Stories from Glasgow – a group exhibition curated by Leo Hajducki

A mixed-media exhibition amplifying diverse and often overlooked narratives from Glasgow-based artists and outsider practitioners, articulated through collage, print, photography, sound, poetry, and graffiti.

Stories from Glasgow is a mixed-media exhibition amplifying narratives often marginalised, softened, or excluded from dominant accounts of the city. Curated through collective making rather than extraction, the project positions lived experience not as content to be mined, but as knowledge in its own right.

Developed through artist-led workshops across three of Glasgow’s booster wards—Calton, Govan, and Govanhill—the exhibition foregrounds creative practice as a means of reclaiming space, articulating personal and collective histories, and building connection across difference. Booster wards are areas identified as experiencing the highest levels of child poverty, targeted by the Glasgow Child Poverty Programme with preventative, place-based interventions. Rather than presenting these neighbourhoods through deficit narratives or statistics, Stories from Glasgow centres the knowledge, creativity, and agency already present within them. The artworks emerge not as responses to intervention, but as affirmations of lived experience—complex, resilient, and irreducible to the language of need.

The exhibition brings together collage, screen print, photography, sound, writing, and graffiti—mediums selected for their accessibility, immediacy, and deep roots in community expression. Artist-participants collaborated with established Glasgow-based practitioners whose work prioritises experimentation, care, and co-creation, producing pieces that resist polish in favour of honesty, tactility, and presence.

Rather than presenting a single story of the city, Stories from Glasgow operates as a constellation of voices: some whispered, some defiant, some deliberately anonymous. Together, they form a collective portrait of a fluid city, resisting tokenism, branding exercises, or surface-level representation. The exhibition embraces the fragmentary and unfinished, acknowledging that many stories are still unfolding.

Care, consent, and accessibility are embedded throughout the project’s structure. Decisions around authorship, attribution, and display were made in dialogue with participants, recognising that visibility is not always synonymous with empowerment. In doing so, the exhibition challenges conventional gallery hierarchies, asking what it might mean to encounter art through mutual respect rather than consumption. Audiences are invited to move beyond passive observation: to feel, to listen, and to encounter the city through co-creation, imagination, and shared authorship.

In this exhibition, you will notice the absence of individual wall labels naming the creators of certain works. This is a deliberate curatorial choice. Many participating artists are currently in care or otherwise vulnerable, and for some, anonymity is a necessary form of protection. Others have chosen not to be individually named. Stories from Glasgow challenges the assumption that visibility must always take the form of bold, declarative authorship. Participation in an exhibition need not require self-disclosure, nor should artistic value depend on recognition within conventional systems. The works presented here are contributions to a shared cultural moment, not commodities awaiting extraction. Where consent has been given, artists’ names are included collectively