Identity
2nd June 2021
Ewan Gibbs' book 'Coal Country' claims to be the first full length study of deindustrialisation in the Scottish coalfields. But its scope is actually much broader and much more ambitious in its treatment of an age of massive social upheaval. Johnny Rodger reviews and appreciates that ambition.
19th May 2021
In advance of our own Neighbouring project (15-18 June @ GI), one of our Scottish Japanese collaborators, Naoko Mabon, writes here of the work of Scottish artist Ilana Halperin in Japan. Halperin's mineral investigations open us up to the urgency of our understanding of and identity with the geological in the age of Anthropocene.
9th May 2021
Photographer Nicky Bird's engagement with memory, community, place and legacy is put in artistic and intellectual context by Eszter Biró in a review of Bird's new show at Streetlevel Gallery (until 6th June).
17th April 2021
The fever is high, but public engagement seems, as yet to lag... Scottish politics is running a factionalist temperature from the 'Manky Jaiket' so-called greens to the Alba blues. New parties have appeared suddenly in the fray and schisms, nastiness, invective, small hatreds and big ugly prejudices seem the order of the day. Owen Dudley Edwards attempts a dispassionate round-up, and counsels an end to self-harm.
9th April 2021
Lorna Miller’s incisive work for The Drouth here brilliantly demonstrates how the lightning-fast flare of phantasmagorical developments in Scottish politics at the minute can only be truly grasped and conceived of in its bizarre momentum through a visual medium.
12th March 2021
Expansive and exclusive is the paradoxical mentality of the frontier from Trump's Wall to Offa's Dyke. Can anybody live on a non-existent border, and how have they done it? Owen Dudley Edwards looks deep into a line of no breadth
23rd February 2021
What, if anything, does the end of land, or of territory, have to do with the end of language? Is there ever an end of language, even of a particular speaking? Noah Rose is an artist working on the intersection between place and minority language.
14th January 2021
January 6th, Epiphany in the Christian calendar, is most commonly marked here by the taking down of the pagan midwinter decorations. This year, on the day that gifts were brought from the east for the baby Jesus, some strange kings and magicians visited the home of the American Republic. Owen Dudley Edwards tells us all we need to know, and more, about that 2020 election, and then, the Epiphany at the Capitol.
SUGAR AND SOOT & ALL THINGS MOOT : Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman @ CCA by Johnny Rodger