Review
30th September 2021
The Scotto-American photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper is a titan in his field. Dana Macfarlane reviews his new show, ‘The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity’, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and discusses the tensions in the work which is 'unsettling' and 'subtly uncanny'.
1st August 2021
Form follows Fuel -or is it, Form follows Food? -Or both? In advance of COP26 -and our own specially timed 'Climate' issue in November, Florian Urban assesses Barnabas Calder's new book. Its exposé of Architecture - and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement - as the worst of climate-change culprits is interesting, to say the least, in the light of Calder's published panegyrics on Brutalism...
5th July 2021
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.
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).
3rd March 2021
In both Daisy Lafarge's poetry and prose -see her 'Metaphor as Parasite' in our Hollow issue - consciousness seems to float seamlessly in a fermentation of biology and minerology. Rochelle Roberts reviews her latest poetry collection here and finds it 'full of, and without air'.
23rd January 2021
A major thinker and innovator in the understanding of the significance of Cognitive Capitalism, US artist and activist Warren Neidich has worked across fields from neurobiology and psychology to art and architecture. Here he probes, proposes and defines neuroaesthetics as an area of critical , politically engaged and creative thought.
Underneath the Arches : building the foundations to fail better by Neil Cooper