, so does the band, who start up and drown out the clowns. However, the vibe shift is irrevocable. The party’s supposed to go on til 3 am, yet the crowd is already filtering out. I weigh up my options and I decide to call it a night.

Friday

My last day, I’m leaving around lunchtime. No headache, no regrets. A coffee and then out east to another industrial estate to visit David Dale Gallery. On the way, the taxi driver tells us about his collection of diecast lorries blu-tacked to the dashboard. Truly, there is an artist in all of us. David Dale is one of those artist-run spaces that straddles the categories of studios, gallery, bar and event space. It takes its name from the building’s previous occupant, David Dale Technical College (the gallery still has the college’s original tiled hallway). Here, Minne Kersten has installed part of a film set: outside it’s bare pine, inside it’s an exact replica of an ageing attic. A note: there seems to be a trend for installations mimicking domestic spaces, but I appreciated the second layer of fantasy in this one. Across the courtyard, siblings Florence and Jacob Dwyer have collaborated on a temple-like installation of Florence’s folksy ceramic firebacks hung up like icons and Jacob’s audio drama titled ‘Tom’s House’.

The rest of the morning is a blur. My head stops spinning only when I arrive at 42 Carlton Place. Calm space with smooth white walls and light wooden floors, it’s how I imagine a high-end rehab centre looks. This gallery wasn’t on the schedule, but I couldn’t miss it. You shouldn’t either. It’s currently showing works by David Byrd, a trained artist who spent his life entirely outside of the gallery system, working variously as a janitor, cinema usher and delivery man. For 30 years, he was an orderly on the psychiatric ward of a veterans’ hospital. You see it in his subjects but also in his neatly ordered composition and delicate, soothing palette. It’s strangely contemporary.

One more venue, and then as suddenly as everything started, it ends. We hit the bricks and wander around the Barras, the rambling collection of warehouses and markets at the east end of the city. Three days in Glasgow, 33 venues, it’s been a trip.