Identity
6th August 2025
Scotland's greatest living Irish Historian on an Irish publication of Scottish writers on the state of Scotland. Owen Dudley Edwards casts a critical eye over the recently published Irish Pages Scotland issue.
4th April 2025
A meditation on time in architecture by philosopher and architect Mark Rego. In this piece Rego examines the apparently paradoxical union in an art museum of a painter who rejected time, and an architect 'whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.' Alvaro Siza's Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Chaves, Portugal to house the works of Nadir Afonso.
12th January 2025
It sometimes seems that never enough has been made of Scotland's presence - the Scottish Pavilion - at the Venice Biennale. The 2023 architecture exhibition (- hopefully not the last Scottish one ever, as 2024 was cancelled) was an exploration of the connection between architecture and language on a traumatised land. A Fragile Correspondence was curated by Architecture Fringe, -ism Magazine and /other, and is now showing at the V&A in Dundee. Johnny Rodger reviews.
13th December 2024
Scottish artist Maud Sulter (1960-2008) worked in multi-media as a photographer, filmmaker, poet, playwright and visual artist. Born of Scottish and Ghanaian parentage, she was raised in the Gorbals in Glasgow by her Scottish mother, and much of her work - including that now on show at the Tramway - is an exploration of of her sexuality, gender and identity as a black woman. Federica Giardino reviews the show and ponders on the cultural richness and the 'poignant questions' her work highlights.
29th October 2024
Since their first gig two years ago, Glasgow band The Tenementals have played solidly round the city and elsewhere to full houses and released several singles. With a line up of eight musicians, and sometimes more, they sing the history of Glasgow into being and conjure up the glories and the disasters, and the pride and the shame of it before the citizens. Norry Wilson of Lost Glasgow will introduce them on stage at the launch of the first album in Oran Mor on Wednesday 27th November. Here he tells us why he is delighted to present them on the occasion of the release of their first major recording. (plus free track!)
9th May 2023
Scotland's foremost Irish historian and Ireland's finest Jockstorian, Owen Dudley Edwards, finds a textless chronicle of the farcical and chaotic politics of Jockland in the 2020s. It's to be sung swiftly, though it's no song of Solomon. The rulers from Laputa assume they have (in the jargon of the period) 'taken back control', but none of them can actually determine where Jockland is, or if it even exists ...
29th March 2023
Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.
31st January 2023
From the sophistry of the Saorstat to the solecism of Saor Alba - what, if any, are the parallels between Irish Revolutionary relations with the UK, and the relations between the current crop of Scottish and UK politicians? Owen Dudley Edwards addresses an independent question.
TENDING AN OLIVE TREE by Michael Mersinis