Glasgow’s biggest visual art celebration to scale back for 10th edition in 2024

Work from 75 artists to be showcased across 30 spaces during GI festival

Delaine Le Bas will be among the artists involved in the Glasgow International visual art festival when it returns in 2024. Picture: Iris Ranzinger

Glasgow's biggest celebration of visual art has revealed it will be scaling back its programme when it returns in the summer.

The number of artists being showcased in the Glasgow International (GI) festival will be less than a third than of what it was when the last full-scale programme was staged in 2018.

The 10th edition of the event will be staged across 45 exhibitions, projects, performances and events, with work from 75 artists featuring at more than 30 different spaces.

Susan Pui San Lok was among the artists featured in the Glasgow International visual art event in Glasgow in 2021. Picture: John Devlin

In comparison, the 2018 festival featured work from 268 artists across 90 exhibitions, projects, performances and events in 70 venues.

The event, which has been on standstill funding for the last five years, is normally staged biennually but the 2020 edition was postponed at the eleventh hour due to the first pandemic lockdown.

The festival was staged in a hybrid format, showcasing work in venues and online, when it returned in 2021, when 70 exhibitions exhibitions, projects, performances and events unfolded.Organisers said they want to focus on a smaller festival to ensure more support for participating artists and arts organisations based in the city, including funding year-round projects.

Venues confirmed for next year include the Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Platform, the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at Glasgow University, Glasgow School of Art, Tramway, Transmission and SWG3.

Richard Burkett is director of the Glasgow International visual art festival.

An official announcement from the festival said: “The remodelled format presents a collaborative and collective vision that equally platforms projects initiated by the Glasgow International curatorial team and those which are conceived, developed and delivered by individuals and organisations across the city.

“This new approach prioritises structural and artistic equity, with an overall reduction in the number of festival projects allowing more careful consideration and support for how each is realised and experienced.”

Mr Birkett said: “We got a lot of help with emergency funding during the pandemic to ensure that people got paid for the commitments we made to artists for the 2020 programme and for the festival to happen in 2021. However the festival’s basic funding has not changed since 2018 so that has had an impact on us.

"The other big post-pandemic considerations for us are what the ethos of the festival is in future and where our priorities lie.

“It is evident to us that we should be prioritising addressing, and be responsive to, the visual arts ecology in Glasgow and across Scotland more broadly. We’ve been thinking carefully about what that looks like, including our year-round presence in the city.

"We will be doing less projects so that we can support the projects that we do have in really effective ways. It’s not just down to money.”