Programmed as part of Glasgow International 2014
A disused Underground Car Park under Fleming House tower in Glasgow’s City Centre imagines it was a Swimming Pool in an alternate history. Subverted through a vision of a past non-existent utopia, the Car Park becomes a doorway to another world, twice removed from its current status of abandonment. The exhibition is an overall transformation of this immersive space into a body of a Swimming Pool, with works by six artists (Druzkowski, Kubba, Lewis, Murphy, Owen and Shapeero)that explore the idea of “Other Spaces” on the one hand, and react to the transformation of the Car Park on the other.
“The apparent absence of a social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.”
J G Ballard, Cocaine Nights
The introduction of a fictional past (swimming pool) to an existing heterotopic space (underground car park) harkens to the utopian origin of modernist residential towers, where open spaces freed up by the piling up of apartments, were envisioned as places for leisure and recreation. The abandoned Car Park highlights the abandonment of otherwise profitable urban spaces due to the current economic conditions; while the fictional pool is both a comment on the lack of non-commercial public spaces in the City Centre, and the dissolution of the follies of modernist housing.
4th to 21st April 2014
Open Mon to Sun 12 - 6 pm
Preview - 3rd April, 6 to 9 pm
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