This year’s Edinburgh Art Festival takes place 11-27 August, with 55 exhibitions, events and performances across over 35 venues in the city. Now in its 19th edition, the festival is a celebration of the city’s vibrant art community, which includes many SCAN member organisations.
Ahead of the launch, we take a look at the diverse, ambitious projects our members are showcasing during the festival. We’re also delighted to be co-hosting a creative networking event with Soapbox and members Sierra Metro during the festival – register to join us on Tuesday 22 August for a morning of inspiration and professional skill-sharing.
Above: Laurence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel, installation view. Top of page: Jesse Jones, The Tower, installation view.
Talbot Rice and Edinburgh College of Art
Talbot Rice hosts three major projects this August: film installations from Laurence Abu Hamdan and Jesse Jones, alongside a newly commissioned textual intervention by Hephzibah Israel. At ECA, new work from graduating students of art, design, architecture and landscape architecture is on display for this year’s Graduate Show.
Arusha Gallery
Group show Dreamer’s Eye brings together work from emerging artists Plum Cloutman, Zayn Qahtani and Georg Wilson, who share an interest in surreality, dreams and folklore, expressed through diverse individual practices.
Edinburgh Printmakers
Glasgow-based artist Christian Noelle Charles’ solo show WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is a vibrant collection of screenprints conveying the gestures of being judged, analysed, and satisfied within a salon. Also showing is Portrait, a display of prints from the gallery’s archives, including work from Alasdair Gray, Rachel MacLean, Jennifer McRae and more.
Haein Kim, Bubblegum Birth
Sierra Metro
Presented following a residency with the gallery, Australia-based artist Haein Kim’s playful exhibition PAIN 2 POWER explores materialism and the modern woman’s psyche through a series of intricate drawings and life-sized cutouts.
Ingleby
Never a joineris a new sequence of large scale canvases by painter-storyteller Andrew Cranston, hung alongside narrative paintings made on linen bound covers of old books. On 19 August, Ingleby will also host the launch of a new publication by Cranston, including a signing and exhibition walk through with the artist.
Travelling Gallery
Scotland’s contemporary art gallery on a bus makes a number of stops at EAF, touring a new exhibition from Gabecare, the joint practice of Rachel Adams and Tessa Lynch. High on the Summit Ridge exposes the domestic mess of 21st century living, embracing and revelling in its unravelling.
Rabiya Choudhry, Give light and people will find the way (Ella Baker), Glasgow Women’s Library, 2022. Photo: Isobel Lutz-Smith.
The Common Guild
Initiated by The Common Guild, Rabiya Choudhry’s work Give light and people will find the way (Ella Baker) will be installed at Leith Library for the duration of EAF. Part of the artist’s ongoing project Lost Lighting, the work incorporates the words of African-American civil rights activist Ella Baker, and is intended to ‘act like a vigil in the dark’.
Fruitmarket
Portuguese, Berlin-based artist Leonor Antunes exhibits her work the apparent length of a floor area at Fruitmarket, continuing her engagement with traditions of modernist art, architecture and design through sculpture made and displayed with the specifics of a given place in mind.
Collective
Journey up Calton Hill for two EAF exhibitions from Collective: DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN by Glasgow-based artist Rabindranath X Bhose, and I wear my wounds on my tongue (II) by French artist and poet Tarek Lakhrissi. Collective and EAF also present BEAST!, a performance by Lakhrissi exploring bestiality as a philosophical and political concept.
Markéta Luskačová, Two boys with their jumpers over their heads, 1988.
Stills Centre for Photography
Stills presents the first exhibition in Scotland dedicated to the work of Prague-born, UK-based photographer, Markéta Luskačová, focusing on Luskačová‘s photographs of the lives of children made over a 40-year period.
Jupiter Artland
Out in the wilds of Jupiter, Lindsey Mendick’s solo show SH*TFACED is a series of larger-than-life ceramic tableaux depicting the gender-based shame of binge-drinking culture. Mendick also co-curates an EAF x Jupiter Rising party on Saturday 19 August, alongside queer workers’ co-op Bonjour.
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
ESW present two shows for EAF: Sebastian Thomas’ A New Face in Hell, drawing inspiration from the mythological fable of the Golem, and Adam Lewis Jacob’s tense, a film featuring Japanese percussionist Ryosuke Kiyasu.
Alberta Whittle, Entanglement is more than blood, 2022. Tapestry woven by Dovecot Studios. Cotton, linen, whaling rope, fishing rope, Venetian trading beads, children’s hair clips, manillas, and cowrie shells; steel. National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased with assistance from Lesley Knox 2023. Co-commissioned by Scotland+Venice and Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh. Photo: Neil Hanna.
National Galleries of Scotland
NGS presents a wealth of exhibitions across all its sites for EAF. At Modern One, Alberta Whittle’s immersive, must-see solo show create dangerouslysits alongside the refreshing display Conversations with the Collection, and across the road at Modern Two Decades: The Art of Change 1900–1980 encompasses 80 years of artistic rebellion. At the Portrait gallery, The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize celebrates the best in contemporary photography, and at the National gallery, Grayson Perry’s Smash Hits provides a major retrospective of the artist’s funny, provocative work.
National Library of Scotland
Co-curated by Waverley Care, Blood Sweat and Tears: Scotland’s HIV Story looks back at the earliest stages of the HIV outbreak in the 1980s, showing the community response to the epidemic in Scotland through photographs, creative writing and oral histories.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
At RBGE, Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots poetically traces the legacies of plants through the British Empire, specifically linking Australia, India and the UK. An extensive series of tours, workshops and talks accompanies the exhibition, alongside Connecting Histories, a complementary display of Indian botanical drawings from RBGE’s collection.
Edinburgh Art Festival 2023 takes place in venues across the city, 11-27 August – full programme at edinburghartfestival.com.
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