Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism

Glasgow Women's Library

14th August, 2021 – 16th October, 2021

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Co-curated with Catherine Spencer, Caroline Gausden and Nat Raha.

How have individuals and collectives imagined alternative ways of living and organising? Inspired by Glasgow Women’s Library’s communities and collections, Life Support considered how artists and activists have addressed and challenged experiences of care, health, education, housing and home life. With artworks, archival materials and installations displayed throughout the building and beyond, Life Support focused on feminist, LGBTQ+ and anti-racist responses to existing systems. Featuring activist perspectives alongside works by artists, the project also explored how archives can play a vital role as a form of care work for radical struggle. Realised during the Covid-19 pandemic, the exhibition highlighted the urgent need for mutual care and support across the infrastructures and relationships that shape our everyday lives.

Kate Davis | Greer Lankton | Shona Macnaughton | Manual Labours | Olivia Plender | Franki Raffles | Martha Rosler | Veronica Ryan | Alberta Whittle

Olivia Plender is a multidisciplinary artist whose work seeks to make visible the sophisticated techniques of care, collaborative methods and forms of feminist pedagogy that have been developed and practised by feminist groups, especially in women’s spaces and activist organisations. Her intervention for Life Support has transformed GWL’s Community Room, making it more comfortable for the individuals and groups who use it, while also introducing a new focus on feminist and queer health activism.

Veronica Ryan is a sculptor whose work often uses organic forms to explore ideas of containment, displacement, salvage, support, memory and memorialisation, attending to the complex relationships between individual experience and historical narratives. Life Support brought together works from different points in Ryan’s career to explore her consistent engagement with these themes across her practice, particularly through the forms of seeds, pods and vessels.

Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher and curator whose creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces. Whittle’s engagement with Life Support followed several intersecting paths. As well as producing a new floor sculpture for display alongside existing works, she collaborated with Ubuntu Women Shelter on a durational project which included a residency GWL later in 2021.

Photographs of Greer Lankton’s sculptural dolls could be found throughout Glasgow Women’s Library, including an image of the model Peggy Moffitt on GWL’s Landressy Street flag. A key figure in the 1980s New York art scene, Lankton used her dolls’ unique trials and tribulations to create an entire universe of fantasy and discord.

Kate Davis works across a range of media, including film/video, drawing, printmaking, installation and bookworks. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, Davis’ artwork is an attempt to reconsider what certain histories could look, sound, and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical art works and their reception from a feminist perspective.

Manual Labours is a practice-based research project exploring physical and emotional relationships to work, initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope. Their Global Staffroom Podcast is a series of live conversations and interviews with people exploring what it feels like to care, be cared for and not to be able to care at work. For Life Support, Manual Labours created a listening station where staff and visitors can take a break, read the associated manual and listen to the podcast, with an illustrated tablecloth and cushions made with Muna Al Yaqoobi.

To download a free copy of the manual click here. 

Artist and theorist Martha Rosler’s work is focused on everyday life, the politics of class and public space.  Paying particular attention to women’s experience, her artworks and published writings utilise a range of strategies to address urgent topics including inequality, war and surveillance. An exhibition within an exhibition, Life Support re-presented If You Lived Here…, first staged in New York in 1989 which focused on housing struggles and made incisive interventions into debates on gentrification and urban regeneration. In the 30 years since the original project, the If You Lived Here… archive has continued to grow and has been displayed in multiple variations. At GWL, it was presented in partnership with Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union. Once again, it combined archival and documentary materials with a video lounge and artworks.

Those materials reprised from the 1989 exhibitions include documentation from Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson’s pioneering Docklands Community Poster Project (1981-1991), Jerry Pagane’s woodcut Vacant Village (1986) and Seth Tobocman’s Spatial Deconcentration (1989). New additions focused on the context in Scotland, including Joey Simons and Keira McLean’s Glasgow Housing Struggles Timeline (2021), Shona Macnaughton’s Progressive (2017), an exploration of bodily and urban regeneration in the city’s East End, and a selection of Franki Raffles’photography which focus on housing and home life, curated by Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu. Raffles was a feminist social documentary photographer based in Edinburgh whose images of women address work, health, housing and education, and resulted from close collaboration with activist groups in Scotland. The Video Lounge included films by Downtown Community Television Center, Tony Freeth, Winnie Herbstein, Janet Koenig, ManSee Kong, Leeds Animation Workshop and Sasha Wortzel, among others.

For access to press reviews click here.

Life Support was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC/UKRI), the Henry Moore Foundation, the Art Fund/Garfield Weston, the University of Edinburgh History of Art Department, the St Andrews School of Art History, and the Contemporary Art Research Collection at the University of Edinburgh.

Designer: Maeve Redmond

Production support: Becca Lewis, Katie Reid and Laura Dolan 

Installation team: Jonny Lyons and Rob Kennedy (AV)

Use the arrow keys below to scroll through the slideshow of documentation images:

‘Life Support’ (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘Life Support’ (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘Life Support’ (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘Meditations on Welcome’, Alberta Whittle (2018). Photo Alan Dimmick
Left to right: ‘Celestial Meditations II’ (2018), ‘Meditations on Welcome’ (2018). ‘C is for Colonial Fantasy’ (2017), Alberta Whittle. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘stormy weather skylarking’, Alberta Whittle (2021). Photo Alan Dimmick
'The Glory of a Great Picture is in its Shame I', Kate Davis (2012) Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
Left 'Particles' (2017); Right: ‘Lamentations in the Garden’ (2000) Veronica Ryan. Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘Particles’, Veronica Ryan (2017). Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘Particles’, Veronica Ryan (2017). Photo: Neil Hanna
‘Particles’, Veronica Ryan (2017). Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘Life Support’ (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘Life Support’ (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
Alberta Whittle, 'Creating dangerously (we-I insist!)', Life Support (2021) exhibition detail
Alberta Whittle, 'Creating dangerously (we-I insist!)', Life Support (2021) exhibition detail
‘Creating dangerously (we-I insist!)’, Alberta Whittle (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Neil Hanna
‘Creating dangerously (we-I insist!)’, Alberta Whittle (2021), exhibition detail. Photo Neil Hanna
'Hitherto Unknown: Tillie Olsen’s Reading Lists' (2018-present), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power’, Olivia Plender (2021). Photo Neil Hanna
‘Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power’, Olivia Plender (2021). Photo Neil Hanna
‘Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power’, Olivia Plender (2021). Photo Neil Hanna
‘Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power’, Olivia Plender (2021). Photo Neil Hanna
‘Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power’, Olivia Plender (2021). Photo Neil Hanna
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
Photographs from the late 1980s and 1990s, including: ‘To Let You Understand…’ (1987–88), ‘Lothian Health Campaign’ (1993) and ‘Zero Tolerance’ (1991-2). Franki Raffles. Curated by Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu. Courtesy University of St Andrews Photographic Collection, and the Estate of Franki Raffles. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ). Life Support exhibition detail including Focus E15 materials. Photo Alan Dimmick
Photographs from the late 1980s and 1990s, including: ‘To Let You Understand…’ (1987–88), ‘Lothian Health Campaign’ (1993) and ‘Zero Tolerance’ (1991-2). Franki Raffles. Curated by Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu. Courtesy University of St Andrews Photographic Collection, and the Estate of Franki Raffles. Photo Alan Dimmick
'Vacant Village' Jerry Pagne (1986) Woodcut Print. Courtesy Tom Simonds and Holly Graff; Bottom: 'Docklands Community Poster Project', Peter Dunn and Loraine Neeson (1981-88). Documentation from photomural sequences, action and exhibition roadshow. Presented as part of 'If You Lived Here...', Martha Rosler (2021), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
'Docklands Community Poster Project', Peter Dunn and Loraine Neeson (1981-88). Documentation from photomural sequences, action and exhibition roadshow. Presented as part of 'If You Lived Here...', Martha Rosler (2021), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
Top: 'Progressive', Shona Macnaughton (2017. Performance documentation; Bottom: archive materials. Presented as part of 'If You Lived Here...', Martha Rosler (2021), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
'Sissy and Cherry outside of EINSTEINS NYC', Greer Lankton (1987). Courtesy Greer Lankton Archives Museum (G.L.A.M)
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘Glasgow Housing Struggle Timeline’, Joey Simons and Keira McLean (2021). Presented as part of 'If You Lived Here...', Martha Rosler (2021), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), video lounge. Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), Life Support exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
Photographs from the late 1980s and 1990s, including: ‘To Let You Understand…’ (1987–88), ‘Lothian Health Campaign’ (1993) and ‘Zero Tolerance’ (1991-2). Franki Raffles. Curated by Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu. Courtesy University of St Andrews Photographic Collection, and the Estate of Franki Raffles. Photo Alan Dimmick
Photographs from the late 1980s and 1990s, including: ‘To Let You Understand…’ (1987–88), ‘Lothian Health Campaign’ (1993) and ‘Zero Tolerance’ (1991-2). Franki Raffles. Curated by Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu. Courtesy University of St Andrews Photographic Collection, and the Estate of Franki Raffles. Photo Alan Dimmick
‘If You Lived Here…’, Martha Rosler (1989 - ), exhibition detail. Photo Alan Dimmick
'Peggy Moffitt' Greer Lankton (1986) Archive print on flag. Life support exhibitiom detail. Photo: Alan Dimmick