Joey Simons – Solo Show November 2025

~ Introducing our 2025 Solo Show ~ a commission which supports an emerging artist based in Glasgow to develop, create and exhibit new artworks. The commission culminates in a 6-week exhibition, taking place in November 2025.

Joey Simons is an artist and writer working across video, theatre, research, publishing and community arts to explore the traditions and contradictions of the city’s militant political cultures. Through reconfigurations of worker-poets, communist opera-goers, street orators and autodidacts, dead and alive, new forms of immanent critique may emerge from the wreckage of defeat.

Joey’s upcoming exhibition examines practices of collective translation, underground correspondence, technical ingenuity and formal innovation in Ewan MacColl’s Theatre of Action of the 1920s and 1930s. Situated within local and international histories of the workers’ theatre movement, the project will experiment with forms of street performance, translation and publishing to investigate the limits and possibilities of radical cultural production in contemporary regimes of censorship, recuperation and class fragmentation. 

Alongside the development and creation of new artworks, Joey will host a series of collaborative events across Glasgow between September-November, further announcements to follow.