GLASGOW.-Tramway presents Barbara Kruger - Twelve, on view through September 26. Twelve is an installation by one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, Barbara Kruger. First shown at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in April 2004, Twelve is a large scale video installation of twelve short scenes, written by Kruger, performed by actors and projected on opposite sides of the space to each other. Nine of the 12 scenes occur at the same time in a mealtime setting. Text scrolling along the bottom of each scene suggests the thoughts or words of the people involved.

Each scene lasts between 6 seconds and 12 minutes and portrays discussions between groups, friends or families, which evolve into arguments. The viewer stands in the centre of the installation going on around them, thrust into the middle of discussions which become increasingly hostile, feeling unease at witnessing something private yet public, real yet unreal, violent orally/ aurally but not physically.

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and now lives in New York and Los Angeles. After attending The School of Visual Arts at Syracuse University, she went on to study Art and Design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York. Barbara Kruger’s iconic red and black text and image works, where fragments of images are overlaid with short phrases or captions, owe much to her early career in graphic design and art direction at Conde Nast Publications.

Since then, Kruger has sustained a career which spans over thirty years. Her work is included in all major collections of contemporary art throughout the world, but is just as likely to be placed in non- art environments – billboards, public parks, train stations, or match boxes.

Barbara Kruger uses popular culture as both a subject and a tool in her work. Images taken from sources such as fashion magazines are juxtaposed with provocative text to criticise the very structures and values these magazines propagate. Her work poses questions, scenarios, and ideas on a range of subjects - economics, consumerism, gender politics, race, personal rights, autonomy – but all can be reduced to a simple exploration of how people function and co- exist within a hierarchical society.

”Power and its politics and hierarchies exist everywhere: in every conversation we have, in every deal we make, in every face we kiss. I try to address this power and how it choreographs the issues of violence and control, of wealth and poverty, of hope and abjection.” (from an interview with Barbara Kruger, Amnesty, March 2005)

Twelve has been programmed as a partner show to Barbara Kruger’s first ever exhibition in Scotland at Gallery of Modern Art (21 April – 26 Sep), which is part of Rule of Thumb: Contemporary art and human rights, a 13- month programme of exhibitions, workshops and events exploring human rights and the issue of violence against women. Rule of Thumb is a Glasgow City Council project developed in partnership with Amnesty International UK and Rape Crisis Scotland, and supported with funding from the Scottish Executive.