Margaret Salmon's survey exhibition at Tramway features multichannel film installations and a screening series

A major survey of Glasgow-based filmmaker Margaret Salmon's work is presented at Tramway in Glasgow from 16 February to 18 March 2018. Cocurated by LUX Scotland and Tramway, the exhibition includes three multichannel film installations with stacked monitors showing different films on each screen. It also features Here, there, everywhere… outside over there, a four-week screening programme of short 16mm and 35mm films. Salmon's films, spanning from PS (1998/2002) to Company (2018), imbue everyday scenes with intimacy, such as in House (2018), which silently tours empty interiors. Her work often focuses on the experiences of suburban women, exploring gender politics through cinema-vérité forms, recalling Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx. Films like Peggy (2003) and Ramapo Central (2003) document daily routines, using voices that may or may not belong to onscreen characters. Salmon's approach avoids preciousness by layering sound and narrative, as seen in PS with repetitive marital accusations. The exhibition highlights her epigrammatic visual vignettes, contrasting with Karl Ove Knausgaard's linear narratives in My Struggle. ArtReview covered the show in its March 2018 issue.