Devised with and performed by Christopher Scanlan.
Group show with Aideen Doran and Susannah Stark at
Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow International 2021
The pamphlet titled Songs for Work in the show is a long form poem, provisional and ongoing in nature, which sometimes takes the form of a performance, notebook and collaboration, and is here available as a pamphlet. It consists of a voice as an accumulation of things read, heard or seen, weaving together moments from intimate relationships in life with multiple pieces of texts and distant voices on the page. It explores attempts to live in common within the context of capitalism.
A song for work is a performance devised with and performed by Christopher Scanlan. Scanlan shifts between working with materials and dialogue between himself and the audience. His labour in the space is improvised anew each time. He uses his lived experience of how identity is constructed through what we do for a living, what we aspire to do, and where that situates us emotionally and socially. He draws from his own life, sometimes rehearsing monologues for his auditions, slipping in and out of the performative labour of an actor to the culturally constructed and mediated performance of self within a public space.
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Songs for Work brought together sound installation, sculpture, poetry and performance by three Glasgow-based artists – Aideen Doran, Beth Dynowski and Susannah Stark – to examine the effects of work on subjectivity, community and wider social, political and ethical imaginaries. Being about work, the exhibition is also necessarily about time – the absence or abundance of it – and about the spaces between violence and reverie.
The exhibition looked at both the individual and collective body at work and the cultural practices, strategies and meaning-making which undermine, reinvent and transcend work as world-making. It pays attention to how we shape and are shaped by what we do for a living in all senses – physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and politically.
