GAM x GI: ‘Group Work as self portrait’, on No one is ready, Iris Touliatou, David Dale Gallery

GAM x GI:
‘Group Work as self portrait’
No one is ready, Iris Touliatou
David Dale Gallery, 05 June – 11 July, Glasgow International 2026

In 1941, Salvador Dalí completed what my Google AI describes as ‘his most famous and surreal self-portrait.’ Painted while exiled in New York, Dalí’s ‘Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon’ pictures a resinous caricature of the artist in shades of midcentury brown. Propped up by nine crutches, not by flesh and bone, the apparition has a mask-like quality, existing as a Disney-esque riff on the Shroud of Turin, a form which pastiches the sanctified artist-as-icon. This allegorical play seems reinforced by the single rash of leporelloed bacon that rests below the Dalí image, a form operating as the face’s salted spine. Reading the painting as an arrangement of metaphorical parts, focusing on how the crutches animate the otherwise boneless face specifically, I want to suggest that the portrait points to the interdependence of artistic being; how the individual artist genius is totally subject to, shaped and scripted by, external support structures. Figuratively, strung up across those supports, the face of ‘Soft Self-Portrait…’ evidences this. Further, it seems of note that Dalí has signed this work ‘Gala Salvador Dali’, a direct reference to his wife (born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), who acted as his muse and, importantly, as his business manager. More than a dedication to his lover, this gesture underscores how Dalí’s artistic being is constituted by human relations otherwise unseen.

This digression into the art of Dalí will seem irrelevant, irreverent, to the work I am meant to be discussing: Iris Touliatou’s ‘Group Work’ (2026) – an artwork created on the occasion of her solo exhibition No one is ready at David Dale Gallery (2026). Touliatou isn’t a painter; her arts emerge through well-oiled conceptual operations, often through scores – short texts which outline the protocols that an organisation must follow to realise a titled work of art. Touliatou uses this medium to produce intimate, site-sensitive works of art which foreground the relations that bolster their being and becoming in the art world. That is, her work renders liquidus the line between the artist-self and that of an institution. For example, in artworks like ‘SCORE FOR COVERAGE’ (2023) – first produced for her solo exhibition Gift at the Kunsthalle Basel (2023) – Touliatou’s life becomes entangled with that of Kunsthalle Basel – after taking out a 12-month life insurance policy, Touliatou’s death would result in the Kunsthalle’s governing body receiving a cash sum of 100,000.00 Euros. 

On the face of things, ‘Group Work’ resides in David Dale Gallery as an anti-arrangement of borrowed furniture – sofas and easy chairs, side tables, cups, a coffee machine, water dispenser and a blue foam football clustered, on the exhibition’s opening day, in a non-descript square – with an accompanying handwritten contract, framed on the wall, and a camera that peers into the almost bare space, documenting this daily through photographs. As a score, these aesthetics mean little; this stuff is merely a trace of the work’s en-action.

Group Work started long before the opening of No one is ready, anachronistically becoming as the exhibition runs. The work began to cohere in May 2026, when Touliatou, who was on a residency in New York, published a job advert on Creative Scotland’s online opportunities page – a tool that allows browsers to find residencies, jobs, grants and pedagogical programmes across Scotland. With this opportunity, Touliatou sought to contract six freelancers, each of whom would be paid £672.50 in return for fifty hours of labour. During this labour time the selected freelancers were to be tasked with forming an autopoetic group, an entity that studies itself – the conditions of its existence and “the methods by which it organises…” to quote the exhibition text.

From seventy-three applications, the handwritten agreement signed by the six appointed contractors, Touliatou and Max Slaven (Programme Director at David Dale Gallery), appears purposefully loose – physically as it hangs in the gallery and theoretically as I read it. That is, unlike the freelance agreements commonly used across the artworld, where an artist/contractor is expected to perform to a specification or asked to provide a detailed outline of the work to be done, this group did not receive instructions about how it was to perform its contractual obligation, nor did it have to share any details about how it would undertake the work assigned and how this would be documented. The group operates autonomously in this regard. Inversely, as an artwork authored by Touliatou, ‘Group Work’ seems to exist beyond the labours of the group – “the work’s documentation [– how it lives and the materials it produces –] does not end with the group’s dissolution.” This two-faced sense of autonomy underscores the anti-material nature of ‘Group Work’, confounding the equation which relates labour to a definable product, a work of art produced by a sole genius. In blurring these lines, Touliatou’s challenge re-presents the conditional aspects of an art’s production; here, creative labour exists as a multiform and formless pool of relational forces. 

As an exhibition of ‘Group Work’ only, there is something punny about No one is ready. At its base, the exhibition is not ready because the work at its centre is not complete – I wonder if it will ever be. Indeed, with the work’s constitutive bodies all operating autonomously, the desire for oneness evoked by the exhibition’s title is critiqued through the labours of its formative parts. Read allusively, this act of institutional critique resounds beyond the walls of David Dale Gallery, exposing the art world’s quest for the individuated artist-icon to be nothing more than a hollow-eyed fallacy. Dalí’s self-portrait reminds us of this; how the face of the artist is animated by multiple contingencies human and infrastructural. With this interpretation in mind, I wonder if ‘Group Work’ is a self-portrait of Touliatou; not an exact reflection as such, but a metaphorical refraction of the “international contemporary artist”, a persona with currency in the art world. I recognise that this is a leaky allusion; one reading among the many that might exist in the study of ‘Group Work’.

Toby Üpson is a writer based in Glasgow

This review was commissioned by Glasgow Art Map and Glasgow International as part of a series that offers critical reflection on this year’s festival.

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