Kelly Rappleye

The social upheavals of COVID-19, the BLM uprisings of 2020 and Scotland’s housing crisis have provoked a reckoning with the implicit material and cultural systems that perpetuate inequities in the UK’s urban spaces. Drawing from urban studies, postcolonial theory, and media/film theory, this practice-led curatorial project investigates how curating moving images can contest and unsettle the social, historical and material aspects of colonial urban spaces. The curatorial practice-led research aims to test and deliver situated methods of ‘spatial’ (Rendell, 2006) inquiry to reveal vital new understandings of Glasgow’s urban space in artists’ moving image. By curating archival moving images of Glasgow into dialogue with artists’ moving image works that investigate its colonial legacies, the research asks if site-responsive curatorial practises can actively contribute to processes of decolonisation.

The project will analyze works of artists’ moving image from the past 5 years which have contested Glasgow’s spatial heritage by introducing new affects over and within its urban spaces and infrastructures, including works from Sulaïman Majali, Alberta Whittle, Anne-Marie Copestake, Winnie Herbstein and Tako Taal. The curatorial practice research will bring these artists’ moving image works into dialogue with amateur and documentary archival moving images from the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive (NLSMIA) of direct relevance to the artworks’ sites and/or themes. Through curating these disparate forms of moving image together, the research asks if new affective, social, and historical understandings can be developed that shift Glasgow’s spatial relations.