VISUAL ART | Previews
MIXED MEDIA SAHEJ RAHAL: BARRICADIA CCA, Glasgow, Sat 16 Sep–Sun 29 Oct
There is a rich tradition of artists who invent whole new worlds in which to explore their ideas. This summer, Mumbai-born Sahej Rahal has spent eight weeks at Cove Park, the artist residency centre in Argyll, creating a body of new work for Glasgow’s CCA about the country of Barricadia.
Flotsam and jetsam picked up in Scotland will come together with mythology and science fiction to create the artefacts and histories of this invented land. Rahal’s practice combines performance, film, installation and sculpture, and also references contemporary political events in his native India, such as the peaceful protests which followed a recent spate of Islamophobic lynchings.
Rahal, who was born in Mumbai in 1988, is one of India’s most
interesting young contemporary artists, and was selected to make work for the Liverpool Biennial last year. This will be his first show in Scotland, and it will also include remade versions of previous works and a film, ‘Dry Salvages’, first shown in Nottingham earlier this year.
CCA curator Ainslie Roddick believes Rahal’s work will chime with
many of his Glasgow-based contemporaries. ‘I think his work here will speak to practitioners working in the city who think through materials and sculptural practice,’ says Roddick. ‘It will also raise important questions about the worlds we all create for ourselves in uncertain times. Sahej is a prolific thinker and maker and it’s been a great process working through the sculptural works and performative actions together.’
With a broad frame of references stretching from Star Wars to Jorge Luis Borges, his imagined world promises to be unique. Rahal says: ‘Barricadia emerges, fragmented across borders and histories. It is a temporal, autonomous, organic place. It is built and undone each day, and each night it is rebuilt upon the masonry of hope, held steadfast across lands, across ages, against the dire winds of hate.’ (Susan Mansfield)
PHOTOGRAPHY ROBIN GILLANDERS Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 28 Oct–Sun 14 Jan
Robin Gillanders, one of the foremost photographic artists working in Scotland, will be the subject of a major exhibition this autumn at Stills in Edinburgh. Beginning with portraits of Scottish writers, artists and public figures made in the 1980s, the show will celebrate three decades of work, finishing with a new hot-off-the-press series of portraits of women in the arts today.
The exhibition will include work Gillanders made in collaboration with Ian Hamilton Finlay in the 1990s and early 2000s, and will exhibit for the first time a series of photographs taken in Hamilton Finlay’s cottage, Stonypath, in 2009, three years after his death. Other bodies of work represented in the show include ‘Ten Men’, a series of portraits made for Street Level Photoworks in 2012 to mark Gillanders’ 60th birthday, and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, a series of still lives made in response to philosopher Roland Barthes.
Gillanders, who taught photography at Napier University from 1988–2012 said: ‘I’ve exhibited nationally and internationally and published four or five books, but this is the biggest and most comprehensive show I’ve ever done. To see representation from various projects in one place is very exciting.’ (Susan Mansfield)
90 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2017
INSTALLATION KELLY RICHARDSON: THE WEATHER MAKERS DCA, Dundee, Sat 23 Sep–Sun 26 Nov COUNTER-CINEMA LAURA MULVEY AND PETER WOLLEN Cooper Gallery, Dundee, Fri 29 Sep–Sat 7 Oct
Canadian artist Kelly Richardson’s environmental films show fantastical large-scale scenes which have been digitally manipulated to display an imagined future environment. ‘She’s been making these spectacular works for many years now,’ says DCA’s head of exhibitions Eoin Dara. ‘The questions Kelly is asking in her immersive installations about the ways in which we’re mistreating the world around us are more pertinent than ever.’
This exhibition will feature three large video installations alongside a new suite of prints by Richardson that are currently in production. ‘We’re presenting the show’s most expansive installation in partnership with NEoN Digital Arts Festival,’ says Dara. ‘It’s called ‘Mariner 9’, and it’s a 12-metre-long panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years in the future. We’ll also be showing two further multi-screen film works called ‘Orion Tide’ and ‘Leviathan’, which draw on histories of landscape painting, wildlife cinematography, science fiction and apocalyptic cinema, and the C-print series ‘Pillars of Dawn’, which show a crystallised future landscape where flora and fauna have been transformed by unknown environmental catastrophes.’ (David Pollock)
In December 2016, Laura Mulvey gave a keynote address at the Cooper Gallery as part of the 12hr Action Group symposium, the culmination to the gallery’s sprawl through feminist art since the 1970s. This September, the veteran feminist film theorist, who first introduced the notion of the male gaze to cinematic critique, returns to Dundee with her partner in art and life, Peter Wollen, for a series of screenings of some of the key films they made together. Urgency and Possibility: Counter-Cinema in
the 70s and 80s will show five films, dating from Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, made in 1974, through to 1982’s Crystal Amazons. Like them, 1977’s Riddles of the Sphinx is feature length, while the shorter Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1981) will also be screened. The season will open with a screening of the pair’s 1980 film, AMY!, preceded by a talk by Mulvey. Only the pair’s final outing, The Bad Sister, (1982) will not be seen in a canon that taps into patriarchal myths, male fantasy and sub- Godardian disruptions of narrative. With a new wave of radical thought rising up as a
counterblast to reactionary global forces, Mulvey and Wollen’s back-catalogue look like key touchstones for possible futures yet to be written. (Neil Cooper)