AS a self-appointed New Glaswegian and a big fan of what it offers, this is far from my first time visiting the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. I’ll often pop by before work and have a nosy at whatever they’re running that day and it’s yet to disappoint.
Filled with friendly young staff and greeted by a bookshop and pretty wee shop, despite its harsh metal architecture, the venue has worked hard to create a welcoming vibe. Fairy lights adorn the air in a closed courtyard-like space, and you can watch artists hard at work through the huge open windows.
Enjoying a reasonably priced coffee in the café downstairs, the whole place echoes with the ghastly sounds coming from whatever’s going on in the exhibition upstairs. A noise isolation problem, it seems.
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And it’s particularly an issue in the cinema room. Like any small venue, the sounds feed into the room often converted into two and separated from the outside noise by a mere curtain.
This time, the main screen shows a piece by The School of Mutants, guest curated by Glaswegian artist Thomas Abercromby. You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is about knowledge. The starting point of years of research, the multimedia exhibition aims to depict a direction towards freedom and liberation.
The cinema depicts a three-screen installation about a real and predicted future. The audience reclines on bean bags in the middle of the room to watch all the screens in one go. The French-language film depicts the modern and the traditional.
A man uses a hand-operated sewing machine in the middle screen while the surrounding ones show a busy street. A loudspeaker, a petrol station and traffic juxtapose with ancient masks, forests, fields. It brings to mind the idea of the modern world and what man made of it – shown brilliantly when a man uses a shell to make his steampunk-esque machine work.
We fade to a conversation between the man and a woman. Their ideas clash – shown by them appearing on separate screens and never once seeing their mouths move in accordance with their words – as they argue about gentrification.
The second room is a playground dedicated to knowledge. Speakers overlay as you become almost overwhelmed with what you’re seeing and hearing. A class uprising in Dakar, where the project began, forced power struggles and the history of the railroad come together in a sort of universal language.
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One of the team explains that the texts littering the floor are part of a mobile library that audiences are encouraged to borrow and reflect on, to truly learn and absorb what they’ve read and write about it. Because it’s only through learning, through partaking in this universal language of knowledge, that we can comprehend life’s ills.
Ascending the stairs to take in the intermedia gallery, you can pause for a second to watch an artist at work in the creative space nearby. The CCA will choose 12 local artists to fund and help them display their work in this gallery. This week is Playthings by Sequoia Danielle Barnes, and I’m reliably informed it’s quite controversial.
Upon first glance, it’s just two teddies, surrounded by bricks and books, and the sort of things you’d see in a child’s playroom. But it’s somehow… off. Uneasy.
The installation is about white supremacy and how it’s ingrained in our culture even from childhood. With two huge, sinister teddy bears showing a meadow and a gollywog advertisement on their tummies and a horrible grinding sound overlayed, it’s the epitome of an unsafe space.
You can’t even feel comfortable glancing away to the meadow, as the bears are placed so closely that you can still see the racist caricature in the corner of your eye.
Upon approaching, the tiny teddy in the corner is a monster too. Though appearing like a normal Build A Bear-type teddy, its legs are different lengths, the paw pads on its feet are shaped oddly and its eyes are in the wrong places. The whole room is highly disturbing for such a simplistic idea and it executes it flawlessly.
I return to a member of the CCA team to ask about the noise. Unlike the friendly noise usually made when stitching, the grinding and scratching sound is that of the very sewing machine that created the bears.
As I leave the art space to catch my bus, I can still hear the scratching echoing throughout the building. It leaves me with that creeping sense of dread that although we try and ignore it, run from it, white supremacy is well and truly ingrained in our society.
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated runs until August 31, and Playthings runs until July 27
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