A Disturbance of Memory on the Necropolis

Body Building brings together four artists working in the medium of performance: Amy Pickles, Shona Macnaughton, Laura Gonzalez and Hannah Rose Whittle.

Following a micro residency at Market Gallery over three days in November that included tours of the local area and Necropolis, the artists have been asked to produce new work for the gallery or further afield that responds to the social and geographical situation of Dennistoun.

The title for the show, taken from Kathy Acker’s 1992 essay, ‘Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,’ in which she recounts the process of bodybuilding over two years, becomes a metaphor for the building and sustaining of identity and community within Dennistoun and beyond. The four artists have found inspiration in the latent histories and spaces of the suburb, creating work that both resists and transforms the language of the body: the former Meat Market and labour exchange at Graham Square, the old quarry on Whitevale Street and the Necropolis. These vestiges become reserves for the rebuilding of embodied narratives, that like Acker, can challenge the normativities of gendered roles in the paths forged by the circadian body; the mnemonic traces of its public mode.

With special thanks to Justyna Ataman, Katie Orton, The Friends of Glasgow Necropolis and @soft.play

For this exhibition, I made ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Necropolis’, a déjå vu of Sigmund Freud’s letter to his friend Romain Rolland. The work consisted of pairs of booklets, two photographs and a sound piece.