This summer Edinburgh Art festival (EAF) will invite audiences to join them to collectively pause and reflect upon the conditions under which we live, work, gather and resist.
EAF will use their 20th Birthday to connect with historic and contemporary ways of organising that have built infrastructures of care and pioneering activist movements over the past 20 years and even before that. The programme, the biggest yet for EAF, spans the work of more than 200 artists and takes place all across Edinburgh asking viewers to look again at the capital through the eyes of the exhibiting artists.
Laura Aldridge and Andrew Sim will transform Jupiter Artland with Aldridge’s richly glazed ceramics, light, videos, textiles and sound, alongside Sim’s paintings depicting a dreamlike forest, with plants and trees growing beneath rainbows and star-studded skies.
Pic Neil Hanna
Andrew Sim is a Glaswegian who now lives in New York. They explained that some of the work on display at Jupiter Artland had been created in about five weeks, saying: “Plants have always been quite central to my practice. There are a lot of characters and recurring themes in my work as well the trees and flowers.”
Andrew explained one of the subjects of his painting is a real tree “planted in the Botanic Garden in Glasgow when I was about five years old. It is on a bit of grass that you’re not allowed to walk on. I have always wanted to draw it and when I had a show at the Modern Institute last May I thought that this was the time. I had always wanted to draw it life size – and it was getting bigger and bigger.
“It tends to be after I have left a place that I paint the trees I find there. I lived in Glasgow for my whole life until I was about 35 and it was quite a difficult place to extract myself from. My family are there and I liked being there.”
Sim explained the practice involves a working drawing or progression, and then eventually creating a canvas version of it using pastels on canvas. Friends often alert the artist to plants they think are suitable candidates for painting. And occasionally Sim looks at the plants used in paintings on Google Maps to “see how they are” and whether they are still there.
At Fruitmarket, Ibrahim Mahama is making a brand new body of work inspired by the Gallery’s unique physical location, supported on columns above Waverley railway station. This proximity to – and dependence on – the railway is the starting point for large scale drawings, sculpture and installations referencing his own interest in and using material from the now defunct colonial-era railway of Ghana.
At Talbot Rice Gallery, El Anatsui’s exhibition will comprise a large selection of his iconic sculptural wall hangings, wooden reliefs and works on paper and will be the most significant exploration of El Anatsui’s practice, which spans more than five decades, ever staged in the UK.
Los Angeles based painter Hayley Barker will make her first exhibition in Europe at Ingleby, where landscape and nature paintings strike a seemingly impossible harmony between intimacy and grandeur, appearing simultaneously dense and intricately painted, and yet open and full of space.
At the National Galleries of Scotland, Do Ho Suh architectural structures and objects using fabric in what the artist describes as an “act of memorialization.”
Taking over the ground floor of Modern One in Edinburgh, Tracing Time is the South Korean-born, London-based artist’s first exhibition in Scotland. Travelling through time, it examines the integral role drawing and paper play in Suh’s practice, with a focus on his collaborative methods, experimental techniques, and innovative use of materials.
Neil Hanna
The programme allows us to look at recent and current socio-political history in new ways. Women in Revolt! is the National Galleries of Scotland’s survey of feminist art that celebrates the women who challenged and changed the face of British culture, restaged in Scotland following its presentation at Tate Britain.
The Edinburgh Seven Tapestry, meanwhile, at Edinburgh Futures Institute, commemorates the first women to matriculate at any British university. Designed by Christine Borland and created by Dovecot Studios, the tapestry triptych was created using a combination of traditional and modern materials and techniques and its organic shapes are based on cellular structure in motion.
EAF Director, Kim McAleese said: “This year EAF celebrates persistence. Our programme traces lines through personal histories, the natural world, post-colonial landscapes, and the global political stage. We have invited artists from across Scotland, the UK, Europe, Latin America, and the SWANA region, who refuse inequity, isolation, destruction, and despair (in large ways and in quiet ways). We want to connect to our context and the city — to the people and movements who inspire change, who enable solidarity, and bring people together to work towards collective futures.”
Culture Secretary Angus Robertson said: “The 20th anniversary of the Edinburgh Art Festival is a perfect opportunity to recognise how creative arts can inspire positive change and this year’s ambitious programme showcases the immense talent of over 100 artists from diverse backgrounds. I’m immensely proud to support the festival with £110,000 this year from our Expo fund, which aims to raise the international profile of Scotland’s festivals and help enhance their programmes through innovation collaborations.”
Pic Neil Hanna
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
