Tom Jeffreys

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  picks October 03, 2022

  Bianca Hlywa

  Bianca Hlywa is an artist who fuses beauty with disgust. Her chosen medium is the symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) used in fermented foodstuffs such as kombucha. The powerful vinegar odor means that you tend to smell Hlywa’s works well before you can see them. In this case, the stench hits as you descend the staircase to Gossamer Fog’s underground gallery.

  Inside, Hlywa’s sculptural installation Thermaloop (all works 2022) mounts a roughly 440-pound SCOBY specimen (grown over five months) onto a webbing substrate, which is submerged within a large rectangular vat of brown liquid.

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  picks March 12, 2022

  Haig Aivazian

  Haig Aivazian's first UK solo exhibition consists of two films, each of which collages together found material from a dizzying range of sources—tech-bro TED talks, Georgian indie bands, phone footage of police violence, Tintin—tracing a tangle of connections between sport and war, power and profit, surveillance, spectacle and state-sanctioned murder. Light and fire are running motifs: Aivazian asks what gets lit up and why, who gets to see and who is always being watched.

  Prometheus, 2019, revisits the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona in the aftermath of the Gulf War, a conflict that, Baudrillard

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  picks October 04, 2021

  “Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism”

  Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Glasgow Women’s Library, “Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism” combines new commissions, existing works, and extensive archival materials that open alternative possibilities for community, care, and resistance. The exhibition spans the building, with contributions including Franki Raffles’s photographs of women at work in the late 1980s and early ’90s, documentation of Shona Macnaughton's 2017 performance Progressive, and the Glasgow Housing Struggle Timeline, 2021, compiled by Joey Simons and Keira McLean. A metal shelving unit of what