About this Event
You are warmly invited to join us for the preview of our new exhibition 'Afterlives: The Weaver, A Score, An Archipelago', curated by Alaya Ang, which opens in the Reid Gallery at 5pm on Thursday 9th July 2026.
Your ticket will also give you access to the exhibition preview of '' which opens in the Window on Heritage at the same time.
Inspired by the Glasgow 2026 Festival theme of ‘social justice’, this group exhibition brings together artists whose work engages with Southeast Asian legacies of the Commonwealth. Focusing on practices that draw from archival materials and oral histories, the exhibition approaches history as partial, contested, and continually reworked, and considers how contemporary artists revisit and reframe inherited narratives to uncover obscured or marginalised histories. The works aim to sensitively deal with routes to a just future through the acknowledgement of individual histories.
This exhibition includes Gogularaajan Rajendran’s film 'Coolie’s Chorus' (2025) that draws on Tamil plantation songs to foreground the lived experiences of indentured labourers, revealing how collective memory persists through voice and performance. Erika Tan reflects on the life of Halimah Binte Abdullah, a Malayan weaver who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London, to bring to attention the forgotten, overlooked, marginalised, and eclipsed subjects of empire. Alongside these works, Elia Nurvista’s practice examines the contemporary politics of plantation economies through the palm oil industry, connecting colonial agricultural systems to present-day forms of extraction, monoculture, and global capital.
The works on display trace the enduring impacts of colonial systems, particularly in relation to labour, migration, and plantation logics, while attending to the ways these histories continue to shape cultural memory and material conditions today.
Afterlives: The Weaver, A Score, An Archipelago is curated by Alaya Ang, an artist-curator originally from Singapore, now based in Glasgow. Rooted in community-led and collective modes of working, Alaya’s practice engages with Southeast Asian histories to explore the intersections of home, migration, and ancestral improvisation.
Image: 'Coolie's Chorus' director Gogularaajan Rajendran, reading one of the poems from 'Malaysian Tamil Folk Songs' (2025)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Reid Gallery, The Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
