This year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is back for its 20th year and it's shaping up to be one of the best yet. With so many innovative artists showcasing exhibitions this year, narrowing down what to see is a challenge. Patricia Ann-Young selects some of programme’s highlights…
Custom Lane and Lost in Leith, 9th August, £6-£20 + £5 for afterparty
The Edinburgh Art Festival turns 20 this year and it’s time to celebrate! The festival is throwing a big birthday bash at Leith’s cutting-edge, creative workspace, Custom Lane.
Hosted by queer-led hair salon turned iconic party series Ponyboy, attendees will be treated to a steady stream of Edinburgh’s hottest DJs all evening. Of course, being an EAF birthday party, the fun doesn’t stop with the amazing musical acts. There will be gogo dancing and performance art throughout the evening from artists MV Brown, Shawn Nayar, and Luxx.
If you want to boogie into the wee hours, you can book tickets to the after-party at Lost in Leith, where EHFM’s Saint Sunday b2b Percy Main will take control of the tunes. Being a birthday party, attendees are encouraged to put on their glad rags and get dressed up. Time to look out your best birthday suit.
City Art Centre, 9th August - 25th August, 10am-5pm daily
Karol Radziszewski will bring his first solo Scottish exhibition to the EAF this year, which promises to zing with the boundary-pushing thoughtfulness that has become the artist’s signature. Karol Radziszewski: Filo is a free drop-in exhibition that traces the history
of Filo Magazine, one of the first underground queer magazines in Central-Eastern Europe. The publication was founded by queer activists in response to Polish communist police suppression of sexual minorities.
Radziszewski, a Polish artist who uses archive materials to anchor his work, has curated a show that features both rare photographs and ephemera from the era, alongside the artists own paintings of queer, Central-Eastern European historical figures, hung in a style that mimics Eastern Bloc propaganda portraits.
A great strength of Radziszewski’s is his ability to draw poignancy from the explicit. This exhibition will explore the beauty in the bawdy and the power in the subversive.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 15th August, £15/ £13 for members (18+)
The Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh is hosting a mini festival within a festival this year. Botanic Lates will feature visual art, live performances, tours, and interactive activities all inspired by one magical topic –mushrooms! This plucky evening event encourages visitors to get funky with fungi, providing many bountiful ways to explore the miraculous mushroom, and lots of opportunities to enjoy delicious food and drink too.
The exhibition Fungi Forms will trace how mushrooms have inspired artists over the years, and live performances from Hannah Read, Jose Miguel Navas and Brian d’Souza will bring the world of fungi to life through music and sound. The interactive elements of the evening are particularly exciting, inviting visitors to create their own clay mushrooms and to dress up and play with Lego to help them better understand the world of plants. The event will be light-hearted and lots of fun(gi), and there is something for everyone in its fully packed line-up. Botanic Lates is a particularly great choice if you are planning a group outing at this year’s festival.
Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything Is Satisfactual
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 9th August – 1st September, Tuesday-Saturday, 9:30am-5pm
Dr Sequoia Danielle Barnes is a fascinating African American artist who uses soft sculpture, wearable art, and ceramic sculpture to radically subvert symbols of white supremacy through deconstructing representations of the black diaspora.
Her exhibition, Everything Is Satisfactual, is an Afro-surreal retelling of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, a popular story in African American folklore. The artist seeks to challenge the widespread hunger for all things ‘cute’, exploring how the impulse to consume cuteness upholds modes of oppression and marginalisation.
Barnes’ sculptures quietly draw the viewer's eye to the sinister white supremacy at the heart of what initially appears to be a beguilingly ‘cute’ object. She unravels a thread that, in her words, highlights “the contradiction between ‘cute’ and cruel.”
Barnes’ methodology, and the equal importance that she places on the making of art as on the finished artwork itself, make her exhibitions deeply immersive and compelling. Everything is Satisfactual is no different and one not to miss.
Matthew Hyndman: Upended
Bard, 1 Customs Wharf, 9th August – 25th August, Wednesday – Sunday, 10am-5pm
The landscapes of Scotland have been painted, photographed and filmed so often that the sheer volume of imagery risks rendering the country’s unusual beauty mundane.
Hosted by Bard, Matthew Hyndman’s exhibition Upended playfully disrupts this monotony. The artist and activist photographs himself literally upended in remote and rugged environments while doing a naked headstand, his bare body turned away from the camera. The photographs initially seem like a cheeky joke, but the more you look, the more you see – of Scotland, that is. Sometimes the sun drenches Hyndman’s body in a beautiful golden light, making the rough Scottish brush he places himself amongst feel wonderfully tangible. Sometimes sea crashes over Hyndman’s head, and you subconsciously brace for freezing freshness of the seawater.
His work is as fun as it is serene and as funny as it is defiant. Upended is definitely worth a peek.
You can view the full Edinburgh Art Festival programme at edinburghartfestival.com