ART CITIES:Edinburgh-Art Festival 2017
Founded in 2004, Edinburgh Art Festival is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art. The Festival brings together the galleries, museums and artist-run spaces, alongside new public art commissions by established and emerging artists and an innovative program of special events. The vast majority of the festival is free to attend.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Edinburgh Art Festival Archive
The 14th edition of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) sees 50 exhibitions across more than 40 venues, with solo, group and survey shows by contemporary and modern artists from the UK and beyond. Alongside this, EAF presents the 2017 Commissions Programme, entitled “The Making of the Future: Now”, with new projects at sites in and around Edinburgh’s Old Town. The 2017 festival also features performances, tours, workshops and talks by some of the world’s leading artists and curators. Commissioned by EAF and Ingleby “The Regent Bridge” is Callum Innes’s first light-based work, a simple intervention which floods a dark tunnel on Calton Road with colur to reveal the magnificent architecture of the Regent Bridge above. Innes has evolved a scheme that transforms the flat sides of the lower arch at street level into an illuminating plinth of floating color. The work follows a series of set rules to create a structured and yet deliberately random order of coloured light, revealing and lifting the giant curve of the arch. In 2017 Commissions Program “The Making of the Future: Now” reflects on two important anniversaries for the city: the foundation of the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947, and the 1917 publication of Patrick Geddes’ “The Making of the Future”. Separated by a generation, both were born out of the experience of global conflict, and a belief that artists could play a critical role in helping societies to imagine new and better ways of living. Bobby Niven brings together his own individual sculptural practice with his concept developed for The Bothy Project, to create a temporary studio workshop within the Johnston Terrace Wildlife Garden. Throughout the festival, Niven’s studio workshop will play host to a programme of artists’ residencies, and a series of environmentally focused workshops for families (including a weekly Forest School for young children) and local community groups. Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich in “The Dragon of Profit and Private Ownership” reflect on Patrick Geddes in the context of radical thought and social activism at the end of the 19th Century. At the heart of the project is a giant inflatable sculpture of a dragon, the contemporary descendant of the mythical fire-breathing creatures of the kind slain by St. George. Streamers flowing from its mouth, inscribed with inspirational slogans such “a plea for common ownership”, “production for use not profit” and “leisure for all”, evidence the many ideals (and idealists) it has consumed. At Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, a two-room display with a sellection from the substantial collection of Ruscha’s work held in ARTIST ROOMS, including photographic series, paintings and drawings dating from the early ‘60s to the ‘00s, the exhibition highlights the ways in which Ruscha has consistently drawn upon urban landscape and architecture, cinema, brands, automobile-culture and language that refer and relate to Los Angeles and Hollywood to create works that engage with the aspirations and seduction of the American Dream. Also Douglas Gordon created the specially commissioned installation, “Black Burns”, is a response to the full-length marble statue of the poet Robert Burns, which stands in the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The Installation address many of the key concerns in his work and aims to render Flaxman’s totemic sculpture of Scotland’s national hero more human, more vulnerable and more exposed.
Info: Director: Sorcha Carey, Festival Administrator: Katie Bharaj, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh, Duration 27/7-27/8/18, https://edinburghartfestival.com
