From Jamie Crewe’s fantasy-tinged live performance at Tramway to Lisette May Monroe’s study of heartbreak and betrayal at Gulabi Photo LTD
David Wojnarowicz | The Modern Institute | 5 – 21 June
I can’t help but draw atmospheric parallels, however loose, between the new outpost of The Modern Institute, in a derelict Georgian terrace on the south side of the Clyde, and the hotbed of art and sex that enlivened the Hudson River piers in early 1980s New York. This imposing former townhouse, most recently used as a strip club before lying empty for 15 years, has been pared back to the structural stone and brick in preparation for a redevelopment that will see it become the gallery’s primary site, with a library and archive. The inaugural solo exhibition, ‘some day this will all be crumbling ruins’ – unbelievably, Wojnarowicz’s first in Scotland – comprises a selection of the activist and artist’s photography, writing, moving image and paintings, including works made in and around the Hudson piers in the early 1980s. It explores how the waterfront’s abandoned industrial landscape fermented queer, erotic and creative activity; cruising in ruins, as Fiona Anderson describes in Cruising the Dead River (2019), is a furtive methodology.