“The Scottish Pavilion, located in the Palazzo Pisani, surely offers one of the most solid group shows proposed by the national representations. The individual works and projects of the three Glasgow-based artists launch a triangular set of proposals that gravitate around material culture and its potential to shape personal memories (Corin Sworn), the representation of history (Duncan Campbell), or the inner value of objects (Hayley Tompkins).

In her video The Foxes (2012), Corin Sworn pursues her analysis of how the circulation of images and objects generates narratives and intertwines them with history. The starting point for her project in Venice was the rediscovery of a collection of fieldwork slides taken by her father, an anthropologist, in Peru in the 1970s. Sworn returned to the same area where the images were taken with her father, using the old photographs to explore aspects of imaging, memory, places, and oral transmission. Duncan Cambell’s film It for Others (2013) departs from Marker and Resnais’s 1953 film essay Statues also Die to pursue a meditation on the life, death, and value of objects. It includes a superb illustration of the basic principles of the exchange of commodities enacted by the Michael Clark Company. And Hayley Tompkins’s floor installation of photographs and paintings puts together different scales of familiar, commonplace scenes and objects (from the depiction of a traffic jam to an electric plug or to the proliferation of plastic bottles) in such a way that they all become part of a set of recognizable, familiar presences.”