This Land is Your Land

This Land is Your Land is a two-part exhibition exploring everything from the pleasure of planting a seed to issues of territory and national boundaries, inviting us to consider our relationship to the land we live on.

For a full list of events taking place during the exhibition, please take a look at the This Land is Your Land Diary or visit the links on the left for more details.

Emerging from new outreach work in Drumchapel, comprising school gardening projects and community guerrilla gardening, from 6 – 19 June part one of the exhibition will be interactive, featuring a continuous series of talks, screenings and cookery, gardening and seed bombing workshops in the main gallery, looking at issues of self sustainability and living off the land.

Glasgow School of Art Architecture students will present their visions for a community garden in Hamiltonhill; Stephen Watts from Sheffield will explain how to forage; Friends of the Earth will run swap shops and films screenings will look at Cuban urban farms, garden protests in Los Angeles, the work of seed activist, Vidana Shiva and the activities of agricultural corporate giants, Monsanto.

CCA Director, Francis McKee says: “How land is used now and who has the right to access it has become a key issue in contemporary society. Ordinary people are challenging formal barriers to growing their own food, accessing land and controlling their own food supply. At the same time, the new discipline of psychogeography has led many people to reinterpret their urban landscape, navigate streets according to their personal histories, experiences and memories.”

In recent years, the term ‘psychogeography’ has been used to describe ‘playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.

Drew Mulholland, Composer in Residence at the University of Glasgow's department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, will present a series of psychogeographical maps while Bob Hamilton, founder of City Strolls will lead tours of Glasgow city centre, questioning how we view the architecture and makeup of the city by renegotiating streets and pathways in order to consider them differently.

In the first gallery space of CCA, a two-week project by practitioners in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan and EyalWeizman, will look at rethinking our urban environment. To do this – they will create a small court room where they will investigate the way in which the legal context of an object, a film or a situation, for example, can influence how we interpret it.

In the second gallery space, there will be a continuous hourly screening of The Desert People (1974) by David Lamelas, one of the pioneers of conceptual art and institutional critique. Part road movie, part documentary, it records the experience of five car passengers who have visited a North American native Indian reservation, and dwells on the difficulties of knowing other cultures from the outside.

Part Two of This Land is Your Land adopts a more conventional exhibition format to present the work of Ursula Biemann, Mark Boulos and Bouchra Khalili, exploring issues of mobility, land resources and migration.

Sahara Chronicles (2006 – 2007), by Ursula Biemann examines the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of current global geopolitics, through taking a close look at the modalities and logistics of the migration system in the Sahara region.

All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008) by Mark Boulos is a video installation about petroleum, dematerialisation and globalisation, depicted through an opposition of two discrete films. One portrays the Nigerian guerrilla group that battles against colonisation of the petroleum resources that are their birthright. The other film depicts American financial traders who buy and sell ‘futures’, the most speculative of financial products, on the last open-outcry trading floor in an increasingly computerised financial world.

Mapping Journey #1 and #2 (2008) consist of short videos by the Moroccan-born French artist Bouchra Khalili. Between 3 and 4:30 minutes is enough time to trace, with just a few pencil lines marking the surface of a map, the hundreds of kilometers traversed by several illegal immigrants in search of precarious employment. Without pretentions and in a direct manner, the artist displays her work, shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style. A close shot of a map slightly in relief, a close-up of a hand holding a marker and a masculine voiceover narrating without emotion the dangerous attempts to cross the Mediterranean and slip across borders, necessary steps for these men and women who, forced to leave their home country and to become outlaw nomads, meet their situation with an exemplary resignation and dignity.

This Land is Your Land

Künstler: Drew Mulholland, Bob Hamilton, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Eyal Weizman, David Lamelas, Ursula Biemann, Mark Boulos, Bouchra Khalili ...