As is often the case with big arts festivals, the smaller offerings tend to get closer to the heart of the matter. This spring, Glasgow International Festival, a citywide event that takes place every two years, hosted a staggering number of exhibitions, performances and events in the city’s galleries, museums, railway arches and abandoned warehouses. As a city, Glasgow sits in the north, its post-industrial urbanity cast in the gothic shadows of not-quite-gothic buildings. This year, Glasgow International brought together local and international artists, such as Gerard Byrne, Jimmie Durham and David Maljkovic, who have an articulate preoccupation with the recent past. Standout events during the festival included Le Drapeau Noir, a temporary artist café; The Voice is a Language, a screening and performance event; and “Prologue: Endless Renovation,” Corin Sworn’s solo exhibition at Washington Garcia.
Upon entering “Prologue: Endless Renovation,” one passed through a sheath of curtains. The curtain design was based on two projector beams that crossed each other. The second curtain in the exhibition sat high above the white wall of the gallery and covered a circular window like an orb. Depending on the time of day, the light that passed through the curtains either enabled or eclipsed the slides in the exhibition, creating an atmosphere of gentle discontinuity.
This past autumn, Sworn found over 600 slides and a diary in a trash bin near her home. The images themselves are nondescript. They are of odd objects that are difficult to identify: dust, flowers, empty apartments and clocks—round and linear. The images were projected onto two adjoining walls in the space. The slide machines gave off a persistent hum emblematic of the decades of analog electronics. They were assembled on a 1980s unit whose shelves were replaced by panels of tinted mirror, making them reflective to varying degrees.
The exhibition itself was structured around projection as a motif, and the slides were accompanied by an audio track. This consisted of a woman’s voice offering thoughts and comments as they corresponded to the found images. These associative wanderings, played in tandem with the slides, projected meaning onto the images. Yet the recording was slightly askew from the rhythm of the slides, and this slippage reaffirmed one of Sworn’s primary points of interest: the multiple and simultaneous readings of history’s non-absolute objecthood. The script tangentially referenced the content of the slides while addressing various philosophical notions about time, attesting to the ways in which we project meaning upon the past. In this way, Sworn evoked Svetlana Boym, Bob Perelman and Vilem Flusser, the film Dazed and Confused and artists such as the Language poets, who put forth the idea of reading as a form of production.
On the floor, a flower arrangement blocked the light of a third projector beam, casting striking shadows on the opposing wall. In using the slide machines, tape player, shelf and flower vase in conjunction with the recording, Sworn addressed art’s anxiety over nostalgia while building her own insightful discourse on the matter.
