CLOSED - France-Lise McGurn: In Emotia
Due to government advice on Corona Virus, Glasgow Life has taken the difficult decision to suspend all services and Tramway is now closed. We expect the suspension to continue until the end of April.
Read the latest information from Glasgow Life>
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France-Lise McGurn (born 1983) is a Glasgow-based artist who predominantly works with painting to create layered installations that incorporate the gallery walls, floors and ceilings.
'In Emotia' is a derivative term which suggests a state of being, simultaneously emotional and in motion. Mcgurn’s figurative painting and wall drawings evoke bodies and limbs overlapping and interacting in ambivalent spaces, at parties, in night clubs, on streets or lying in bed either side of paper thin walls. Cities and bodies, are constantly moving and shaping each other, a sentiment which McGurn evokes through the shifting forms and gestures of her metropolitan figures. Often the works themselves overlap from canvas to wall to floor, creating energetic compositions which suggest intimacy, ecstasy, sexuality, violence and loss.
Working intuitively rather than through direct appropriation, McGurn uses swift brushstrokes and repeated marks to create loose associations about place and relationships, inviting viewers to conjure their own narratives. For Tramway, McGurn takes this process one step further, translating the fluid lines of her paintings into sculptural forms fabricated from neon. A series of new mobile sculptures will shimmer and turn in the space, constantly rearranging themselves to create new narratives and configurations.
Her work has been featured in Art Now at Tate Britain, Extensa Suite, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, 2018, Virginia Woolf, an exhibition inspired by her writings 2017–18, Tate St Ives, Pallant House, Chichester, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. France-Lise McGurn is represented by Simon lee gallery.
This exhibition is generously supported Simon Lee Gallery
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Image: Easy Emotia, (detail), 2019. Courtesy the artist.
Glasgow International: Jenkin Van Zyl - In Vitro
*PLEASE NOTE* This exhibition is POSTPONED
Glasgow International has announced the postponement of its 2020 programme in response to the impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19), and following the advice from the Scottish Government. They are working hard on a plan to restage a festival in 2021.
Read their full statement on the GI Festival website>
We arrive into a chamber of cake ‘heads’ – grotesque mask-like baked goods in fridges – and thus begins a journey into the witty and bacchanalian world of Jenkin van Zyl. Taking on the dungeon-like qualities of Tramway’s T4 Theatre, the artist creates an immersive installation comprising both sculpture and video, inviting viewers into a scenario involving, amongst other things, airplane fuselage to impress a sense of claustrophobia, sexual ecstasy, hysteria and ‘folk horror’.
At the heart of the installation is a new film which introduces us to characters enacting looped rituals of reproduction and self-pollination in an effort to achieve community, individuation and re-enchantment. The work seeks to indulge in but also problematise the spectacle of transgression. Pulling together at once pleasure, pain and hope, van Zyl uses camp and humour to subvert societal expectations, and imagine what abundance and joy could mean outside the cycles of physical reproduction and consumption. For the artist ‘the hope of pretending is that, with enough time and practise, the performance becomes you’.
Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
Image: Jenkin van Zyl, In Vitro production still (2020)
Glasgow International: Bodys Isek Kingelez
*PLEASE NOTE* Glasgow International has announced the postponement of its 2020 programme in response to the impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19), and following the advice from the Scottish Government. They are working hard on a plan to restage a festival in 2021.
Read their full statement on the GI Festival website>
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Based in then-Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948 – 2015) was a Congolese sculptor and visionary artist who created sculptures of imagined buildings and cityscapes that propose fantastical, utopian models for a more harmonious future society. Working in a period of socio-political shifts, Kingelez responded to an urgent need to transform urban reality.
From the late 1970s until 1985 Kingelez worked as a self-taught art restorer at the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaïre, which gave him access to supplies and materials, and a base to refine his practice. He created works from a variety of everyday and found materials such as coloured paper, cardboard, plastic and tape, meticulously repurposed in order to radically rethink the world around him.
Shown for the first time in a UK solo exhibition, Kingelez’s ‘extreme maquettes’ are vibrant, ambitious and highly detailed sculptures. These inventive works raise questions around difficult issues of urban planning, economic inequity, nationhood and national identity – resonating profoundly within today’s contemporary societies – while remaining innately infused with potential.
Kingelez’s work was first included in the ground-breaking 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and has most recently been exhibited in the first large-scale solo presentation of his work, City Dreams (2018-2019) at MoMA, New York.
This exhibition is part of the Director’s Programme for Glasgow International, Scotland’s largest festival for contemporary art.
Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
Image: Bodys Isek Kingelez, Kimbembele Ihunga (1992) Courtesy of The Museum of Everything
Glasgow International: Georgina Starr - Quarantaine
*PLEASE NOTE* this exhibition is POSTPONED.
Glasgow International has announced the postponement of its 2020 programme in response to the impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19), and following the advice from the Scottish Government. They are working hard on a plan to restage a festival in 2021.
Read their full statement on the GI Festival website>
Quarantaine is an ambitious new film by Georgina Starr. Its title refers to the French word for ‘forty’, and also alludes to the period of enforced isolation known in English as ‘quarantine’ (so-called because of its original forty-day timeframe). Over the course of multiple chapters, it follows the story of two new recruits to a clandestine sisterhood whose pursuit of esoteric knowledge takes place in a secret place of instruction, similarly cut off from the world outside.
Contrasting what seems like a cult-like focus on strict supervision and mind-control with other more unruly rituals of mind expansion and extrasensory perception, Quarantaine continues Starr’s preoccupation with the otherworldly and the occult, and her longstanding interests in the visionary aspects of experimental cinema, to further her exploration of the hidden recesses of the creative imagination.
Co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery and Glasgow International with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums. This programme is made possible thanks to Thomas Dane Gallery and a group of private galleries and individuals.
This exhibition is part of the Director’s Programme for Glasgow International, Scotland’s largest festival for contemporary art.
Image: Quarantaine (2020), by Georgina Starr. Courtesy the artist, FVU, Art Fund, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery and Glasgow International.
Glasgow International: Martine Syms - S1:E4
*PLEASE NOTE* Glasgow International has announced the postponement of its 2020 programme in response to the impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19), and following the advice from the Scottish Government. They are working hard on a plan to restage a festival in 2021.
Read their full statement on the GI Festival website>
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S1:E4 is a new episode in Martine Syms’ project SHE MAD (2015-ongoing), in which the artist incorporates elements of the sitcom format and past TV series to explore ‘the sign of blackness in the public imagination’. Presented in the form of a giant widescreen projection encompassing one wall of Tramway’s largest gallery, the work follows the character of Martine, described as an ‘overachieving, stoner graphic designer who lives in Hollywood and wishes she were an important artist’.
In this iteration the focus is on a ‘micro-aggression’ at a client’s party, triggering a flashback to the summer of 2000, when Martine was a camper at T-Zone, a week-long empowerment programme for teenage girls founded by a supermodel and business mogul.
Co-curated and co-commissioned by Glasgow International and Tramway
Supported by Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York, Sadie Coles HQ, London and The Henry Moore Foundation
This exhibition is part of the Director’s Programme for Glasgow International, Scotland’s largest festival for contemporary art.
Image: Untitled (2019), Photo: Tyler Adams
Lucy and Molly Suggate: Is it Too Hard to Be (A) Human?
Presented by Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance
Part of Molly & Lucy: The Companion Series
See also The Moody Blues (Greyhound & Dancer), 16 May>
'I have noticed a type of energy, possibly power emerge when I dance. Maybe it's a spirit, or a non-human force that is encouraging me to fall deep a kind of extreme physicality, to overthrow time, grace and logic. In this altered-nation of dance I am offered a glimpse of other ways of being and ways to re-negotiate my very human relationship with power, ambition and responsibility.'
Lucy Suggate
Molly & Lucy are creating a performance-lecture that seeks to find connections between the sprawling mass of information, theory, instinct & obscurity.
This event includes a live dog (greyhound)
Recommended for ages 14+
ACCESS info TBC
Nic Green: Absolutely, Awesome, Affirmative
A National Theatre of Scotland production at Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance
World Premiere
Step into a world of constant self-refinement. Two performers engage in a continuous verbal scuffle, bringing streams of empty promises into a gradually saturated space. Filled with voices and bodies, everything slowly crumbles into a non-place, stripped of meaning, of truth.
Absolutely, Affirmative, Awesome is a radical new project from Nic Green, exploring how we believe – in fact, in nature, in truth, and in ourselves – and how that belief can be targeted, twisted, and shaped into whatever we want it to be. Part TED talk, part shopping channel special, part showbiz hypnotism, the stage becomes a post-truth world of opulent theatricality, visual flair, and driving soundscapes.
In a world drowning in a flow of news, expert opinions, and more-or-less believable facts, is there any real meaning left? Or does everything stand completely void, lone symbols of the things they once signified?
Age guidance: 16+
TICKET DEAL
See this show and Dana Michel's Cutlass Spring on 15 May with a discounted double bill ticket for £25/£18. Book here>
See this show and Dana Michel's Mercurial George on 16 May with a discounted double bill ticket for £25/£18. Book here>
Dana Michel: Cutlass Spring
Presented by Tramway with Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance
The first of two audacious and original works from the Montreal-based choreographer and live artist as part of the festival. Interacting with improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary, Michel's work has earned international attention and prestigious awards.
See also Dana Michel: Mercurial George (16 May)>
Buy one ticket to see this and Nic Green's Absolutely, Awesome, Affirmative on the same night, for a discount price of £25/£18>
'She is not present in their pornography. She is not found in their eroticisms.
She is not even a part of her own fantasy world.
CUTLASS SPRING is what sex might mean to me right now.
I will roam inside a question : How might I locate my sexual identity within a multitude of complimentary and seemingly contradictory identities – as a performer, as a mother, as a daughter, as a lover, as a stranger? I will map a sexual education – with all of its embodiments, fabrications, and disassociations. I will follow these trajectories toward their softest core so as to discover what I hold back and what I make explicit.
She will solicit her body and all of the many things that go with her person. She will realize what remains within her for sexual contemplation.
Inching towards uncensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire.'
Dana Michel & Michael Nardone
ACCESS: This work is highly
visual with ambient sound.
Recommended for ages 18+
Lucy and Molly Suggate: The Moody Blues (Greyhound & Dancer)
Presented by Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance
Part of Molly & Lucy: The Companion Series - see also Is It Too Hard to Be (A) Human, 15 May>
LIVE INSTALLATION
A soft, padded space, a giant dog bed, a space for reclining, listening and embodying stillness.
This installation will be a meditation on companion species, kinships, parenthoods; on tired hopeless bodies, on exhaustion…….extinction. The public are invited to join, witness Molly & Lucy in their daily practice of being and reclining together. Molly is an ex racing greyhound aged 6; originally from Ireland, Lucy is a dance artist aged 42; originally from Yorkshire. Both bodies have endured extreme physical pressure, sometimes out of choice, nature, addiction and/or survival.
This is a durational installation: Come and go as you wish.
This event includes a live dog (greyhound)
Recommended for ages 14+
Dana Michel: Mercurial George
Presented by Tramway with Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s festival of contemporary international performance
The second of two audacious and original works from the Montreal-based choreographer and live artist as part of the festival. Interacting with improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary, Michel's work has earned international attention and prestigious awards.
See also Dana Michel: Cutlass Spring (16 May).
Buy one ticket to see this and Nic Green's Absolutely, Awesome, Affirmative on the same night, for a discount price of £25/£18>
In the wake of the acclaimed Yellow Towel, Mercurial George traces and transforms the banal, provoking a certain malaise. Sifting through the heaps of dusty clues leftover in the wake of initializing a cultural excavation, Dana Michel offers a destabilizing solo. The body vacillates as it struggles for balance and a toehold. Stretching out time with minimalist and deconstructed movement, Michel becomes the archaeologist of her own persona.
“I only just got a bit of dirt under the nails with the last thing. Now wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig. So much debris! I couldn’t have predicted how much debris there would be and how much work I had created for myself in waking this beast. But they needed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and sniffing its scent. What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body? This is another science experiment. This is another ground on which to test skins that belong to me, outfits and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” Dana Michel
Recommended for ages 18+
Access: This work is highly visual with ambient sound.