𝙍𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙞𝙨/𝙖𝙨 🌀 is a research-led exhibition presented by 16 Collective that takes the River Clyde as a critical geography: infrastructural, social, and ecological. The group exhibition shares a new body of work developed over two years of collective artistic fieldwork, research voyages, and collaborative field study along the Clyde river corridor by artists Matthew Cosslett, Maria Howard, Zsuzsanna Ihar, Coneffluents (Jac Common and Katy Lewis Hood), Sonia Levy and Bint Mbareh, Extense (Dianne Burdon and Clara Hancock), and Camara Taylor, as well as features a 2025 project, Green Clydeside, developed by Pinelopi Gardika, Leela Jadhav and Khem Rogaly.

River is/as occupies a hydrological vantage point on Glasgow, understanding the River Clyde as a vessel of multiple and overlapping stories, subjects, and social imaginaries of the city. Featuring immersive sculptural installations, moving images, and sonic environments, the project maps the Clyde’s sedimented histories and infrastructural futures.

Once dredged and engineered as a logistical conduit for colonial trade of tobacco and sugar (founding Glasgow as the ‘Second City of Empire’) the Clyde is now seen through narratives of energy transition, militarised re-industrialisation, and urban regeneration. At this material juncture of imperial debris and transitional horizons, the artworks in this exhibition locate the Clyde as a poetic field, where extractive pasts and military-industrial futures exist in spectral proximity.

The works attune to hydrological lineages of power down the Clyde, from the Gorbals’ Glasgow Sheriff’s Courthouse, to sites of military production in Govan and Scotstoun and out to the Hunterston nuclear power stations in the Firth of the Clyde. Repurposing military imaging technologies and counter-mapping tools of subsea surveillance, the artists look back at hydro-political ways of seeing the river, to ask what forms of riverine knowledge and social connection resist and exceed these violent ways of looking. 

In the exhibition, the Clyde returns to a tidal zone, where planetary infrastructures meet the flows of intimate memory, dreams and hauntings held in the riverbed. The works offer sonorous lamentation for cycles of endless war and extraction, dreaming new futures up from the silt.

Alongside the artists’ works, the exhibition presents a visual display of Green Clydeside: Modelling Military Industrial Conversion, a research project by Pinelopi Gardika, Leela Jadhav, and Khem Rogaly, supported by the Transition Security Project (Common Wealth). Employing 3D modelling, video, and a historical timeline of industrial conversion across the UK, US, and Europe, the project draws on interviews with workers at Govan and Scotstoun shipyards to model what a future away from military production, and towards public good and green energy, could look like along the Clyde.

Join us Saturday 6 June (5-7pm) for our opening event:

Green Clydeside: Sounding Alternative Futures

Our public programme continues with Coneffluent’s Porous, Ambivalent workshop series:

Taking the form of a microbiological sampling laboratory — a carrier apparatus and orbital lab shaker — Coneffluents invites you, the audience, to activate their sculptural installation in the exhibition River is/as, bringing the River Clyde into the exhibition space with living and incubating water samples.

Porous, Ambivalent workshop 1: River is/as Sample

Porous, Ambivalent workshop 2: River is/as Vessel

Lead Curator: Kelly Rappleye

Public Programme: Nell Cardozo

Production & Publication Design: Aga Paulina Młyńczak

Glasgow International

Glasgow International is Scotland’s biennial of contemporary art. Presented at locations across the city every two years, the festival is a globally-renowned platform for experiencing the vital work of artists and arts organisers active today.

Access information

🔹We’re pleased to share this exhibition will be the first at our new Clydeside venue, joining 5 Florence Street!

🔹16 Collective: 5 Florence Street, Gorbals, Glasgow, G5 0YX, Scotland

5 – 21 June, 2026

Tuesday – Sunday

Glasgow International
Scotland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art
Free & Open to all