CCA: Spring 2023

images courtesy of the artist, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2019

ABOUT CCA

CCA is a multi-arts venue in Glasgow. We curate national and international contemporary art in our gallery space, as well as commissioning and hosting new projects in our online platform CCA Annex, and providing the Intermedia gallery space for emerging artists. CCA hosts cultural events year-round on an open source model, sharing our building and resources with artists, individuals and organisations to create a citizen-led programme. We are also home to Glasgow Seed Library, Common Ground, an extensive Archive and the Creative Lab, a space to provide residencies for creators. CCA is supported by Creative Scotland and Glasgow Community Planning Partnership.

CCA is located in the heart of Glasgow city centre. Our address is 350 Sauchiehall Street, next to the Dental Hospital. You can find us online at our website, and at CCA Annex, our digital platform.

www.cca-glasgow.com / https://cca-annex.net

Highlights from the next few months at CCA. You can visit our website for a full and up-to-date programme.

Core Programming

All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands

Tuan Andrew Nguyen — 11/02/23 - 25/03/23

WHAT’S ON

A solo exhibition from visual artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Nguyen’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance, and this exhibition centres on a video installation that continues on from the echoes of French colonial subjects.

Check page 7 for more…

Confluence

07/04/23 - 20/05/23

Confluence brings together three artists whose work approaches historical and contemporary examinations of the sea and other bodies of water as contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories. The exhibition is part of a 1-year residency and research programme taking place between Marrakech and Glasgow.

Check page 11 for more…

Intermedia

Jongen

Benjamin Soedira — 03/02/23 - 25/02/23 — The Skinny pick Soedira’s new work in progress explores identity, colonialism, and the unravelling of family history through photography.

Check page 17 for more…

Ongaku Tiffany

Sgàire Wood — 03/03/23 - 25/03/23

An exhibition of new work by visual artist and performer Sgàire Wood that pairs the sublime with the sensual.

Check page 18 for more…

Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do

Jack Cheetham — 07/04/23 - 22/04/23

— The Skinny pick

With the help of community and puppetry, the show will speculate on future hometowns, families, loves, demons and pals. Check page 19 for more…

Open Source

Six Short Films About Housing

Living Rent and the Workers’ Stories Project — 22/02/23 — The Skinny pick

A presentation of shorts on housing inequality in memory of late housing justice activist Cathy McCormack, proceeds will go to Living Rent and striking CWU workers.

Art Workers For Palestine

22/02/23, 22/03/23, 26/04/23

Art Workers For Palestine Scotland is a regular meeting of artists and art workers organising to work on campaigns, strategise, deepen understanding of Palestinian art and culture, and express solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Glasgow Film Festival 2023

01/03/23 - 11/03/23

Glasgow Film Festival celebrates every corner of world cinema and provides a fantastic showcase for the best of Scottish film.

Cryptic Nights: Entwine

Karen Sutherland with Kris Halpin and Chris Jacquin — 16/03/23

An interactive journey through different musical zones incorporating technology, moving image, and sound, in collaboration with Kris Halpin (MiMuGloves) and Chris Jacquin (The Brain).

Attics, garrets, pedlars and poets: a hidden geography of Glasgow

Joey Simons — 18/03/23

An evening of readings sharing Joey Simons’ ongoing research into the 19th century pedlar-poet James Macfarlan for CCA Annex.

Glasgow Short Film Festival

22/03/23 - 26/03/23

The 16th edition of Scotland’s leading short film festival, foregrounding disruptive, ground-breaking work that transgresses the boundaries of conventional narrative film.

//BUZZCUT// Festival

30/03/2023 - 01/04/2023

The return of Glasgow’s favourite festival for new experiments in live art and performance!

Check page 21 for more…

Glasgow Seed Library

Field Day

25/02/23, 25/03/23, 29/04/23, 27/05/23, 25/06/23, 29/08/23

Join a small, social garden team at Lambhill Stables Community Garden to help sow, grow and harvest seeds for the library.

All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands

images courtesy of the artist, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2019

Tuan SPRING 2023

All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands

Andrew Nguyen

11 February — 25 March 2023

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His work is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. We spoke to him about the film that his exhibition at CCA centres on, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming.

Can you tell us a little about how this work came about, what was the impetus behind it?

FEB RUARY — MARCH

I was interested in finding moments of solidarity between the colonized – I was doing research on French colonial soldiers called tirailleurs: tirailleurs sénégalais (French colonial soldiers from West Africa) and tirailleurs indochinois (French colonial soldiers from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) specifically. What solidarities had arisen on the battlefield between these colonial soldiers that had come to the aid of France during WWI and WWII but then were pitted against one another when the uprising against France began in Vietnam in the 1940’s?

I had heard that there was a Vietnamese community in Senegal. I had read something about a Vietnamese dish called ‘nem’ being popular in Dakar and it struck a chord of curiosity. There was an impression that it was a community that goes back a while, but I didn’t know the extent of it. I started traveling to Dakar for research and through friends, started meeting people from the Vietnamese-Senegalese community. As I got to know the different members of the community there, I was blown away by the breadth of their experiences, their stories and their resilience. Our discussions continued which led to me making an immersive 4-channel video installation that explores their stories.

How does storytelling factor into how you present histories from these communities?

Stories are such powerful devices. They can be designed and instrumentalized by those in power to control and oppress, or conversely, used by the oppressed to resist and empower themselves. Stories help us hold onto hope. Stories and the telling of stories is a way for memory and history to be transmitted from one generation to another. We define ourselves through the stories we tell. For communities, like the Vietnamese-Senegalese community in Senegal, who have arisen from a very chaotic moment in history and a migration that was essentially a series of ruptures, both socially and personally, storytelling not only becomes a way to reify one’s sense of belonging in a space, but it also helps to fill in the gaps cause by personal or political erasures.

An aspect of your filmmaking is “creating memory”, can you speak to the importance of that act - both in terms of what it has meant to you as an artist and in a broader political sense?

I think there has been an overall sense of helplessness, especially amongst immigrant and refugee communities all over the world, over the last century - known as the century of refugees. So much of official history has been designed to negate lives and bodies and other memories – memories that did not work towards colonial profit and extractivism. The colonial project specifically was a calculated process of exploiting, of killing, of negating, of erasing. I’ve realized that the imagination expressed through storytelling, specifically storytelling that works towards filling these gaps, of producing or “creating memory”, could be such a strong tool for healing those wounds.

Tuan Andrew Ngyuen’s exhibition All That We Are Is What We Hold In

images courtesy of the artist, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2019

courtesy of the artist, Samra Mayanja

Confluence

7 April — 20 May 2023

11:00am — 6:00pm

APRIL — MAY

Our upcoming exhibition Confluence (7 April - 20 May) brings together three artists whose work approaches historical and contemporary examinations of the sea and other bodies of water as contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories. Expanding on barzakh خزرب the state of “in-between” as a liminal space, a margin, a point of transition, the artists Asha Athman, Islam Shabana and Samra Mayanja explore specific events, situations and mythologies tied to this realm of stasis and separation between borders.

ASHA ATHMAN ’s Sowing and Mending stems from visual and literary media research undertaken in the last two years on marine life, technology and politics in Somalia. The material and immaterial relevance of nets and networks becomes a main point of connection for bringing together parallel realities and imaginations related to the experiences of Somali coastal communities and the nature of diasporic living for Somalis. Learning the traditional manual method of various weaving, rope/net making and embroidery techniques, Asha hopes to bring out conversations she had with her father since she was a child about the fishing industry in the Puntland region of Somalia and the current circumstances of unregulated foreign fishing in the Gulf of Aden and the Somali Sea affecting the livelihood of fishing communities and the natural coastal, terrestrial, aquatic ecosystems. Asha is also experimenting with breaking down and layering different types of images that will feature in the collage and sculpture pieces for this show.

Blueprint for the Deep by SAMRA MAYANJA works with the sounds of thunder and rain, starting with her research into the floods in 2022 in Uganda that displaced tens of thousands of people across the region. The work is also influenced by Ugandan playwright Elvania Zirimu Namukwaya’s play, Family Spear, that looks at the circumstances surrounding a wedding, evoking social contexts in Uganda and the ruptures brought about by the introduction of Christianity and anglicised European identity to the cultural practices and religious beliefs of Ugandan family culture. The piece also revisits the incident of the Nigerian cook, Harrison Okene, kept alive for more than three days underwater by an air pocket, after his boat capsized off the west coast of Africa.

ISLAM SHABANA will present an installation based on the anthology The Geomorphosis Cycles , looking into the intersection between water technologies, mythology and Islamic philosophy through simulation, science fiction and poetry. In the Mediterranean, coastal cities are increasingly threatened by being swallowed by a rising sea and inland ones face the risk of drowning under waves of the sand of an expanding desert. Between the polarised narratives of “submergence and drought”, governments in the region are beginning to use the latest technologies and top-down modes of governance for a ‘futuristic city’. From Alexandria to Marrakech, The Geomorphosis Cycle is an exploration about the politics of the human-made water crisis and to speculate about urban transformations in a post-anthropocene and more-than-human world. Combining collected myths around Egyptian cisterns and Moroccan khattaras with speculative fiction, Shabana questions (neo) colonial narratives on desertification and flooding to unfold hydro-imaginaries from the Maghreb to the Mashrek embedded in the region’s indigenous and historic water infrastructures, opening up a space connecting the world from above and the one from below.

Confluence is a 1-year residency and research programme taking place between Marrakech and Glasgow curated by Alaya Ang, Francesca Masoero and Shayma Nader, and developed by CCA Glasgow & QANAT (a collective platform held by LE 18). Confluence is supported by the International Collaboration Grant of the British Council and Creative Scotland.

images courtesy of the artist, Samra Mayanja

/ليربا ناسين

INTER MEDIA

Intermedia is an independent gallery space managed by CCA. The gallery is on the second floor of CCA, and operates independently of CCA’s curated exhibition programme. Intermedia’s programme aims to support emerging artists working in Glasgow.

We are delighted to announce the line-up of artists exhibiting in 2023-24! These artists were selected based on proposals to an open call issued earlier this year.

The artists selected were: Ben Soedira, Sgàire Wood, Jack Cheetham, Eleni Wittbrodt, Wei Zhou, Tulani Hlalo, Josie Perry & Francis Jones and Natsumi Sakamoto.

Here is a preview of the most upcoming shows…

Benjamin Soedira

3 February — 25 February 2023

11:00am — 6:00pm

Benjamin Soedira is a Glasgow-based artist who works predominantly with the photographic medium as a means of understanding and exploring. Soedira’s work encapsulates ideas of belonging and foreignness, both coinciding with one another in order to create the idea of home and familiarity. The visual work created follows the documentary elements within the photographic medium, whilst pushing the photograph in a way that can be read conceptually and descriptively.

Soedira’s new work and current work-in-progress Jongen aims to explore a family history entangled in repression and landscape. Through which, Soedira will travel through Indonesia to West Papua (his father’s birthplace) to reunite with family, along with understanding an identity so little is known about. Soedira hopes to break down preconceptions of Indonesian identities by slowly moving forward with his father’s motherland, West Papua. A dark colonial past alongside the dizzying everyday life of a place Soedira is still navigating. Jongen aims to find answers in a place where family and identity have been out of reach.

image courtesy of the artist, Ben Soedira

Ongaku Tiffany

Sgàire Wood

3 March — 25 March 2023

11:00am — 6:00pm

Sgàire Wood is an Irish artist and performer based in Glasgow. Combining dance and spoken word performance with elements of costume, makeup and set-design, Wood’s work utilises artifice and anachronism to achieve moments of authenticity and facetiously deconstruct societal taboos around mental illness, psychological trauma and trans sexuality.

Ongaku Tiffany is an exhibition of new sculpture, sound and drawing-based work positioning the decorated body and the domestic space as mirrored manifestations of the self. By simulating the grandeur of the Victorian parlour room with food, confectionery and human hair, the show pairs the sublime and the sensual to bring into question the validity of the visual performance of identity and its contingency on ornate social contract. Motivated by a desire to confront the hyper-visibility of the trans body, this exhibition also represents a departure from the artist’s mostly performance-based practice to date, exploring what it means to transcend a medium which centres the body, not only as physical and intellectual generator of work, but also the site of its presentation.

image courtesy of the artist, Sgàire Wood

Jack

Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do

Cheetham

7 April — 22 April 2023

11:00am — 6:00pm

Jack Cheetham is an artist and educator. He was raised in Derbyshire, England, and has lived in Glasgow since 2012. Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do is an installation by artist Jack Cheetham. With the help of community and puppetry, the exhibition will speculate on visions of future hometowns, families, loves, demons, and pals. Puppets have a ‘life of their own’, and Cheetham is interested in how puppet play is used in theatrical and therapeutic contexts, and how it can be used as an alternative mode of communication through roleplay as a treatment for trauma.

The interactive installation is an imagining of a forgotten puppet show that takes place in and around ruined castle grounds, set in the year 2066, in the fictional town of Helldham, Anglandshireland. The puppet show has been abandoned due to a mass puppeteer revolt. The show is full of knackered puppets (to be reanimated by the exhibition’s audience, becoming the puppeteer), in which several characters together try to break up with the main character, the Castle.The exhibition will examine the potential and ongoing failures of its creators through the imagining of a certain consumer-driven fantasised moment in time.

image courtesy of the artist, Jack Cheetham

CCA Open Source

CCA’s open-source programming strand is a citizen-led process, and means that we share our building and resources with a range of artists, individuals and organisations.

We’re really open to new ideas, and invite anyone who has a suggestion for an event to get in touch. You can email us to start a conversation or simply pop in and ask.. You can find more information on our website.

Guillermo Gomez-Peña.

Photo by Zen Cohen

//BUZZCUT// Festival

30 March — 1 April 2023

CCA will host part of BUZZCUT Festival, a performance festival showcasing the best and most exciting in live art. We spoke with members of the BUZZCUT team Karl Taylor and Claricia Parinussa about what to expect from this year’s festival.

What can people expect from BUZZCUT Festival?

K: BUZZCUT is the best time of the year! It’s a chance to see around 30 live artists and performance-makers showing fresh experiments in a jam-packed 3 days across CCA and Tramway. There’s a real mix of work: durational performances that you can drift in and out of, one-on-one intimate encounters, ‘sit down and watch’ studio shows and some participatory performances that are co-created with everyone present. The work we love is really experimental in form; stuff that wouldn’t find a home elsewhere. It’s a really busy, exciting vibe, with loads of spaces to meet new people and hang out. If you’re new to live art, it’s a really fun opportunity to see a bunch of stuff and find what clicks with you.

Are there any performers you’d like to highlight in this year’s line-up, both from the local scene and further afield?

K: We’re so excited to welcome Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Ballitronica back to Glasgow. They’re one of the most influential artists in live art history – Guillermo has performed in Glasgow since the 80s. They’ll be showing the pandemic divination ritual; utilising a casino roulette and traditional tarot deck to determine which texts and ritual actions occur on the night. They’ll be at Tramway on Sat 1st.

Glasgow-based artist HUSS will be showcasing the outcomes of the 2022 Emerging Artist Award; which gives an insight into the frustration, monotony and dehumanisation of the visa process; in a replica

of the solicitors office which they repeatedly visited during their application for asylum.

And we can’t wait to welcome Amsterdam-based pop-superstar Mavi Veloso with her album celebrating trans and nonbinary bodies Travesti Biologica, opening our end-of-fest queer performance party taking over CCA on Saturday night.

C: I’m really anticipating the culmination of this years’ Club Residences with artists Nikhita Devi, Chardonnay Emerald, and Shawn Nayar also performing at the BUZZCUT party on Saturday. You may have seen them performing and developing their practice across Bonjour, Shoot Your Shot and HEALTHY Glasgow in the past year.

We’re also looking forward to welcoming April Lin 林森 with Everyone Spits Chicken Bones, which considers how food can act simultaneously as a mediator of care, intergenerational trauma and the diasporic experience.

Plus, daughters-of-the-rave InXestuous Sisters’ HotWorks; a post-punk airing and torching of dirty laundry (to which our audience members are invited to contribute - check out the programme for details on that!)

InXestuous Sisters.

Photo by Eda Sancakdar

It’s been six years since the last in-person BUZZCUT Festival, how has the process been bringing it all together after such a long time?

C: It’s my first time being part of the team for an in person BUZZCUT Festival! It’s been great to expand our tiny team by bringing on some new folks as well as working with our Associate Curators FK Alexander and Jamila Johnson Small to make this programme happen!

K: Attending BUZZCUT back in the day was a big reason I fell in love with Glasgow, and it feels really special and exciting to bring the live festival back. A lot of people only know us through our ‘Double Thrills’ performance nights, but the festival is O.G. BUZZCUT so you can’t miss it!

BUZZCUT Festival takes place 30 March - 2 April.

Mavi Veloso

CCA CINEMA

With the recent loss of crucial cinema spaces around Scotland, we wanted to highlight the film curation work of our programme partners. Our Cinema Audience Development Coordinator, Sarah Harbison, spoke to three of our cinema partners about programming at the CCA, the challenges facing Scotland’s film sector and how they hope to connect with audiences.

My Twentieth Century (1989, dir. Ildikó Enyedi)

What inspired your festival’s programme?

Xuanlin Tham (Take One Action Film Festival):

Take One Action was founded on the belief that shared cinematic experiences can spark transformation and change. Cinema has an immense power: it carves out space for empathy, connection, and imagining new worlds together. Take One Action unfurled from an eagerness to harness this power – to bring people together, and nourish the hope and community necessary to work towards social and climate justice, in Scotland and across the world.

Ilia Ryzhenko (Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival): Films are powerful vessels for encountering different cultures, histories and ways of living. This is especially the case with Eastern European cinema, because it frequently focuses on politics and hardship in an artistically sophisticated way that relies on visual and aural poetics. In essence, we wanted to show Scottish audiences what we found to be so precious and important about the national cinemas, just as it drove many in our team to seek out more fantastic art and learn about the region.

What do you enjoy about screening at CCA Cinema?

Kuan-Ping Lui (Taiwan Film Festival):

We actually just had our first screening at CCA! Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh is a relatively young festival, having started in 2020. With the two past years affected by COVID, this was our first festival in a while that was fully in-person. CCA Cinema opens to all kinds of programmes and the organisation has been very helpful in all aspects, from tech to ticketing. The staff are amazingly friendly!

Xuanlin Tham (Take One Action Film Festival):

As soon as we step in through the doors of the CCA, it already feels like we’ve been transported: there’s a buzz in the air, a vibrant cross-pollination of arts, culture and community. It’s a beautiful and welcoming space, and we’ve been honoured to work with the wonderful staff at the CCA who have been really supportive in facilitating our

access commitments like captioned screenings and sliding scale ticketing. There’s always something exciting going on at CCA, so to be part of that ecosystem is always thrilling! We loved how Saramago concocted a za’atar cocktail to coincide with our screening of Palestinian film Foragers (we’re also massive fans of their food!)

What challenges currently face the Scottish film sector?

Kuan-Ping Lui (Taiwan Film Festival):

I think Scotland could do with more international films that might be outside audiences’ comfort-zones (such as more East Asian films, etc). These films might not yet have an audience, which is exactly why we need to show them, so we can develop an audience that could really find something they love.

Xuanlin Tham (Take One Action Film Festival):

The devastating loss of Centre for the Moving Image has thrown into stark relief just how important – but fragile – spaces for cultural cinema and arts are. Many challenges are to be found in deciding just how the sector moves forward from this, but it’s clear that a deep-rooted reckoning is needed: one that necessitates facing head-on how a relentless growth-and-profit model will always fail the arts and its people. We hope that everyone – exhibitors, funders, audiences, festivals, venues – can work together in the immense, but exciting, task of reimagining what a vibrant, diverse, sustainable film sector can look like in Scotland. With care, and with passion.

Foragers (2022, dir. Jumana Manna)

What do you hope audiences experience at your screenings?

Kuan-Ping Lui (Taiwan Film Festival):

I hope through our screenings, audiences can understand that East Asian cinemas are easily approachable, and that there is so much more to explore in the world of films by seeing through language and cultural barriers.

Ilia Ryzhenko (Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival):

We hope our audiences – whether they come from Eastern European diasporas or are Scottish film-goers – feel a deep connection with our films that makes them want to seek out more (more art, more knowledge about what inspires it). We particularly want to make Eastern Europeans living in Scotland feel welcome and enter an environment where their culture is celebrated and faithfully and thoughtfully represented. At our last year’s festival, the additional objective was also to spotlight Ukrainian cinema, educating British spectators about the country’s cinematic tradition as well.

Xuanlin Tham (Take One Action Film Festival):

We aim to take creative, exploratory, and caring approaches to our screenings and events – our screening of Foragers at CCA, for example, was a multifaceted evening of music, dance, spoken word, films, and food sharing, presenting a rich palette of engagement that people really valued. But regardless what shape that takes, we always hope that our screenings leave audiences with a spark of feeling, no matter how small or profound, that goes on to ignite possibilities for connection, transformation, and togetherness long after we meet.

You’ll find all event details on our website’s “What’s On” page or pop in to chat to our friendly reception staff, who can also be reached on 0141 352 4900.

Stay informed of every event and exhibition on our social media:

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Centre for Contemporary Arts

350 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3JD