Edinburgh Art Festival: Scotland's Alcatraz, concentration camp, burning of women and 'Jekyll & Hyde' inspire new work

Showcase to feature 55 exhibitions across 35 venues

Striking new work inspired by Bass Rock – Scotland’s answer to Alcatraz – and the burning of women as heretics before the first witch trials will be on display across Edinburgh this summer as part of the city’s annual celebration of visual art.

Works centred on a Nazi Germany concentration camp, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and an African-American civil rights activist will all be explored during what is billed as the UK’s annual biggest festival of visual art.

The impact of “deep fake” technology, the climate crisis, a ground-breaking AIDS hospice in Edinburgh and 21st-century living are among other festival themes.

Kim McAleese is director of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Picture: Neil Hanna

The 19th edition of the festival, which will see exhibitions and events expand out across the city to new venues and locations, is the first to be shaped by new director Kim McAleese, who has pledged to forge stronger partnerships with the city’s galleries, its other festivals and local communities around Edinburgh.

Running from August 11-27 and featuring 55 projects across 35 venues, the festival has also commissioned a series of one-off live events inspired by, and planned to coincide with, exhibitions and shows.

Other shows and events are inspired by the voices of working-class women, “the modern woman’s psyche”, and the work of female Scottish artists spanning more than 250 years. Racial identity and inequality, Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Jekyll and Hyde” story, the radical power of the colour black in the fashion industry and Scottish bogland areas will also be explored by artists in different shows.

McAleese said: “With this being my first festival, it was really important to me to have a programme which is really rooted in the city, and really respects and interrogates the history and the culture here.

Rachel Mars will be creating a durational performance installation at the Royal Lyceum Theatre's workshops at Rosburn during the Edinburgh Art Festival.

“I was very keen that there was a lot of collaboration between the art festival and galleries around the city, and with other festivals in the city. We’re also using a lot of different venues around the city that we’ve not used before.

“And there is also a real focus on bringing people together by creating big moments in the form of one-off events, performances and parties on each of the three weekends of the festival.”

The festival will open with a one-off performance-screening at the Queen’s Hall of History of the Present, a “hybrid opera” collaboration between Northern Irish writer Maria Fusco, Glasgow filmmaker Margaret Salmon and American composer Annea Lockwood, which has been partly inspired by the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

French artist and poet Tarek Lakhrissi will be staging a show at the French Institute on Charlotte Square on the festival’s final weekend, which will feature Makeda Monnet and musician Victor da Silva.

Jesse Jones will be staging a show featuring film, performance and sculpture at the Talbot Rice Gallery during this year's Edinburgh Art Festival.

The 17th-century Parliament House, the oldest-surviving parliament building in the UK, will play host to a one-off performance by Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle inspired by her film work Lagareh – The Last Born, which reflects on grief, loss and mourning, the trauma inflicted upon the black body, and of white privilege and power.

Other one-off events include an American-style block party at Edinburgh Printmakers, where the solo exhibition from Christian Noelle Charles will explore racial identity, inequality and care through the black female lens.

Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh Airport, will play host to a solo show by Lindsey Mendick, which will tackle taboo topics and uncomfortable truths, and feature nightlife scenes inspired by The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Mendick is also collaborating with the Bonjour collective to curate a party night in collaboration with Jupiter Artland.

The art festival will be joining forces with the city’s August celebrations of literature and film to stage a series of Sunday afternoon salon events, which will give festival goers an insight into the work of writers, filmmakers and artists.

Christian Noelle Charles will be staging a show at the Edinburgh Printmakers Gallery during this year's Edinburgh Art Festival

Edinburgh University’s venue at 50 George Square will be playing host to Nat Raha’s performance exploring the history and development of island prisons across the British Empire, including the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth.

Jesse Jones’s shows at the university’s Talbot Rice Gallery is based on the writings of medieval female Christian mystics and explores the women who were burned as heretics before the first witch trials.

The university’s Institute for Design Informatics has joined forces with artists including Martin Disley, Theodore Koterwas and Everest Pipkin for an exploration of “deep fake audio”, which will bring together human and machine voices.

Rabindranath X Bhose’s installation Dance in the Sacred Domain, for the Collective Gallery, on Calton Hill, features sculpture, poetry, performance and drawings inspired by his time spent meditating on bogland in Scotland.

Venues in Leith include the Sierra Metro gallery, where Haein Kim’s show exploring the modern woman’s psyche will feature a “playful world of humorous and bold protagonists who readily express their fear, anxieties, love and determination”.

The nearby Leith Library will showcase a new illuminated artwork by Rabiya Choudhry, which draws inspiration from the flaming torch motif found on many Andrew Carnegie-funded libraries. The artist’s own torch will be encircled with the words of African-American civil rights activist Ella Baker.

Writer Maria Fusco, filmmaker Margaret Salmon and composer Annea Lockwood will be collaborating on a hybrid opera on stage and screen during this year's Edinburgh Art Festival.

Leith Library, the Whale Arts centre in Wester Hailes, The Ripple Project in Restalrig and the Bridgend Farmhouse in Newington will all play host to the Travelling Gallery bus, which will showcase a collaboration between Rachel Adams and Tessa Lynch exploring the mess of 21st-century living.

The Royal Lyceum Theatre’s workshops at Roseburn will be playing host to a three-day durational performance by Rachel Mars inspired by the arrival point at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. The Dovecot Gallery’s celebration of female Scottish artists will feature work by Rachel Maclean, Sekai Machache, Joan Eardley, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Elizabeth Blackadder, Alison Watt and Alberta Whittle. The work of Chanel, Dior, Jean Muir, Gareth Pugh, Simone Rocha, Comme des Garçons, Joe Casely-Hayford and Maximilian will also feature in the National Museum exhibition, Beyond The Little Black Dress.

Amand Catto, head of visual arts at Creative Scotland, said: "The spirit of collaboration at the heart of the Edinburgh Art Festival creates exciting opportunities for artists and for audiences.”