Thursday 30 October 2025
– Saturday 29 November 2025
- Current Events
- Window on Heritage
Exhibition: 30 October 2025 – 29 November 2025
Opening Hours:
Mon to Sat 10am – 4pm
Sun – Closed
Access to the exhibition is through the main entrance of the Reid Building, which has step-free access and double-width doors.
For Accessibility Information click here
Seep
30 October 2025 – 29 November 2025
Window on Heritage
Seep is an exhibition exploring Glasgow’s saturated histories and hydropoetics, featuring contemporary moving image works by Alia Syed, Tako Taal, Joanne Lee, Winnie Herbstein, and Sulaïman Majali. Bringing these together with archival ephemera from GSA Archives & Collections, the exhibition assembles this material around the concept of hydropoetics—how water might act as a carrier of memory, history, and place. This project is curated by Kelly Rappleye in a collaboration with GSA Archives & Collections as part of Rappleye’s SGSAH-AHRC awarded doctoral research in the GSA’s SoFA.
Across different urban sites and contexts, and through a variety of film formats and methods, Seep invites visitors to inhabit water as an alternative way of sensing the city. Through immersive film installation and archival display, the exhibition reflects on watery entanglements of empire, exile, migration, and urban displacement—histories often absent from the civic imaginaries through which Glasgow narrates itself.
The works in this exhibition evoke water as both poetic and material archive—tracing stories of migration, displacement, and colonial legacies embedded in Glasgow’s urban fabric. Water in film troubles the promise of the camera’s visual capture, and of the image as history. Hydropoetics refract, obscure, and resist legibility. Drifting, eroding, and depositing residues that resist neat classification, hydropoetics evoke absent histories in affective, ephemeral, and marginal forms.
In this exhibition, curator Kelly Rappleye’s explores curatorial approaches to moving image art in contested urban landscapes, with a focus on water as both method and subject. Her research takes Glasgow as a focus to examine how tracing the poetics and politics of water can help surface submerged histories—imperial, displaced, migratory, diasporic—that continue to shape the city’s spatial politics and cultural memory.
