Nothing Personal: critical writing & art

Join artist and writer Calum Sutherland, writer Kiah Endelman Music of Nothing Personal Magazine and members of the LUX Scotland team for two writing workshops as part of our Aberdeen programme.

The first workshop will centre on the field of art writing, the scope and focus of the magazine and the essay as a generative critical form. The second will look more closely at responding to artworks and developing strategies for review writing and the ethics of editing. The workshops will also include a short contextual introduction about the formation of Nothing Personal Magazine and its relationship to criticality and the Scottish art scene.

There are eight workshop places available and we encourage participants to attend both sessions, where possible. The event is open to those with an interest in critical writing and art and we would expect that the group would include participants at an earlier stage in their careers who would value learning new methods and developing their writing in a supported space.

Please note that the workshop is for those who are no longer in full-time education.

Calum Sutherland is an artist and writer. He is the editor of Nothing Personal. His criticism has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Japan Times and MAP Magazine. He has shown work at Studio Pavillion at House for an Art Lover (2019), and Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles (2018). He co-runs exhibition space 20 Albert Road and works on curatorial projects with Grace Johnston as Cento.

Kiah Endelman Music is a writer based in Glasgow. She is an associate editor for Nothing Personal. Her writing has been published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, MAP Magazine and PUB Journal, performed at The CCA and Glasgow Women’s Library and exhibited at Govan Project Space. She is currently working on a PhD at the University of Glasgow, entitled Living Still with Injury: writing reparative midrash as an act of feminist, resistant memory-making.

Nothing Personal is a magazine for art, essays and reviews, based in Glasgow. Edited by Esther Draycott, Kiah Endelman Music, Maria Howard and Calum Sutherland, Issue I was released in August 2021. Nothing Personal responds to the problems of criticism in a small arts scene. Overlaps in professional and personal positions, competition and risk lead to a landscape in which critical thinking takes place in private spaces and between small groups. This context sparked the magazine’s conception, acting as a starting point for debate and to let artists contribute to and re-centre these debates.