By Phil Miller, 11/04/08

GLASGOW'S contemporary art festival, GI, opens today, with a two-week showing of an eclectic range of art across the city, including work by Jim Lambie, Alasdair Gray and Simon Starling, amongst many others.

There are 40 exhibitions, and last night Lambie, the Turner Prize-nominated Scottish artist, opened his biggest show to date - Forever Changes - at the Gallery of Modern Art, while today sees the exhibition based on one of the most daring acts ever performed for art in the city.

Didier Pasquette attempted to walk a high wire, with no safety net or harness, between flats in the city's Red Road area last year, a vertiginous venture captured by the artist Catherine Yass, and now the film of the attempt is being shown at the CCA in Sauchiehall Street in a show called High Wire.

Douglas Gordon, Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist, who created the acclaimed movie Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, is allowing the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Arts (or GI) to use several rooms and the stairwell of his Woodlands Terrace home as a venue during the event, which runs until April 27.

Elsewhere in the festival, which is now moving to a biennial format, there will be anexhibition of rare work by Alasdair Gray, the novelist and artist, from a 1975 BBC film that was never made.

The festival has a theme this year of "public/private" and, to reflect that, there will be exhibitions and installations in both established galleries and "off-site and found spaces".