Welcome

Welcome to the 11th edition of Glasgow International, Scotland’s biennial festival of contemporary art. The festival holds a programme of exhibitions and events across the city that are free and open to everyone. We are very happy to welcome visitors and participants from Glasgow, Scotland, the UK, and around the world.

Glasgow International brings together work by over 60 artists, presented across 32 venues throughout the city. The festival is a collaborative undertaking, with projects developed by artists, curators, organisers, independent spaces across the city, and the GI festival team.

The programme reflects a wide range of artistic practices and career trajectories, encompassing emerging and established artists, extending to presentations that reconsider histories of visibility and recognition.

Projects span exhibition-making, performance, public programming, community organising, and research-based practice. While some works take the form of time-bound performance, others unfold over the three weeks of the festival, with several expanding beyond this period to continue throughout the summer in partner venues.

Glasgow’s reputation for contemporary art and critical discourse is inseparable from the historic and ongoing work of artists and artist-led activity. Glasgow International is made possible by a rich cultural ecology across the city, sustained through collective labour, mutual support, and long-standing commitment.

Central to the festival is its international orientation and grounding in solidarity across borders. Artists in the programme engage with both local and global conditions, attending to shared urgencies and interdependencies. At a time marked by genocide, war, deepening divisions, and widespread anxiety, the festival commits to creating space for artists who confront these realities.

Rather than imposing a single unifying theme, the festival invites visitors to form their own connections and resonances as they move through the programme. The thinking that links artists and works is often made visible through our public programme, Gatherings, which offers space for reflection, congregation, critical dialogue, and shared exploration.

Across the festival, you will witness artistic experimentation, personal and ancestral memory, intergenerational kinship, and connections that cross cultures and trace the textures and rhythms of different lands and waters. We aim to create sites for encounter, hospitality, and shared focus, holding space for tenderness, empathy, alliance, and solidarity.

The 2026 edition of Glasgow International marks the debut of our Special Projects, developed with organisations deeply embedded in Glasgow’s communities. These commissions amplify the ongoing, everyday practices of these organisations, celebrating the expertise, insight, and care they bring to the city. This year, we are commissioning Platform and Rumpus Room to create opportunities for communal experience and exchange.

Returning to Glasgow International across three weekends is our public programme, Gatherings. These free events and activities provide spaces to engage with recurring ideas and themes across the festival, supporting congregation and collaborative discussion. Through workshops, talks, screenings, and conversations, Gatherings brings visitors, participants, artists, researchers, and organisers together for moments of conviviality and reflection.

Gatherings 2026 will foster collaboration, communication, and the circulation of ideas, laying bare how artistic and curatorial practices emerge through ecologies of exchange between local and international networks and communities. Gatherings is a platform for synthesising insights across the programme, generating encounters, and activating cross-cultural and intergenerational resonances.

Events will be organised and curated by the programme team, including a range of artist and curator talks, workshops, performances, and screenings that reflect collective and individual practices.

Details of each Gatherings event will be available on the festival website from 5 May. Please note that booking is essential.

We want to thank the artists, curators, and organisers who have given their time to this year’s festival.

We are indebted to Richard Birkett, Siobhan Carroll, and Diana Stevenson, our colleagues who led the festival programming and delivery team in 2024 and contributed so much to this programme.

Finally, we hope that you will join us in June for a memorable two weeks of incredible art.

Helen Nisbet, Festival Director

Martel Ollerenshaw, Festival Manager

Poi Marr, Curator

Pelumi Odubanjo, Curator

Robyn Haddon, Open Programme Convenor

Abie Soroño, Festival Officer