Was the Second City of Empire the First City of the carbon economy? Ewan Gibbs takes a tour through history and across civic space to show us the special sites of interest in 'Glasgow's role in the making of a fossil burning world'
How is the Anthropocene at sea/local level? And how can climate change be be felt, and dealt with through the time worn understandings and handlings of material in the oceanic zones? Reviewing Saoirse Higgins' show PapØycene at the Pier in Stromness, Antonia Thomas suggests that art and artists can open us to new perspectives - and that Higgins, in particular, sets a 'benchmark' here.
Are some places more obviously adaptable and amenable to new environmental measures and regimes, and what are the economics and politics of some of the new necessities? Guest Editor for our Climate theme, Dominic Hinde, surfs the local modern to sample the global drift.
Chris Leslie has spent 25 years documenting Sarajevo. He has followed the changes in that city through the post war period and engaged on many levels with the legacy of conflict. His latest work asks how the city stages its recovery and how we can know it as that city in recovery. What shapes our approaches to it now, and what does it tell us?
Can climate change be discussed in isolation from racism? From slavery? Can it be discussed in isolation from anything? Johnny Rodger reviews the art work/film by Ferreira da Silva and Neuman commissioned for the Glasgow International Festival.
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.
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.
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).
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.