RICHARD Birkett, the director of Glasgow International – now in its 10th edition – says there’s no over-arching theme to this latest iteration of Scotland’s contemporary art biennial.

That aside, there are plenty of works highlighting issues relevant to the moment – societal othering, the catastrophic effects of war, the legacy of colonialism – all germane to Scottish life today.

There is an accent on collaborative working, joint efforts that maximise the muscularity of much of the work on display.

As with the message on cans of Lyle’s golden syrup: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”, references to Glasgow’s conflicted relationship with sugar abound … Here are 10 of the best.

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Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien (Gallery of Modern Art)

This duo is fascinated by the Philippine island of Negros, a place with a plantation-based sugar industry. A Glasgow-based company traded textiles for cane on Negros in the mid-19th century.

We’re also reminded that the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) built on the site of a mansion owned by a sugar merchant, So, an early but not the only a reference to the long history of colonial expropriation and exploitation by Glasgow’s elite.

There are beautiful mobiles and animations and a moving documentary film about the violence of the Marcos regime.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (SWG3)

A screaming comes across the sky. More violence but this time aurally delivered. Abu Hamdan makes performances, live lectures, to a backdrop of imagery from modern Lebanon, the jet tracings in the firmament and drone invasions courtesy of the Israeli Defence Forces.

The sound of the aircraft intensifies and we’re left in no doubt as to the torturous effects of excess sound. How do the people of Beirut cope with this barrage? And what is the world doing to stop it?

Susan Philipsz (King Street Car Park)

There’s a much more gentle approach to sound here as we climb into a wee car belonging to one of Philipsz’s students from Dresden and parked, usefully, near Mono bar and record shop. Inside we listen to Radio International, a long list of sound works inspired by Jean Cocteau’s movie Orpheus (1950). Think spooky static, glitchy murmurings, and imagine you’re a spy in East Berlin before the Wall fell. All brilliantly evocative.

Martin Beck (SWG3 Warehouse)

More sounds. Last Night is a 13-hour video work that documents the music played at a legendary party held in 1974 by the American DJ David Mancuso at his loft space in Manhattan. We’re talking dance music here so wear your cotton twill side button trousers and get down to the beat.

Keith Haring at the Modern Institute: The late Haring’s graffiti works are hugely influential – think Banksy of course – and a visual metonym for New York City. Here there’s a great historical find, a 100-metre-long mural, a panel that was once on the city’s East Side.

Sandra George (5 Florence Street)

More nostalgia of a sort with George’s photographs of 1980s life that refuse to shirk the challenges faced by minority communities in Scotland. Sandra (1957-2013) was a community worker, and we see poignant shots of hostel residents.

Her images also perfectly capture the controlled and righteous anger of activists at the time.

Delaine Le Bas (Tramway)

Staying with the exasperated, Le Bas’s show is an impressively busy and indignant take on Britain’s attitudes to our Romani Gypsy communities. There are many fabric collages and embroideries that expose the daily prejudices faced by her people.

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There’s a boxing ring, totemic figures grasping snakes, and an incessant voice warning us to “beware of linguistic engineering”, the sort that labels, dehumanises, and in her own words act as an “exclusionary tool”.

Cathy Wilkes (The Hunterian)

And then there’s Ulster, a place long cursed by linguistic engineering and where, as Seamus Heaney once had it, whatever you say, say nothing.

Wilkes presents us with a frightening sculpture of a female figure recoiling from an object projecting from a wall, a minimalist tube structure meant to represent a gun firing a rubber bullet. Elsewhere, vitrines display clues to the horror: a report of a shooting, a blinding, a blanket hinting at hunger strikers.

Mina Heydari-Waite (Offline)

Heydari-Waite is a British-Iranian artist living in Glasgow and her video work Farang (2024) features footage from Iran that intrinsically fascinates, given the difficulty visiting the country.

We see delightfully quotidian family footage interspersed with haunting clips from Iranian TV that feature unusual graphics. The sense of the exotic is captured perfectly. Imagine being teleported to the highlands of the country’s interior, a world you’re unlikely to ever see for real.

Minne Kersten (David Dale Gallery)

THE installation by this Dutch artist that sees a room looking as if burgled. In the aftermath, we find overturned lamps, rifled cupboards, scattered books, old plastic alarm clocks, hampers and boxes. All this junk provokes questions: what’s happened here? Who lived in this place?

The work chimes with the building itself and its abandoned spaces, its industrial design, its tiled bar called DEEDEE – this latter is nothing to do with Limmy’s stoner character, rather it’s a tribute to the Enlightenment philanthropist and abolitionist David Dale. We’re in Bridgeton, not Yoker …

Cameron Rowland (Ramshorn Cemetery)

One final work to mention. DALE is buried in Ramshorn Cemetery in the Merchant City where many of the Glasgow’s rich traders are laid to rest.

Many were slave owners. In a deliberate act of sabotage, Cameron Rowland, an American conceptual artist, has barred entry by sticking a padlock and thick chain around the blue iron gates.

The mental link to slaves in chains may be brutal and unsubtle but it’s necessarily so. The reminders of the city’s dark past are stark and there in the names of the nearby streets – Virginia, Jamaica. Maybe the high incidence of edentulate locals is an ironic outcome given their love for sugar.