Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art

A star burns forever is a star that burns in me

 Tahliah Simumba, Candy, 2025
Dates and Opening times

Fri 5 Jun - Sun 21 Jun,

Thurs – Sun, 12pm - 6pm

Venue

Strange Field, 105-109 French Street, G40 4EH

Participants
Tahliah Simumba
Presented by

Tahliah Simumba

Supported by

Creative Scotland; Strange Field; additionally supported by Glasgow International with funds from the Scottish Government's Festival EXPO Fund

Accessiblity

Level Access, Step Free: The venue has ramped or level access and/or lifts to upper floors


Accessible Toilets: The venue has a wheelchair accessible toilet


Gender Neutral Toilets: The venue has toilets not separated by gender or sex

A star that burns forever is a star that burns in me marks the first solo exhibition by Scottish artist and musician Tahliah Simumba, also known as TAAHLIAH. The exhibition brings together a new body of work comprising a series of oil paintings on wooden panels accompanied by a durational sound installation.

Drawing on extensive research into pop-cultural figures whose aesthetics of transness exceed or unsettle vacuous identity labels, this body of work explores the unstable boundaries of the transfeminised image. The exhibition traces how figures both across and beyond trans identity have informed the visual codes that signify “successful” transsubjective iconography.

These questions emerge in dialogue with a text by Marquis Bey that frames transness as a primordial force, an openness set in motion by the first burning stars. This conceptual framework shapes Tahliah's approach to image-making, positioning this iconographic terrain not as a fixed taxonomy but as something glamorous, generative, and unbound, operating through resonance rather than strict definition.