The Ring in the Fish

The Ring in the Fish is a multi-part exhibition featuring a new experimental 16mm film work by Alia Syed, presented as a series of moving image vignettes. Syed’s practice is the product of her engagement in and response to a nexus of geopolitical, historical and personal factors, which she seeks to reimagine within the immersive space of cinema.

Drawing inspiration from the tale of St. Mungo — the patron saint and founder of Glasgow — and the miracle of The Fish and the Ring, the title becomes a conduit for the transformative nature of both individual and collective myth. The exhibition marks a personal journey unpicking a broader history of Glasgow, reworking filmmaker Humphrey Jennings' notion of “making visible the delicate re-balancing of facts, events and ideas”.

Syed gleans stories and images from a series of interviews she initiated with various members of the South Asian community in Glasgow. Spanning generations, this work is preoccupied with how family memories and traditions are passed down, troubling the spaces between official narratives. The Ring in the Fish explores what role imagination holds in migration, and how images woven into family and community lore create new psychic landscapes, enabling new ways of being.

Opening

Join us for an opening on Friday 16 May, 6pm - 9pm.

Alia Syed

Alia Syed, born in Swansea and currently living between London and Glasgow, has been creating experimental films in Britain for over three decades. She is interested in how subjectivities are produced through culture, diaspora and location; and her practice therefore interrogates the protean nature of self-narration: enfolding fact, fiction, present, past, and how histories are made and unmade. Her work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world.

In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Jarman Award; and exhibited in Delirium // Equilibrium at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. In 2019 she was ‘Artist in Focus’ at Courtisane Festival in Gent, Belgium; and her film Meta Incognita: Missive II (2019) was showcased in Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain at the Yale Centre of British Art (2019), as well as (Im)material worlds: Tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists’ moving image from Southeast Asia and United Kingdom (2022). In 2023, her seminal work Fatima’s Letter (1992) was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of Life is more important than Art.