25 October 2012 at 6pm
The Scottish National Portrait hosts the first major retrospective by Jitka Hanzlová, showing work made over the last two decades by this major contemporary photographer.
Hanzlová was born in the former Czechoslovakia, growing up in Prague before defecting from this Communist regime to Essen in West Germany in 1982. Since then she has sought to explore her experiences through photography.
Hanzlová’s work belongs to the technical tradition of German photography and most frequently depicts the human figure in landscape or cityscape settings. She also references Renaissance portraiture and post-soviet industrial landscapes, in an exploration of belonging and alienation. Emerging from her experience of two different cultures and political systems, her work is a profound meditation on European identity in a post Cold-war world.
Joining us to discuss the work of Jitka Hanlová will be Duncan Forbes, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Galleries of Scotland. We also welcome our new Spin co-ordinator, Grainne Rice.
20 February 2008 at 5.45pm
Spin: Glasgow’s next event will be a visit to Glasgow School of Art to view a new exhibition by Craig Mulholland. Members will also have the chance to attend a special screening of his new film and a talk by Craig at the GFT as part of the Glasgow Film Festival. We will meet the exhibitions curator, Grainne Rice.
Grandes Et Petites Machines refers to the Grande Machines of the French salon, large-scale history paintings, which focus on the physical mechanics of human struggle or violent revolution usually set against the crumbling architecture of authority.
This exhibition will endeavour to dramatically highlight the ethical issues raised by various information theories and their related technologies, focusing on their contribution to ideas of progress, entropy and their social, cultural and legal impact. In particular it will seek to expose the coercive role of such technologies in representations of sensationalism, secrecy and encoding in art along with the expansion of governing institutions and patterns of detection and surveillance. An installation of paintings, sculpture and video (spanning the Mackintosh Gallery at Glasgow School of Art and Sorcha Dallas Gallery) will reflect on the changing ubiquity of digital zones, where the virtual and physical coexist, whilst exploring concepts of the artist/creator/viewer as being complicit in the surveillance and division of objects. The concrete artworks in Grandes Et Petites Machines also function virtually as animated components in the accompanying video work Peer to Peer, to be screened during the exhibition period. Peer to Peer is an Artists Film and Video production supported by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen.
Craig Mulholland was born in Glasgow in 1969. He studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1991. Solo exhibitions include Hyperinflation, Tate Lightbox, London; Bearer on Demand, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; RFID, Changing Rooms, Stirling touring to the Whitechapel Project Space, London, all 2005. Recent group exhibitions include Blackberrying, Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, 2007 and The Metal Bridge, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2006. Mulholland was a recent recipient of the Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Artists Film and Video Award. Mulholland lives and works in Glasgow.
