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| Part of Zainab Aldehaimy’s Winner Winner Chicken Dinner |
The GSA’s Postgraduate Degree Show, featuring work by students on one-year taught Masters programmes, returns to Garnethill this year with two exhibitions: Fine Art (20 -26 August) and Architecture, Design, Innovation and Simulation & Visualisation (2 – 9 September). These physical presentations are complemented by a Digital Showcase which launches on 2 September.
The first of the two physical showcases opens in the Stow Building on Saturday 20 August and features work by students on the MLitt in Fine Art Practice, MLitt in Curatorial Practice (contemporary art) and MLitt in Art Writing programmes. The work on show is made in a wide range of media and features pieces that address key social issues as well as ones that tell personal stories.
“We are delighted to welcome Graduate Degree Show back to Garnethill this year with two presentations of work, starting with this exhibition by students in the School of Fine Art,” says Professor Penny Macbeth, Director of The Glasgow School of Art.
“The past few years have created a number of challenges for students on creative programmes and they have had to consider how to mediate them, rethinking their practice and their work, and finding new ways to collaborate and make.”
“The level of thinking, making and realisation in this School of Fine Art Show is exceptional, engaging across major societal themes and issues, challenging the way we see things, questioning approach to the world around us, but also reflecting the environment and importantly the city in which they have studied and developed their creative practice, resulting in work that is open, innovative and exciting.”
The first piece of work which the public encounter on entering the Stow Building is a check point created by Iraqi artist Zainab Aldehaimy. The piece features a sign in Arabic alerting people to “stop for searching” along with a piece that references the 2009 global scam which saw fake “detectors” – sold with spurious but scientific-sounding claims – end up in conflict zones and used by governments around the world.
Zainab, who was raised in Baghdad at the height of war in Iraq, aims to offer the viewer an insight into what life was like, with the daily threat of bombs and how so many people took on trust a device that turned out to be a dangerous hoax, (making the people who sold it wealthy whilst putting the lives of thousands of people at risk).
Progressing to her space in the gallery the viewer then encounters a number of “bombs”, some of which tick unrelentingly, meanwhile on the wall are the words “Winner, winner, chicken dinner”. This is a reference to the video game PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) that was very popular among the youth in Iraq – the phrase pops up once a game is won. PUBG had a huge impact on the youth and many of them dressed up as characters from the game as they were protesting during the October 2019 revolution.
“My work is mostly influenced by my experience growing up in Baghdad,” says Zainab. “It reflects on the political conflict in Iraq and offers a political critique through a psychological and a personal lens.
“It has been challenging creating work for an audience that is not necessarily familiar with the political situation in Iraq and so in response, I decided to create interactive work that can invite the audience in and make the work more accessible.
Due to the weight of the themes of my work, I have also tried to present it in a playful and humorous setting.”
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| Alistair Bamforth’s Knoydart Protest Pub |
Further along the ground floor of Stow viewers will encounter a life-size recreation of the makeshift wooden protest pub created opposite the actual pub (the Old Forge) by the residents of Knoydart as a place to meet and socialise in during the months when the Old Forge was closed by its Belgian owner, Jean-Pierre Robinet. The community has now successfully bought the Old Forge, but are planning to keep the protest pub in place.
Alistair Bamforth’s installation also includes plates and prints created on three visits to the peninsular, an area which the artist sees as embodying key issues around land and property ownership in Scotland.
“I started my project last October looking at land ownership in Scotland and how only 432 people own more than half rural Scotland,” explains Alistair. “Once I had collected information on the bigger picture in Scotland I then wanted to look at one community. I had come across Knoydart five years previously whilst on Skye and it seems the ideal community to look at. I was particularly struck by the story of the protest pub and what this represented”
On his first visit to Knoydart in January this year Alistair took a number of metal plates to leave them in the woods and then collected and printed them . Using the process of sugar lift he added the phrase “Just saying whose land is it anyway” as well as the numbers 432/50 reflecting the current land ownership issue in Scotland. A number of woodcuts have also been placed onto the hanging Bamforth’s pub doors on the wall.
“The woodcuts reflect some of the history of Knoydart in particular, The seven men of Knoydart , who claimed land from the local landowner, under the promise of a land fit for heroes in 1948,” he explains Alistair. “The seven plates on poles in my exhibition reflect the seven men’s claims for land and include earth taken from one of the clearance sites in Knoydart, at Doune, from where over 300 people were removed and sent to Canada.”
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| Yves Leather’s Inflated Pleasure |
Elsewhere in the MLItt in Fine Art Practice presentation Yves Leather explores themes of conditions he personally lives with including Autism, Synaesthesia, Loneliness and Compulsive behaviours. The work takes the form of a bright red inflatable modelled on an AK47; Yiyang Chen explores Women’s body image and clothing, both western and Chinese; Hester Grant offers a feminist take on the decline in care in the health industry, and Esylit Lewis gives a contemporary view on the poetics and politics of translation – working between Welsh and English.
Students on the MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) meanwhile present the outcomes of a number of exhibitions, performances, publication launches, screenings and workshops in Postgraduate Degree Show.
Rose Bache invites us to explore a vocabulary on smell; Rachael Burns has developed a toolkit on compassionate bureaucracy; Holly Croson-Brown has staged a live workshop to explore performance pedagogies; Kim Crowleyhas corresponded with a group of artists on textual process; Þorsteinn Freyr Fjölnisson has conversed with specialists on ideas of ethics in museums; Frankie Gallagher will be quietly installing artistic interventions in three Southside public libraries; Harriet Kotvics will launch a queer magazine into the Discord community; Sian Kydd has written on curatorial activism; Holly MacDonald has explored the botanic in search of a good life; Valeria Nuyanzinahas invited artists to tell secret stories in a hidden garden; Natasha Parker-Edwards has glided towards a dialogue with a group of inter-disciplinary practitioners; Sebastian Taylor will be workshopping xenography with artists and physicists; Emma Watson has tended to the questions raised around a feminist poethics; Noah Xu shall be screening artists films that recall memories of HIV/AIDs; and Marina Ziavra has trailed a labyrinth from which we might lose ourselves.
Postgraduate Degree Show in the Stow Building is open 10am – 8pm Monday – Friday and 10am – 6pm Saturday and Sunday. Entry free.
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For further information contact:
Lesley Booth,
0779 941 4474