River is/as

River is/as is a group exhibition curated by 16 Collective that takes the River Clyde as a critical geography: infrastructural, social, and ecological. Occupying a hydrological vantage point on the Second City of Empire, the exhibition presents a new body of work by FieldARTS developed over two years of artistic fieldwork, research voyages, and collaborative field study along the River Clyde corridor.

Once dredged and engineered as a logistical conduit for tobacco and sugar, the Clyde is increasingly envisioned through narratives of energy transition, militarised re-industrialisation, and urban renewal. At this material juncture of colonial sediments and transitional horizons, River is/as locates the Clyde as a geographic and poetic field, where extractive histories and military-industrial futurity exist in spectral proximity.

Featuring new works by FieldARTS artists Camara Taylor, Coneffluents (Jac Common and Katy Lewis Hood), Extense (Dianne Burdon and Clara Hancock), Zsuzsanna Ihar, Maria Howard, Sonia Levy and Bint Mbareh, and Matthew Cosslett, the exhibition presents immersive installations, moving images, and sonic environments that map the Clyde’s estuarine pasts and infrastructural futures. From Govan Graving Docks to Hunterston and Cumbrae, the works attune to hydrological lineages of power down the Clyde by repurposing thermal-imaging and subsea surveillance technology, or counter-mapping petrochemical toxicity.