About Glasgow International 2024

Glasgow International is Scotland’s biennial festival of contemporary art. It takes seriously the idea of a festival as a celebratory event born from a particular community and context.

Glasgow is a city with a global reputation for contemporary art. More importantly than this image though, it is a city in which artists and art workers care deeply for how art exists in the world. The ways in which people organise around art and sustain spaces for it to flourish runs through the city’s veins. Equally, the ‘International’ in our name speaks to the festival’s outlook and embrace of connections to artists and artistic practices globally. But it also reflects on Glasgow as a city with complex historical and contemporary connections to peoples and places across the world. Glasgow today is a diasporic city, a social space that holds a wealth of cultural, intellectual, and emotional knowledge and experiences that tell of global impacts and accountabilities.

Many of the artworks and projects in the 2024 festival touch on concerns that resonate with these conditions: from how land and space is used and governed; to the act of listening as a social and political force; and the rituals, practices and forms of memory that define individual and collective identities.

The projects that make up the Glasgow International 2024 programme have been developed by Glasgow-based arts and community organisations, artist-run spaces, artists and independent curators, as well as by the Glasgow International team. The festival is made possible by the breadth and diversity of artistic organising and collaboration that operates year-round in the city. Alongside exhibitions by individuals and groups of artists, you can experience performances, events, publications and broadcasts. For the first time, Glasgow International has also provided funding and support to three research projects which will develop over longer periods than the festival typically allows, with possible manifestations in future festival editions.

The multiplicity of voices and artistic approaches involved in creating this festival is our great strength, but also raises important questions about the ways we work together: how do we uphold and celebrate points of connection and difference in our understandings of what art is and can be? How can the year-round relationships between artists, art spaces and the communities they live and work within be equitably and sustainably supported and amplified by a biennial festival?

In building the programme for Glasgow International 2024 we have been led by conversations around the distribution of resources, including the availability of time and energy. Glasgow International provides funding and organisational support to all festival projects developed by groups or individuals who do not have an existing source of funding; this involves a challenging process of selection from many applications. We are very grateful to everyone who applied to be part of this year’s festival, and to the artists Jamie Crewe and Rabiya Choudhry and the curators Sabrina Henry and Cédric Fauq for joining the Glasgow International team on the selection panel.