Edinburgh Art Festival review — Creativity and politics entwined

The Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) takes place across 30 venues, featuring the work of more than 200 artists from Scotland, the UK, and internationally. This year’s programme is the festival’s largest yet, encouraging audiences to reflect on contemporary social, political, and cultural issues through the lens of art. It also aims to provide a platform for underrepresented voices — particularly queer, transgender and intersex people of colour artists — through special events such as Jupiter Rising x EAF at Jupiter Artland.

There are embedded and intertwined complexities, not related to the legitimate desire to open forums to previously underrepresented interests. One such issue is the politicisation of the event, where some participating artists have chosen to display posters in support of the Palestinian cause. These are post-hoc additions, literally Sellotaped on top of existing interpretive material, and unrelated to the artistic content. While this is their prerogative, where are the necessary and balancing arguments for the other side in this intractable conflict?

When questioned about this stance, the organisers stated they had no control over the political views of invited artists. This may be true, but shouldn’t the moral responsibility be to offer spaces for alternative voices? This would align more closely with EAF’S professed stance on inclusivity and providing a platform for all.

The main hub of EAF is the City Art Centre, where work by Rosie’s Disobedient Press — a collaboration by Adrien Howard and Lisette May Monroe — explores Edinburgh’s queer sub-culture in the Nineties. On the first floor, various vitrines, installations and films include work by Karol Radziszewski, showcasing archive material from the Polish underground publication Filo, which provided a forum for the LGBT community during the Eighties and Nineties. Four emerging artists, Alaya Ang, Edward Gwyn Jones, Tamara MacArthur and Kialy Tihngang, have a dedicated space in the upper galleries.

Just around the corner at Stills an exhibition of Ukrainian photography on the theme of “home” by Mykhaylo Palinchak, Alexander Chekmenev and others presents an unremittingly bleak vision of Ukraine. The fashionable polychromatic studies in the displays offer nothing comforting, contrary to the title’s suggestion.

The show reinforces stereotypes of Ukraine as a bleak wasteland of destroyed, poorly constructed Soviet-era buildings. In another exhibition at 24 Art Gallery in Leith, a show of contemporary Ukrainian painting offers a somewhat leavened view, but Vladyslav Shereshevsky’s stark portraits of Azovstal fighters are the images that linger in the mind.

At the Royal Botanic Garden, a different ethos prevails. Organised by the Colombia-based group Más Arte más Acción (Mama) with Beuysian overtones — where politics, ecology, and art intertwine — a round table, constructed using timber from a felled diseased cedar of Lebanon, acts as a literal and conceptual space for discussion. Topics might range from the climate emergency to the role of organisations such as the host in advocating for nature-centred thinking across a wide range of global political, economic and developmental strategies. Mama plans a series of such open dialogues over the next few weeks. It is an approach that some of their more dogmatically-inclined colleagues might heed and learn from.

     Until August 25, 2024