Tako Taal is an artist-filmmaker and programmer living in Glasgow. She graduated in 2015 from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. She was a 2019 RAW Academy fellow at RAW Material Company, Dakar and Artist in Residence at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018-20.
Taal’s work often considers the paradoxes of black subjectivities, and her artistic practice evokes cited, spectral and physical bodies to undermine history, destabilise images and disrupt ideas around identity. At stake in her work are the psychic structures of colonial relations and the question of how vivid they remain in the present.
In 2021 Taal was shortlisted for the 2021 Margaret Tait Award, her work is presented at NADA House, Governors Island, New York, and she is co-programmer of GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, LUX Scotland’s artists’ moving image festival. Other exhibitions include: Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019; Grand Union, Birmingham, 2018; CCA Glasgow, 2017; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, 2017; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2019; New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, 2016.
Talbot Rice Residents is a 2-year funded programme for emerging artists based anywhere in Scotland. The programme offers artists a studio base and workshop access at Edinburgh College of Art, access to the research and collections of the University of Edinburgh, and a series of Masterclasses, writing commissions and studio visits with invited guests. The original plan to end the first iteration of the programme with a collective trip to Cove Park was halted due to the pandemic, we are very pleased however to be able to adapt the plans and offer the 5 artists an individual residential retreat this year.
Image: Tako Taal, ‘Residue’, Colour slide film, slide projector on ash stand, 2018 [Patrick Dandy]
