Glasgow International, one of the UK’s largest and most influential visual arts festivals takes place across the city from 11 – 27 June 2021. Comprising over 70 exhibitions and events, performances and talks over 30 spaces across the city and online, and showcasing work by over 100 artists; the 2021 festival - originally scheduled to open in April 2020 – will showcase Glasgow as a centre for the production and display of innovative contemporary art.

The programme comprises a Commissioned Programme of larger-scale commissions and exhibitions in collaboration with partners and venues, as well as Across the City, a wider programme of exhibitions and projects, selected from proposals by artists, curators and producers who live and work in Glasgow. This year’s Glasgow International will also present a Digital Programme from 11 June - 31 July, giving artists an alternative space in which to present work.

The theme of this year’s Glasgow International is Attention. Our relationship to attention has changed radically in the past twelve months, even if its significance has not. The festival is a special moment, a crescendo in the creative rhythm of the city, and GI2021 seeks to step outside the everyday and open up a new space for looking, thinking and spending time with artists’ work, and to see afresh the intent behind it.

Visitors will encounter certain commissions and exhibitions which involve a forensic concentration – deep and ongoing investiture in a single concern or set of concerns. In others, there is evidence of an exacting attention to the crafting and honing of artworks. Others might involve intensely personal examinations of the self, or explore social and political concerns such as the making of coloniality or the navigation of prejudice.

The Digital Programme features artists from Across the City and the Commissioned Programmes representing their in-person exhibitions online as well as work made for the easily accessible digital programme.

Around 30 artists have made work specifically for the Digital Programme.

It also features a commissioned film from Anne-Marie Copestake in which artists from across the GI2021 programme converse, whether filmed in person around Glasgow or electronically over long distances, bringing together a prismed lens on the city’s visual art scene and its associated protagonists at a time like no other.

The Digital Programme will launch on 11 June. Information on the exhibitions can be found below.