Circus: Acts of Assembly –
Unruly Kinships
Curatorial Introduction
CIRCUS: Acts of Assembly – Unruly Kinships reimagines the circus ring as a living, re-indigenised space of gathering, performance, and care. Instead of a site of spectacle, the ring becomes a framework for exchange. An arena where art is an act of assembly and assembly becomes an act of repair. Within this circular space, artists, audiences, and institutions engage in practices of returning, listening, and co-creation.
Drawing on re-indigenisation as a curatorial method, CIRCUS unfolds as an evolving network rather than a fixed exhibition. Re-indigenisation, understood as a practice of returning, repairing, and re-rooting, invites cyclical approaches to making and thinking. This methodology aligns with CIRCUS’s interdisciplinary ethos, bridging performance, sound, archival research, movement, and social practice while foregrounding affect, embodiment, and place.
The programme brings together established and emerging artists from Scotland and Germany, including Scottish painter and visual artist Tilda Williams-Kelly and Berlin-based Mirae Kh Rhee. Their practices, spanning diasporic performance, colonial resistance, climate grief, and intercultural gesture, activate dialogue across borders and position the circus ring as a translocal platform for radical gathering.
The curatorial framework unfolds across three axes of inquiry:
1. Movement & Migration: tracing routes of people, materials, and performance traditions across Scotland, Germany, and the Caribbean.
2. Ritual & Repair: exploring how performance can heal colonial, ecological, and institutional wounds.
3. Material Intelligence: considering costume, sound, and gesture as living archives that carry cultural memory.
Practically, Acts of Assembly emerges through discursive labs, participatory workshops, artist residencies, process exhibitions, and an evolving digital publication platform that extends the project as an open archive in motion.
Envisioning the circus ring as a re-indigenised site of relation, CIRCUS transforms performance into method, gathering into research, and care into a shared ethic. By bridging Glasgow’s vibrant art ecology with German and Caribbean contexts, the project becomes a laboratory for imagination, reciprocity, and repair.
(Text by Dr Cat Dunn)
