Edinburgh Art Festival: After Nyne's 9 Highlights
Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) opens today presenting work by 250 artists, in more than 40 exhibitions across 30 of Edinburgh's museums, galleries and artist-run spaces, including seven new commissions as part of the 2016 Commissions Programme.
As the UK's largest annual festival of visual arts, the programme combines ambitious presentations of Scottish and international contemporary art alongside major solo and survey shows of artists from the 20th century and historic movements. The 2016 festival also features numerous performances, guided tours, workshops and talks by some of the world's leading artists and curators throughout the month of August.
Here's After Nyne's Top 9 Must-Sees:
1) Ciara Phillips - Every Woman, Prince of Wales Dock
Ciara Phillips’ Every Woman, co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and 14-18 NOW, is the fourth in a series of ‘Dazzle’ ship designs developed by contemporary artists to commemorate the First World War.
Designed not to camouflage, but to distort a ship’s appearance when viewed through a telescope, ‘Dazzle’ was developed by the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson to counter the threat posed by German U-Boats. Using strongly contrasting blocks of colour, stripes and curves, dazzle designs transformed ships into a confusing array of multi-directional shapes, making it difficult to gauge a ship’s direction or speed.
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014, Ciara Phillips works mainly in the medium of printmaking, attracted both by the physical process itself, as well as the long established history of print as a medium for exploring and expressing political and social ideas
2) Helen McCrorie – The Clock in Commune, The Glasite Meeting House
The Clock in Commune is a multi-screen video installation developed by artist Helen McCrorie for The Glasite House; an A-listed former worship house of the Glasite religious sect. This experimental film essay follows contemporary communities of men in Scotland, conducting ancient rites that mark succession and the passing of time: a rural pagan fire-ceremony at Hogmanay and the ordination of a Passionist priest.
Weaving together spectacles from former dominant belief systems in Scotland with intimate domestic ritual and routine, this playful collage of moving image reflects on shifting perceptions of time.
3) Ruth Barker, Place of Pillars, Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Place of Pillars (2016) is a new spoken word artwork by Ruth Barker commissioned by ATLAS Arts.
Composed as a live performance that will also be released as a downloadable podcast, it is a poetic monologue. Barker says ‘the work is a slip shod stretch in unsuitable shoes, it is a meandering and unreliable ramble across the peat landscape of Skye’s Trotternish peninsula, from the township of Flodigarry (‘the floating enclosure’), to the river Lealt (‘the half stream’). It is a circuitous loop through the Staffin crofters’ uprising, past handmade dinosaurs, via biro marks on a folded map. It is a route of thought – not so much a train as a sheep track bumping its way between the lochans.’
With sparks of humour, familiar landmarks, and an ideosyncratic eye for detail, Barker’s writing has a firm rooting in the day to day of contemporary Scotland.
The event is free to attend and will take place at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
4) The Telfer Gallery – Kimberley O’Neill: Conatus TV, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
A talk and screening programme of works for Edinburgh Art Festival selected by Kimberley O’Neill, 2016 Artist in Residence at The Telfer Gallery (Glasgow). This event considers how subjective experiences of attention and desire are manifested through media technologies, a theme related to new work O’Neill is producing for her solo show at The Telfer Gallery in January 2017.
Attention and desire have historically been defined as forces which can enact change. Spinoza used the term conatus to describe the fundamental energy that inhabits bodies and sets them in motion, an innate desire to persist and pursue. Networked media acts upon this energy inherent within the viewer to excite and engage them, yet the exchange between users and network might also generate a collective conatus, born of the relations between users, producers and media technologies.
Whilst media products are shaped, they are also a shaping force – a template or mould for our desires and relation to self. Considering the power relations within the user-media dynamic, the screening event will feature works that explore the peripheries of this relationship, considering how individuals modify or recuperate media-technology for their own ends and reflect on the conditions of mediated subjecthood.
5) Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project, 2010, (Permanent Commission), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Modern Two
Turner Prize winner Richard Wright was commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to make a permanent painting in the west stairwell of their building for the Edinburgh Art Festival 2010.
The Work composed of a flower-like motif, hand painted and repeated thousands of times to dizzying effect. The orientation, size, and alignment of the motif changes according to its placement on the complex three-dimentional structure of the architecture, producing a spectacular canopy above the viewer.
Commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
6) Bani Abidi – Memorial to Lost Words, Old Royal High School
Bani Abidi is interested in the language of power, often using humour to unpick the strategies adopted by politicians to construct and convey their authority. Death at a 30 Degree Angle (2012), for example, tells the fictional story of a small-time politician, commissioning a monumental self portrait from a renowned sculptor, and experimenting with costume and pose to best express his power.
Her newest work proposes an alternative, decidedly anti-monumental, form of memorial. Drawing on the archive of London based poet Amarjit Chandan, Abidi’s sound installation brings into dialogue two sets of voices, both largely overlooked in official accounts of the First World War.
The first are folksongs sung by the mothers, wives and sisters of Indian soldiers living in the Punjab, pleading with their menfolk not to go war. The antithesis of war songs, these ballads — recorded by the artist with folk singers in Pakistan — tell stories of longing, loss and the absurdity of war.
The second are the unheard voices drawn from letters written by Indian soldiers to their families from the front. Censored because of their frank accounts of the horrors of the war, these letters never reached their addressees. Memorial to Lost Words gives voice to these lost letters, through a freshly composed song by poet Amarjit Chandan, commemorating the lives of these forgotten soldiers through a profoundly oral tradition.
7) Graham Fagen – A Drama In Time, Jacob’s Ladder, Calton Road Bridge
Graham Fagen is one of the most influential artists working in Scotland today. His work mixes media and crosses continents. Fagen’s recurring artistic themes, such as our relationship to our environments, histories, individual journeys, and popular music, are used as attempts to understand the powerful forces that shape our lives.
From the shadows below the rail bridge – where New Street meets Calton Road – the steps of Jacob’s Ladder offer an ascent from earth to the after-life, or a steep shortcut from the ‘Old’ to the New Town. The ‘ladder’ leads up into the Enlightenment monuments of Burns and Calton Hill with panoramic views towards the sea (where in 1786 Robert Burns booked a passage on a ship called The Roselle from the port of Leith to Kingston and Savanah-La-Mar, Jamaica – intending to work as an overseer of slaves on a sugar plantation).
Pioneering environmentalist and city planner Patrick Geddes (1854—1932) worked to improve the living conditions of the citizens of the Old Town. He aimed to achieve such improvement by bringing nature and humanity together, suggesting that ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’.
Fagen’s new work for Edinburgh draws on histories that have shaped the city’s forms and ideas – and presents a narrative in neon illuminating a journey of a life, and questioning what lies beyond.
8) Jonathan Owen, Burns Monument
Jonathan Owen takes pre-existing photographs and sculptures and painstakingly removes and reworks elements, transforming images and objects which were once fixed and resolved into mysterious uncertain forms. In his series Eraser Drawings (statues) 2008—9, Owen worked with photographs of public statues, using a rubber to erase elements of the figures, turning solid memorialised mass into ghostly presence.
More recently, Owen has begun to work with sculptures themselves, appropriating techniques more usually associated with folk traditions (scrimshaw and wood-carving) to transform marble figures and portrait busts into disjointed expressions of their former selves. For More Lasting than Bronze, Owen creates his first ever publicly sited work. Working with a nineteenth century figure of a nymph, Owen has re-carved her idealised form into an interlinking set of marble chains, her newly bowed head and buckled form suggesting a body crumpled by two hundred years of the male gaze.
Owen’s new work is sited in the Burns Monument, a neo-classical circular temple, built in 1831 to house a statue of Robert Burns by the artist John Flaxman. The portrait was removed 8 years after the monument opened, amid fears that smoke from a nearby gasworks was damaging the statue. Since then the miniature building has lain empty and largely closed to the public. Owen’s work, itself dependent on a process of anti-monumentalising, invites us to reflect on who and how society seeks to immortalise.
9) MAP: Endnotes, Edinburgh College of Art
Endnotes is part of the MAP Footnoting the Archive project curated by guest editors Suzanne van der Lingen and Claire Walsh. New work by invited artists and researchers will be published on the MAP website and as a limited edition print. The limited edition print, designed by Osasto, will be available at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, where MAP’s Voicing the Archive installation is also available until 31 August. Endnotes will culminate in an event held at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) on 13 August.
Responding to the theme of endnotes, and coinciding with the completion of the MAP online archive, the editors invited contributors to examine ways of approaching archives as a creative, active platform rather than a static reserve of documented content. Each of the invited artists and researchers propose critical approaches to archiving, contemporary art and digital production.
The contributions will be published online and profiled on the Edinburgh Art Festival website, including work by Aideen Doran, Annet Dekker, and Victoria Horne. Van der Lingen and Walsh have been awarded the ECA School of Art micro residency, as part of which they will be producing new work on campus (1—26 August).
The Endnotes public event will be presented in the context of this residency, bringing together the commissioned contributors to discuss their research. A short presentation by each contributor will be followed by a chaired discussion, lead by Jenny Brownrigg.
For more information on this year's festival, including dates and times, visit www.edinburghartfestival.com or follow @EdArtFest #EAF2016 #EAFcommissions
