Glasgow International 2014: Art and the City

Since 2005, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art has been carving out a reputation as one of the leading art festivals in the UK. In fact, according to no less an authority than the Guardian’s Adrian Searle, it is the leading UK festival – “Forget Edinburgh, forget Liverpool: this is the one,” he wrote, and GI smartly put it on their branding. This places the festival in the upper echelons of the international art world which, given the miraculous success of Glasgow-based and educated artists in the last two decades, is exactly where it should be.

2014 marks its sixth outing, its second in its biennial format, and its first under the leadership of new director Sarah McCrory, who is inheriting the role from the Common Guild's Katrina Brown, and will have a two-festival tenure, curating this and the 2016 edition. A 19-day extravaganza featuring 52 exhibitions, 90 events, 155 artists and 24 different nationalities, GI has an expanse and range that belies its relatively tight budget. The 2012 edition brought with it Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, aka the Stonehenge bouncy castle that popped up on Glasgow Green and brought new meaning to the term audience engagement. It inflated (ahahaha) the visitor numbers for the festival to record breaking levels in what McCrory describes as “The Deller Effect,” magically mixing the cerebral and the joyful to convert a slew of new art lovers wherever he may appear.

The statistics may well be intimidating, but McCrory remains unfazed. Having previously steered the programming of Frieze Projects, the not-for-profit creative arm of the Frieze Art Fair, and London’s Studio Voltaire, she has experience across the artistic board, from time-based exhibitions, through art fairs, education, all the way to the more commercial arm of visual arts. She was inspired to keep on the festival programming treadmill after Frieze by an affection and respect for Glasgow International. “People love GI," she explains. "[The visiting audience] comes to see new exhibitions, new and established Scottish artists, Scotland-based artists but you can’t really deny that it’s also a really good fun city. People come for GI and have a really good time.”

In terms of the evolution of the festival programme itself, McCrory has been careful to draw inspiration from local sources while ensuring that it lives up to its titular brief, representing both the city and the international art world, drawing in global influences and exposing the native creative spaces. “The starting point for me for Glasgow International is the city itself. Every city’s got an incredible history but I think Glasgow specifically, with all the different histories that make up this one relatively small city that has this huge artistic community, is very interesting. I’m particularly seduced by all these old buildings, some of which are available, some of which we’re trying to get access to. That’s exciting as a prospect because it feels like a sort of blank canvas of potential spaces that you can produce exciting things in.”

It’s no easy task to get these spaces open, however. “It’s about trying to change the outlook of people who hold the keys and try and work with them to show that there are benefits.” An example of a venue that has done just that is the Govanhill Baths, home to a diverse programme of events and exhibitions, opening again this GI with a show by Anthea Hamilton and Nick Byrne, previously installed at Poplar Baths in London, that will feature inflatable sculptures specifically made to be shown in a swimming pool. McCrory sees the old pool as an examplar of a grassroots success.“Govanhill Baths is currently used by the local community as a theatre venue and a community centre; it just goes to show that if a community are given back a space and allowed to run it, that it can become a really interesting thing. Across the whole of the country there’s this situation where community centres and spaces where people would usually meet and hang out, like libraries, are being closed by the dozen. And actually, if people are given the space back and given a little bit of funding or support where they need it they can – they shouldn’t have to, but they can – reopen and revitalise an area through someone having a bit of faith in them.”

Another building being prised open for the festival is the McLellan Galleries, the vast Sauchiehall St exhibition space that has been languishing disused for years. “The building is incredible. We have four solo exhibitions in there; not only are we delivering what I hope are really interesting exhibitions but we’re also allowing people who live in the city to come into a building that they don’t often have access to.” Showing in the McLellan will be a mini survey of Jordan Wolfson’s video work (accompanied by screenings of his inspirations in the Glasgow Film Theatre); painter Avery Singer; a posthumous retrospective of São Paolo’s Hudinilson Jr, exploring queer issues and sexuality; and Glasgow’s Charlotte Prodger, who displayed in CCA during the last installment of GI and returns with a show marking the next phase of her practice and a neat line of communication with the festival’s heritage.

The programme continues in all the more orthodox exhibiting spaces. In Tramway, Bedwyr Williams occupies the vast hanger space with one of his weird, immersive installations featuring a new film depicting a dystopian vision of a consumption-obsessed future. CCA present a retrospective of Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, with painting, installation and conceptual work. In the Gallery of Modern Art, a first UK institutional solo show for Aleksandra Domanovic who examines gender and science fiction, exploring the intersection of (wo)man and machine. In the Modern Institute, New York-based photographer Anne Collier displays the fruits of her continued investigation into perception and representation. In the collateral events, a partnership with the BBC offers up a strand of arts films and documentaries, expanding the explanatory offering and broadening the potential audiences outwith the already engaged art world. A variety of tours will run, led by curators, GI staff and even art students, given the chance to tell their own stories and offer their interpretations of the city's exhibitions. And across the city, in multiple locations, established and early career Glasgow artists will show their wares in solo and group shows, performances, events, talks and screenings.

It’s clear that 2014 is just step one of the process of opening up the city to host art in forgotten places. Looking ahead to the next instalment, the festival have recruited a crack team to map the spaces that could allow the 2016 programme to be even more expansive. McCrory elaborates, “We’ve been working with Tom Emerson from 6A architects. He’s bringing over about 50 student architects from Zurich to work on a project which is going to map Glasgow. They’re going to map the redundant spaces and pick up threads of different kinds of geographies and topographies of the city. In the future we’ll sit down and try and work out what can be done with those spaces – can we access them, can we use them, what is a good way of using them. There’s loads of potential in Glasgow.”