For their winter programme, DCA opens the first Scottish solo shows of artists Tako Taal and Rae-Yen Song.

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Opening on 11 December, DCA presents a new film work accompanied by painting, collage and archival materials by Tako Taal in gallery one and a fantastical sculptural installation by Rae-Yen Song in gallery two. Although each exhibition stands in its own right together they explore themes around family, ancestral pasts and reimagining alternative futures.

These are exhibitions of slow emergence and deep connection, which will allow us and our audiences to gently move through the last weeks of 2021 into a more hopeful 2022.”

Eoin Dara, Head of Exhibitions, DCA

Rae Yen-Song – ▷▥◉▻

Using a complex large scale sculptural installation, Song gives viewers a glimpse of an alternate dimension, shaped according to the ancestral logics and imagined futures of the artists family, which serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge.

Using myth and fantasy, and actively rejecting Western narrative structures in favour of experimental forms, this work interrogates issues of diaspora and hybridity, in spaces created by the artist where cultural rules and social norms have been overturned.

Tako Taal – At the Shore Everything Touches 

Set in her family’s home village in The Gambia – Juffureh, this new body of work centres on Juffureh, its geography, historical significance as a trading post and fort during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the ways in which its histories are used and instrumentalised in the present day.

In this exhibition, Taal reconstructs whispered anecdotes and artefacts from family archives to trace the shifts that merge and split boundaries between body, land and the state.

Two new publications will be produced as part of these projects, with commissioned texts by Kandace Siobhan Walker and JJ Chan responding to and connecting with Taal and Song’s respective exhibitions.

The exhibitions will run until 20 March 2022.

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