Alexandra Orlova’s first trilogy of exhibitions explores strategies to exorcise fears
Glasgow-based curator Alexandra Orlova inaugurates the trilogy of group exhibitions The Suspense of Opening Grandma’s Mystery Casserole. This first chapter explores how absurdity and humour can become coping mechanisms for unresolved anxieties – whether they concern the body, family, memory, social life or the ordinary objects around us.
The exhibition ventures into the liminal space between the two meanings of ‘suspense’ – from a state of anxiety in the face of the unknown to the narrative mechanism that generates a development. Faced with uncertainty and fear, we invent stories, rituals, museums, memorials and talismans through which to apprehend and connect with the world. Across the exhibition, the artists consider what happens when reality becomes uncertain, strange or difficult to control, and the different strategies we develop to make it manageable.
The exhibition takes place at Strange Field, a former brick-red weaving factory in Glasgow’s East End. It unfolds around a central work, Luke Cockayne’s installation Tree Museum (2026): a wobbly, circular structure functioning as a ‘museum’ for found, ordinary materials, such as branches, feathers, wool and ropes. Cockayne resorts to humour to provoke the authority of museum institutions in deciding which objects should acquire cultural value. At the same time, the work proposes a more generous possibility: that the dull, overlooked and apparently purposeless might deserve to be looked at, collected and cared for.
The transformation of the insignificant into something profoundly meaningful is also pursued in Elizabeth Riddell’s Backcourt Liz (2026), in which a local heroine of the Glasgow household is elevated into a civic icon. Riddell’s work operates between affection, nostalgia and absurdity, asking who and what becomes worthy of commemoration. Similarly, in Imogen Cowan’s film Questo Ti Volevo Dire (2025), family stories and superstitious rituals serve as mechanisms to delay the anxiety of an inevitable separation within the family.
Glenn’s Story Time, Hold for 2x (2026) employs humour to address a traumatic healthcare experience. The artist adopts TikTok’s personal storytelling as a strategy for relief and exorcism of bodily pain. The adopted comic approach also allows her to address the social taboo of speaking publicly about women’s healthcare and eventually serves a wider social function – to operate as an empathetic device for other women who share her same experience.
The loss of certainty and control is also at play in Margarita Shuvaeva’s St Peter (2025). The artist, however, does not resort to humour to address anxiety, but embraces contingency as part of the artistic process – the paint, kept deliberately diluted, exceeds the control of the gesture and begins to drip. Going beyond representation, Shuvaeva creates spaces that capture the structures and tensions of forms, where the vividly perceived gradually dissolves: an unfolding towards the unknown, in which the artist herself becomes a medium, a carrier through which the work takes shape.
While Anna Solomko recurs to Augmented Reality to unsettle reality and animate a mural, Vlada Markinadova employs painting to explore how we project familiarity into the outside through our stories, memories, or associations. Markinadova deliberately employs the artistic medium as a site where perception is re-activated. Spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, her practice develops around a research thread in which viewers are invited to complete the fragmented, the incomplete and the blurred with their own memories. In Transparent, the painted landscape plays with the idea of an abstract, generic image as a space the viewer can enter, finding comfort in a scene that becomes familiar through the act of projecting personal memories.
Taken together, the works in the exhibition offer personal responses to the unknown and the unfamiliar, which they confront by laughing at them, ritualising or remembering them, or simply allowing them to unfold beyond their control or throughout the viewer’s personal memories. Storytelling becomes the central element that allows living with and through anxiety, a way of healing, an escape, a provocation, the activation of a memory. Like the mysterious casserole of the exhibition’s title, the unknown remains impossible to fully apprehend until we open it – but perhaps the unfolding of the narrative lies in the stories it contains.
