Glasgow International 2016

Glasgow feels more like the wild west than Edinburgh, a wee bit more chaotic, more homeless folk on Argyll Street and around the station, more 'real life' around the centre. A good place for 'real art' then? Art that is tapped in to all this unpredictable energy, the legacy of an industrial past? 

The Glasgow International 2016 is Sarah McCrory’s curated programme, this year loosely themed around the ‘legacy of industry and the relationship artists have to making, production and craft’. Fittingly the class met up at GoMA, that elegant neoclassical building from 1778, once the townhouse for one of the city's unscrupulous tobacco lords. 

I'd already popped into a couple of the venues on the GI 2016 map. At the Briggait down by the Clyde Jack Mooney's  'Who are you and what do you want?' used luridly coloured plastic models of cake, double-headed beasts and other food of religious ritual in his work about 'the various ways in which various cultures celebrate, memorialise and represent death.' Deliberately grotesque - not the best thing before breakfast.. Other early morning memorables were Mari Hokkanen's 'Set & Settings' at the Street Level Photoworks. Her photographs are brightly coloured staged self-portraits that also play with the grotesque and the tacky, but in a much more tongue-in-cheek way than Rachel MacLean. In the next room I was attracted by Catrine Val's very different staged self-portraits within landscapes, telling the stories of forgotten female philosophers and their works. Nicholas Parry's mezzotint and mural show at the Glasgow Print Studio was a highlight; his finely-crafted intimate prints zinged against walls painted with graffiti-like marks and shapes in greys and whites. I loved the interplay of serious  print art (mezzotint is hard work!) and fun. Parry was once a graffiti artist.

Unexpectedly, after all this, GoMA itself felt a little flat. I simply couldn't get Cosima von Bonin's white plastic blow up and massive shag pile toys on any level, and I couldn't connect them with 'Who's exploiting Who in the deep sea'. But Tessa Lynch's installation about a city commute was a good collection of visual fragments, including woven brick wall and pinkish pavement slabs, of what appeared to have been a rather dull train ride. For me it really evoked the boredom and mental disconnect of the daily commute. 

It was a mad dash around the city for the rest of the two days. There was so much going on! While there was the usual mix of super clever, surreal and just plain obscure, there were some real stand outs. Monika Sosnowska, a Polish artist growing up in the post-Communist era, and observing the destruction of Communist architectural edifices, had work at the Modern Institute. The main piece was a huge tangle of black metal - bedstead or barbed wire? - occupying much of a large white space. The distortions and bends in the metal were startlingly beautiful, reminiscent of liquid reflections, belying their true solidity. I was struck by the eloquence of the piece - there seemed to be so many layers of emotional content. 

At the CCA Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist, had a review of her work to date, with 10 videos of different social art and performance projects. She 'works with video documenting experimental performances that challenge silently agreed rules within particular communities of people'.  Although these were all thought-provoking, I remember most clearly the work 'Lost Pigeons', hundreds of posters with individually drawn, subtly different lost pigeons based on information from pigeon fanciers in Ghent. The piece is meant to 'offer insight into the economy of the pigeon sport.', but for me, and for many, I'm sure, it was a poignant reminder of all those 'lost' human lives in the urban jungle - some of whom I'd had just seen begging by Queen Street station...

Nearby in the Reid Building Serena Korda et al. had an eclectic installation 'Hold Fast, Stand Sure, I Scream a Revolution', resulting from a residency with Glasgow and Mull that links the feminist history of Garnethill with 'thin places' between worlds on Mull, and the role of psychedelic mushrooms in accessing those thin places. As a centrepiece to the exhibition the artist has created a field of porcelain mushrooms that can be played as bell, and has collaborated with sound designer Martin Low to work with a range of local people to perform with the bells at the exhibition preview. There appeared to have have been a strong element of social engagement in this work, which was not, of course, fully documented in the gallery space. 

In the end it was the Tramway south of the river that was the centrepiece of GI 2016. In a darkened space a beautifully-shot film by Amie Siegal, 'Provenance', charted the life of pieces of 'vintage' modernist furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh, with its gradually eroding Le Corbusier architecture. The use of light, space, natural and human sound (and silence) throughout the piece, created for me something that was bigger and more expressive than its immediate socially-charged subject matter.

Martin Boyce had designed the space in the main gallery to accommodate the work of four artists. Laurence Lek's video installation QE3, using 'digital fabrication to construct a reimagining of the final voyage of the QE2…as it is converted by an anonymous Glaswegian artist into a new home for the Glasgow School of Art', was fun and clever in its technical mastery, but perhaps a slightly literal interpretation of the brief. Mika Rottenburg's deliberately dark and repulsive films about the inequities of world manufacture and trade explored the cultured pearl-making process through a female character whose nose grows, similar to the pearls, as the result of an induced an allergic reaction (Nonoseknows). 'Squeeze' about global outsourcing, includes a memorable image of a fat woman being squeezed in the same way that the blubbery white latex in a Kerala rubber plant is being processed. I couldn't watch too long as I was feart of being put off my lunch!

Sheila Hicks, the veteran textile artist (b.1934), had a monumental piece 'Mighty Mathilde and her Consort', composed of bags of brightly coloured textile fibres, recalling Glasgow's textile history and trade with the far East. That was eye-catching and truly physical. The textile piece I was most drawn to was Trolley I and Trolley II by Alexandra Bircken. These two frames of scaffolding on tramway wheels held woven pieces, recalling Glasgow's maritime industrial past. I loved the way the pieces worked in the space - solid and translucent, tough and fragile, creating textures and perspectives...  All in all, a really rewarding visit to the GI 2016.