Artist studios and gallery
7 Water Row, Govan
Glasgow


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Past Exhibitions
2026
Toby Messenger Systems in Collapse2025
Olivia Wiles West Side Story
Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making
Anna Lawrence Snail Trail
Sam Della-Valle Big Women Little Men
Ali Farrelly a mean diameter
2024Anna Metzger Teether
John Fletcher Acid Reflux
Scott Leeming Didn’t we have a good time?
Gabriella Day The best parts only
[Studio holders] MEETING 2
Amanda Seibæk & Zane Drees For Satin Bowerbirds
Kate Holford That unquestionable bloom
Amelia Barratt Cool Ground
2023
Anna Metzger, Maya Levy, Alfie Sellers The Ceiling So Far
Kirstie Lackie TV Dinners
[Group] A sense of urgency
[Studio holders] MEETING
Charlie Hodgson Trade Winds
Antonio Parker-Rees & Phoebe Kerr
Niall McCallum Path Users
[Group] World of Wonder
Orla Kane Star face
Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King in jest
Dora Padfield & Liv Fox and now the light is on it
Monya Riachi     A Present Disturbance
7 - 14 June 202611 - 4pm daily

For A Present Disturbance, Monya Riachi brings forth a tension between living and memorialising, through an investigation of the symbol and matter of the poppy flower. She asks “How do we remember into the future? In the present tense?”

The poppy thrives in disturbed ground, preferring tilled soil from which to bloom. The common poppy varieties we know in Britain and Northern Europe - Papaver varieties - are closely related to native flowers of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Many of the red species in particular are native to Lebanon: Papaver Polytrichum, -Libanoticum, -Postii, -Syriacum. Artificial red poppies were first sold in Britain in 1921, becoming so popular their manufacture and sale remains a global activity today. Established after the first world war as a symbol of remembrance, poppies became famous in the UK after John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields (1915), which meditated on the image of poppies within the war-torn fields of Belgium. 

A Present Disturbance is a memorialisation in the present. Unfolding, partial, impossible. Presented at Boardroom Committee Room is a collection of small works which began to emerge for Riachi after witnessing the onslaught of genocide in Palestine in 2023. Working across drawing, embossing, text, collage, sculpture, and sound, each piece takes the poppy as its central protagonist. The flower becomes a clarifying distillation of the hypocrisy and denials inherent to the colonial military-industrial project within the British Isles and across global politics; but it is also a declaration of life in the face of destruction, and a symbol of Arab defiance - in particular in Palestine, where the poppy is the national flower. A Present Disturbance contends with the disturbed soils of both Palestine and Lebanon - the lands being devastated by global military powers, both now and through the entangled histories of our geographies and nations. Riachi asks what matter contributes to formations of nationalism, and on what grounds. These propositions are particularly relevant to Boardroom Committee Room’s location on the River Clyde in Govan, an area home to numerous factories producing technologies used in these wars, including BAE and Thales. 

The works presented here carve back into existence shadows and ghosts of the poppy symbol, shed of its cartoonish simplification and returned instead its true and full dimensions. Forever changed, forever present. Stretching deep into earth, into disturbed soil, emerging skyward.



The artist is honoured to include work by other Lebanese voices in the exhibition: a text piece by Mary-Ann Awada, and photographs by Yasmina El Chami. We are grateful for their contributions which provide lived testimony to the present moment in Lebanon.

This exhibition is assisted by grants from the Hope Scott Trust and the Eaton Fund.

With great thanks to all who have provided support in making this exhibition.
- Kate Holford, June 2026
(This text is an abridged version of an essay on Monya’s practice, which will be available in the gallery space.)





Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist from Lebanon. Her practice is led by materials and contextual research, and interlaces politics, poetry and affect. Her works approach matter as a site of narrative, movement and transformation, and entangle the political geographies of her home and adopted countries Lebanon and Britain. She collaborates with musicians, craftspeople, writers, geologists, materials scientists and philosophers in the research and making of her work, often realised through sculpture, installation, writing and performance. 

Monya holds an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. She was selected for the Sharjah Art Foundation Residency (2026) and was awarded the Lewisham Arthouse Postgraduate Award (2024) and the Boghossian Foundation Visual Arts Prize (2024). Previous residencies include Lewisham Arthouse (London, 2024), Cove Park (Scotland, 2023) and Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon, 2022). Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Lebanon and Italy, with solo presentations across London and Glasgow.

Credits:
Artist - Monya Riachi
Additional contributions - Mary-Ann Awada, Yasmina El Chami 
Curator - Kate Holford
Technician - Scott Leeming

Exhibition text - Kate Holford
Editing support - Mina Heydari-Waite, Grace Jackson

Supported by funding from The Hope Scott Trust and The Eaton Fund.










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