Graham Fagen: Downpresser
Date: 15 March – 28 May 2007
Space: Gallery 3

An exhibition of new work by Graham Fagen, organised as prt of work in Glasgow Museums’ to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Downpresserer, which took its title from the song Downpresser Man, by the Jamaican musician Peter Tosh (1944-87), illustrates the interest of Fagen in combing elements of Scottish national heritage, such as Robert Burns’s poems, with Jamaican aspects. The show displayed works from a research trip to Jamaica in 2006, a photographic portrait of Alvera Coke, Tosh’s mother, alongside a video installation of a performance of Burns’s poem Slave’s Lament. An important element of the exhibit was the documentation of Burns’s attempt to become a sugar plantation manager in Jamaica, in 1786. Fagen’s screen prints of the ship illustration used to advertise the passages that Burns intended to take. On occasion of the bicentenary anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slavery in 2007, the exhibition highlights Scotland’s prominent role in the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century.

Artists: Graham Fagen

Links:
• ’Graham Fagen: Downpresser’, The List, 9 April 2007
• The Scotsman
• Evening Times
• The Sunday Herald