Creative Things To Do In Glasgow : Still Glasgow
Still Glasgow: The City Through Its Own Lens
Glasgow doesn’t stand still but sometimes the best way to understand a city is to freeze it.
Still Glasgow is a major exhibition built around photography, pulling together over 80 works that capture the city across time. It blends iconic images from the Glasgow Life Museums collection with lesser-seen pieces, creating a layered portrait of Glasgow, not just how it looks, but how artists interpret and reshape it.
Some of the works haven’t been shown since they were first acquired, including Alan Dimmick’s portrait of Franz Ferdinand and David Eustace’s Buskers Portfolio (1993). These sit alongside pieces that push beyond traditional photography, exploring how the medium itself becomes part of the story.
The timing matters. The exhibition lands at the tail end of Glasgow 850 marking 850 years of the city and rolls forward into the 30th anniversary of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in 2026.
Image: From What’s It to You? by Stansfield/Hooykaas
Where it started
The show grew from a simple idea, a conversation between GoMA curator Katie Bruce and Malcolm Dickson of Street Level Photoworks. After digging through the archives at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, a shortlist of images turned into something much bigger.
The exhibition stretches beyond still images into moving work like Roderick Buchanan’s Gobstopper (1999), built around a very Glaswegian challenge holding your breath through the Clyde Tunnel. Elsewhere, it explores how artists use photography within their wider practice, with contributions from figures like Alasdair Gray.
There’s also a focus on process artists at work, captured in real time from Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan to Oscar Marzaroli’s portrait of painter Joan Eardley in her Townhead studio.
Why it matters
This isn’t just an exhibition about Glasgow, it’s about how Glasgow is seen, remembered, and reimagined.
Through documentary, portraiture, experimentation, and archive, Still Glasgow builds a city out of fragments. Past and present collide. Personal and public blur.
And somewhere in between, you get closer to the truth of the place.
Featured artists include
Khansa Aslam, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Khadija Aurangzeb, Zubaidah Azad, Sadia Azhar, Roderick Buchanan, Nick Danziger, Alan Dimmick, David Eustace, Alasdair Gray, Bert Hardy, Rashida Hanif, Larry Herman, Shahida Imatiaz, Keith Ingham, Nikola Krugova, Patricia Macdonald, Khalida Majid, Oscar Marzaroli, Linda McCartney, Joseph McKenzie, Shazia Rani, Stansfield/Hooykaas, Nazia Soofi, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, Anetta Tancosova, Iseult Timmermans, John T Thomson, Eric Watt, and Matthew Arthur Williams.
Tickets : Free - Drop-in - no ticket required
When : Saturday 29th Nov 2025 - Sunday 13th Jun 2027
Check venue opening times
Venue : GOMA Glasgow
