For Glasgow International 2016, Queens Park Railway Club are proud to present, Re Enter the Dragon, an exhibition by artist and author Stewart Home. In this exhibition Home will utilise digital video, found imagery, performance, sculptural installation and text as a means of exploring cultural hybridity. Of particular relevance to this show are the genre of kung fu movies featuring Bruce Lee clones known as Brucesploitation and notions of occult androgyny. Home explores the relationship between eastern and western mysticism and the relationship of ‘the spiritual’ to bodybuilding and martial arts; while simultaneously delineating the ways in which hypermasculinity inevitably finds itself tipping over into the feminine. While Home is looking back to a film-culture of the 1970s, he is also looking forward to a new world we have yet to create.
QPRC will also produce Radio Home, a YouTube channel featuring serialised audio transcripts of Home’s critically acclaimed book with an Aberdeenshire setting, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.
“...Roared on by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Jenny Turner (who, in the London Review of Books, once declared: ‘I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business
not knowing the work of Stewart Home’), he’s a one-man awkward squad whose adventures in perverse outsiderdom and menacing wind-up tactics place him in the English heretical tradition of the K Foundation, David Britton and Michael Butterworth’s Savoy Books...”
Sukhdev Sandhu Frieze magazine, May 2012
This work is intellectually and philosophically rich while the stress on cultural hybridity makes it highly relevant to its host community. Govanhill is an area where an estimated 53 languages are spoken and has traditionally been a cultural melting pot. Glasgow like a number of other UK cities, is home to several impressive art collections plundered from around the world. These collections have become part of
the history and cultural identity of this city. Questioning notions of authorship and ownership in cultural production is a major theme in Home’s work, as is a questioning of all capitalist hierarchies and structures.
Stewart Home was born in south London in 1962. He developed an interest in northern soul, kung fu films and punk rock as a teenager, and from 1974 onwards spent a lot of his time hanging around the West End of London, both alone and in the company of other juveniles.
After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he first signed on the dole in the late seventies, and last claimed unemployment benefits in the mid-nineties. He has never held down a regular job for more than a few months at a time. On those rare occasions when he’s been forced to work, Home has taken employment as a factory labourer, agricultural labourer, shop assistant, office clerk and art class model.
Queens Park Railway Club exists to support and develop the work of artists who seek to create new ways of interrogating and understanding the world. We consistently bring work to the public that challenge definitions and expectations of contemporary art.
