Irineu Destourelles: Glasgow International

Faint Light of the World with Contradictions

As part of Glasgow International from 5 - 21 June 2026, Outer Spaces will present 'Faint Light of the World with Contradictions', a solo exhibition from artist Irineu Destourelles co-curated with Natalia Palombo.

The exhibition will explore how ambivalent historical narratives tied to one’s culture and language can co-exist within a single body and identity. Drawing on the artist’s experience as a multilingual, diasporic Creole individual, the work asks: how can one live with, and speak from, the tension between complicity and resistance? The artists' new work will translate this tension into an immersive sculptural installation using sound, light, and spatial transformation.

The installation combines a multi-channel sound composition with evolving monochromatic projections across four walls. Film stock sound effects intertwine with fragments of colonialist and anti-colonialist films from African and Western traditions, exploring how ideology is carried not only through narrative but shared cinematic language.

Rather than offering resolution, the work sustains contradiction—inviting audiences to inhabit a space of uneasy familiarity where complicity and resistance coexist. Through sound and light, the installation probes contemporary identity as a layered and unresolved historical condition, continuing to resonate into the present. 

Catharsis from the internalization of negative representations of identity, and the exploration of being between languages and places, lie at the core of Irineu Destourelles’s artistic practice. Working across media—namely moving image, text, and drawing—Destourelles interweaves autobiographical and Lusophone historical references to critique what he understands as a pervasive colonizing drive within contemporary society, one that unfolds in the ways otherness continues to be constructed.

Irineu Destourelles trained in Fine Art at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and Central Saint Martins in London, and holds a PhD in Film Studies from University College London. His solo exhibitions include 'Subtitulizar/ Subtitling' at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon), 'The Beat That Makes You Dirty' at CAPC (Coimbra), and 'Tainted Verbal' at Transmission (Glasgow). His work has also been shown at venues such as the Art Institute of Chicago, CNAD (Cape Verde), MAMA Showroom (Rotterdam), and Videobrasil (São Paulo). Destourelles was born in Cape Verde and lives and works in Glasgow.