The 2008 Gi Festival runs from 11 – 27 April 2008 in its new biennal format and features a programme packed with exhibitions, installations, talks, tours and events in over 30 different sites across the city. Glasgow international – the Gi Festival – is the city of Glasgow’s curated and commissioning Festival of Contemporary Visual Art. The Festival aims to provide a platform for the best of contemporary visual arts, including newly commissioned work by respected and established artists as well as fresh work by emerging talent, shown in grassroots spaces across the city for the first time.
Gi hosts exhibitions, seminars, artists’ talks and events that have been specifically developed for the Festival, in addition to further collaborations throughout the city that reflect Glasgow’s capacity to exhibit internationally significant art. Gi is THE event in the Scottish cultural calendar for attracting major international collectors and curators to Scotland and has proved to have the cache to be able to attract significant artists to participate in the festival and underline why Glasgow’s contemporary art scene is recognised globally as one of the most exciting today. Under the curatorship of Francis McKee, 2008 sees Gi Festival evolve into its new biennial format.
EXHIBITIONS
Asking For It – Everyday Neurosis in Chinese Contemporary Art – Mackintosh Gallery
Date Fri 11th April 08 – Sat 10th May 08
Opening Times Mon – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 10am – 2pm; Sun 13 & 20 & 27 April 10am – 2pm
Beijing-based curators Pi Li (UniversalStudios-Beijing, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing) and Colin Chinnery (UCCA, Beijing) are collaborating with the Mackintosh Gallery at the Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition will take a strangely intimate and humorous look at everyday artistic life in China today through the eyes of seven artists. Each artist brings a different perspective, specifically exploring the ideas of boredom, memory and neurotic impulses in their art making practices. This will be the first large-scale exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in Scotland and opens up critical dialogue between the cities of Glasgow and Beijing. Pi Li and Colin Chinnery will give a talk at the Glasgow Film Theatre Friday 11 April at 11am
Artists
Xu Zhen, Chen Xioayun, Liang Yuanwei, Kan Xuan, Shi Qing, Chu Yun, Hu Xiaoyuan
Maurice Doherty – Futures Gallery
Date Fri 11th April 08 – Sun 27th April 08
Opening Times 11:00-18:00
Maurice Doherty employs a wide-range of media to directly approach and explore the fundamental ambiguities at the heart of human experience. Using the tools and iconography of science and art, these new works confront the interplay between emotions and aesthetics, public and private, love and desire, life and the fragility of biological existence.
Symposium – CCA
Private Thoughts and Public Spaces; Public Acts and Private Places
Mon 21st April 08
Glasgow Sculpture Studios presents a one-day, free public symposium that will explore the shifting relationships between what might be public, what may be private, and how that discussion impacts on contemporary sculptural practices.
Catalysed by both the curatorial theme of the 2008 Glasgow international Festival for Contemporary Visual Art and the work of renowned German artist and invited speaker Mischa Kuball, Private Thoughts… brings together a range of experts in their fields for a symposium of public thinking and private incitement.
Context
Glasgow Sculpture Studios is dedicated to fostering a vibrant community of artists by providing them with subsidized access to workshops, studio space, technical facilities and expertise. To this end, it presents this free symposium, examining some of the most pertinent questions faced by sculptors today.
The first decade of the 21st Century has revealed a complex territory where the lines between the public and the private do not seem impermeable. In the social experience of areas as diverse as technology, ideology, and landscape, it may seem that the distinctions between public and private are becoming routinely challenged, and their positions inverted. What are the implications for how we chart the contemporary sculptural practices that exist within, challenge, and critique it?
Invited artists
Pavel Büchler, Claire Doherty, David Harding, Mischa Kuball
The symposium will be chaired by Ruth Barker.
In conjunction with this symposium PAR+RS has commissioned Glasgow based artist and writer Rhona Warwick to develop a new piece of critical writing in response to the work of Mischa Kuball. This text will be available on the PAR+RS website.