Glasgow International today announces further details for its 7th edition, which opens on 8 April 2016. Over the 18-day Festival, Glasgow International 2016 will host an ambitious programme of new works, site-specific commissions, new venues, exhibitions and events at over 75 locations across the city of Glasgow. Exhibiting work by more than 220 of the best local and international artists, the 2016 Festival will further showcase Glasgow as one of the world’s most important creative hubs for contemporary visual art.

As part of the Glasgow International Director’s Programme, the Festival will stage a group show by five artists Lawrence Lek, Sheila Hicks, Alexandra Bircken, Mika Rottenberg and Amie Siegel at Tramway. The exhibition, co-designed by Martin Boyce, will focus on ideas of production, manufacture, material culture, design, history and labour. Glasgow’s cultural spaces exist predominately as a result of its industrial legacy in shipbuilding, metal-works, textiles and its role as a key trading port as many of Glasgow’s galleries and museums are reclaimed spaces born from this wealth of industry.

For this exhibition, Alexandra Bircken will show new works which fit into the tracks of Tramway. Incorporating reclaimed metal sheets, the work will engage both conceptually and literally with the history of the Tramway space and the impotence of the defunct lines. Artist Laurence Lek will create a new commission for the 2016 Festival. Using architectural models, renderings and virtual reality video, Lek’s work depicts the fictional last voyage of the QE2 as it returns to Glasgow where it was designed and built amid the social and industrial upheaval of the 1960s. American textile artist Sheila Hicks is creating a vertical installation made of soft, sculptural threads tightly wound together. Within the piece, which will fill the height of the Tramway, Hicks will juxtapose colours and textures, clashing the hand-made textile work with the industrial steel framework of the building to create a monumental presence within the space.

Glasgow International 2016 will feature a number of solo exhibitions by both international and Glasgow-based artists, showing across the city. At the Gallery of Modern Art, GoMA, the Festival will present a solo exhibition by German artist Cosima von Bonin entitled Who’s Exploiting Who In The Deep Sea? The exhibition brings together a series of von Bonin’s works from 2006 onwards exploring the artist’s affection for the creatures of the sea. Weaving together humour with melancholy, these works have ambiguous roles which explore art history, popular culture, craft, and feminism. The exhibition will be presented in collaboration with SculptureCenter, New York who will show a parallel exhibition of her work from September – December 2016. In the GoMA 3 gallery, an exhibition by artist Tessa Lynch will be presented. Describing this exhibition, the Painter’s Table, as an architectural drama, Lynch will present a collection of new sculptural works which mimic the objects, scenarios and histories found on her daily commute. The mundane examination of this regular journey from home to work generates a self-portrait, exposing what it is to be a female artist living in this city.

For Glasgow International, British artist Aaron Angell will present a solo exhibition, The Death of Robin Hood, split across two venues. In Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Angell will exhibit new sculptural work, works in iron, assemblages of sixteenth century furniture and other found objects on the mezzanine level facing the museum’s great organ. Central to this presentation will be a theatrical programme of organ recitals. At Glasgow Botanic Gardens, Angell will also present a series of new ceramic sculptures among plants in the National Begonia collection.

Glasgow based artist Claire Barclay will create a new commission in response to one of Glasgow’s oldest arts spaces, Kelvin Hall which, dating back to 1927, is currently undergoing renovation and with the first phase due to open later in 2016. Barclay’s work draws upon aspects of the building’s past to create a large-scale installation within one of the current disused spaces. By responding to archival material relating to the 1951 Exhibition of Industrial Power, Barclay will explore past and present attitudes to our industrial heritage and its influence on culture. Also in Kelvin Hall, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Helen Johnson will be presented in collaboration with Mary Mary.

Johnson’s work poses questions about the ways in which history is formed and its reliability today. The exhibition will consist of a series of largescale paintings on un-stretched canvas that, suspended from the ceiling in the foyer of Kelvin Hall, will variously frame and obscure one another. In addition, Canadian artist Tamara Henderson will display a solo exhibition at Mitchell Library.

Henderson began creating the work for this show during her recent one-month residency at Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath, as part of a joint Royal Over-seas League Residency 2015. The exhibition will feature two large-scale sculptures, Garden Photographer Scarecrow and Body Fountain Fetch, which represent totems to seasonal change, pagan gods and goddesses.

For more information www.glasgowinternational.org