Visual art review: Edinburgh Art Festival 2021

With more than 35 new commissions and exhibitions, the 17th Edinburgh Art Festival is not the kind of event you can stroll around in an afternoon. You’ll need a lot of stamina, physical and intellectual, to tackle some of the demanding and sometimes heart-rending imagery and ideas.

There are some well-known names from the Scottish art world — Karla Black at the Fruitmarket gallery, Will Maclean at the Fine Art Society and Christine Borland at Inverleith House. Emeka Ogboh’s sonic installation inside the Burns Monument on Regent Road makes good use of the acoustics, where sequenced versions of Auld Lang Syne sung in the native tongue of various foreign nationals living in Scotland resonate and reverberate in an overtly political, anti-Brexit artistic statement.

Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour focuses on the life of the emancipated slave Frederick Douglass. Douglass first travelled to Scotland in 1846 as part of his unceasing campaign for the abolition of slavery. Julien has created a multi-screen filmic environment re-imagining Douglass’s Scottish sojourn. It is a startlingly emotive and visually arresting narrative that chimes with some of the tropes of the Black Lives Matter movement.

At Jupiter Artland, the Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle has used the architecture and gardens of Bonnington House as the settings for her multimedia installations. In the doocot, the words of Kamau Brathwaite, a Barbadian poet who died last year, echo among the niches and dark crannies. The poem, Kumina, is a song of rage and lament for his dead stepson and takes its title from the Caribbean practice of ancestor commemoration:

On the sixth day
after yr death. there is this silence of flowers
their petals say their shining needs
soft water needs
sweet showers needs
sweet rain from heaven

The lavish, elegant ballroom has become an installation complete with sand, shells and painting, while an impressionistic, compelling film, RESET, divided into lessons, explores civil unrest, mythology and female identity through dance, movement and multi-layered imagery.

There is something for everyone here. It’s a case of going out to find it. The rewards are immense.

The Edinburgh Art Festival runs until August 29. www.edinburghartfestival.com