Camara Taylor
camara taylor is an artist and – – – based in Glasgow. They work with their various selves, collaborators and organisations to produce still and moving images, texts and public programmes.
Recent projects include [mouthfeel], Tramway, Glasgow (2024), backwash, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2022) ; a rant! a reel!, Cubitt Gallery, London (2021); holus-bolus, 17th Edinburgh Art Festival; IMG_5917 (2021), with Sulaïman Majali, commissioned by the Artists’ Moving Image Festival and suspiration! commissioned by The Newbridge Project, Gateshead, which was a recipient of a 2021 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival New Cinema Award. Camara has undertaken residencies at organisations including Fonderie Darling (Montréal, 2023), Cove Park (Cove, 2021), Market Gallery (Glasgow, 2020) & National Theatre of Scotland (Glasgow, 2019). They have participated in programmes including Satellites (Collective Gallery, 2020-2022); Curatorial Directions (MAC Belfast, 2019) and Constellations (UP Projects/ FTHo, 2017-18). Camara was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery from 2016 to 2018 and Programme Coordinator of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty series at The Glasgow School of Art from 2017 until 2021.
Bankhill Ice House
Fireworks (Archives) is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s offering to the potent spirits of his home region, shot in the sculpture park of a little-known nonconformist temple in the northeast of Thailand.
Agnieszka Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself.
The film borrows its title from a poem by Polish poet of the realist/positivist style Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910). The poem ‘What the sun has seen’ recounts in a childish style the quotidian, peaceful rural activities and happy family life of the nation in the countryside, as observed by the sun on its daily journey across the sky. Polska offers her own dark, ironic version of the poem, dealing with contamination by information (information waste) and the role of the ‘helpless observer’ who, like the ‘Angel of History’ in the well-known adage by Walter Benjamin, can only look at the debris piled by lived time without being able to intervene.
