9 Shows to See in Scotland during Edinburgh Art Festival 2024

Every summer, Edinburgh bursts into life with arts festivals. There’s the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, held every August in Scotland. Alongside it runs the Edinburgh International Festival, founded in the same year as the Fringe, following World War II—a time when arts were seen as vital to uplift spirits after war.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the younger Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). Curated by Eleanor Edmondson and directed by Kim McAleese, this event will take place across Edinburgh, from the Leith Docks to Carlton Hill. It will include everything from performances in car parks to installations in the Royal Botanic Gardens to a one-day festival at art space Jupiter Artland.

This year’s EAF centers around conditions of work, care, and the power of resistance and activist movements. Rosie’s Disobedient Press, a collaborative project by artists Lisette May Monroe and Adrien Howard, for example, will explore language and words as historical acts of resistance over the past 20 years, with guerilla-style print, clothing, windows, and banner interventions throughout the Scottish capital. At the Castle Terrace car park, Prem Sahib presents Alleus, a performance of live and pre-recorded voices which breaks down and reworks an anti-immigration speech from former U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman (the title is her forename spelt backwards).

Here’s Artsy’s roundup of the best art shows to catch during the Edinburgh festival, perfect to fit into your trip to Scotland:

Ingleby Gallery

Through Aug. 31

Rising Los Angeles–based painter Hayley Barker’s exhibition at Ingleby Gallery is all about celebrating the shifts in seasons. Luscious greens and earthy hues fill her canvases featuring her L.A. home and studio surroundings. Some works are cropped close-ups: a hawk, or a woven spider’s web. One round canvas depicts the autumn equinox moon, and other paintings play with perspective, leading the eye down a garden path or a bird’s-eye view of a flowerbed. As well as nature’s cycles, celebrations of the seasons feature in her work, such as My Folks’ Xmas Tree (2024), a large-scale portrait-oriented painting of a Christmas tree. Barker’s works respond to the play of light in the gallery, which is situated in the historic Glasite Meeting House, designed in the 1830s as a religious space.

While making these paintings, Barker asked herself a series of questions: “How do we honor the earth and her many inhabitants over time and space? How does it feel to live a year with special attention to how one celebrates, marks, and notices seasonal changes while experiencing the long and almost invisible cycles of time passing?”

Fruitmarket Gallery

Through Oct. 6

Known for his large-scale architectural installations made from jute sacks, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama describes his work as “the exploration of freedom” as he examines themes of post-colonialism and global migration. His first solo exhibition in Scotland, “Songs about Roses,” is inspired by Fruitmarket Gallery’s location and proximity to Edinburgh Waverley train station, situated next door and above the subterranean station.

For “Songs about Roses,” Mahama has transported materials collected from Ghana’s now-defunct railway in the former Gold Coast to the gallery space. The railway was built by British colonialists in 1923 to transport gold, minerals, and cocoa. Mahama sees the reuse of the railway materials as a revival of the history of the railway, particularly in Scotland, which gained much of its economic wealth from the colonial project. The exhibition will also include large-scale charcoal and ink drawings, sculptures, photography, and film centered on the railway. A solo exhibition by Mahama will open at White Cube in New York in September 2024.

Jupiter Artland

Through Sep. 29

Jupiter Artland, located in the grounds of Bonnington House, spans 120 acres of woodlands, meadows, and gardens. Founded in 2009, the contemporary sculpture park and art gallery aims to create a space where art, nature, and education coexist, and includes permanent works by Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, and Cornelia Parker, among others.

Characterized by almost pitch-black painted backdrops, Glasgow-born painter Andrew Sim’s works depict mythical creatures, rainbows, plants, and forests as signs and symbols to document Sim’s experience of queerness. The show brings together recent paintings, such as Portrait of a Yucca with Lots of Heads and Stars (2024). The canvas depicts a painting of a yucca, which is planted beside The Glory (a pub and LGBTQ+ venue in London’s East End). Many of their paintings associate particular objects with a certain space or place that has impacted Sim’s day-to-day experiences. Other paintings feature twin characters, or two objects together, which Sim explained in a recent interview is “essential” to queer art. “It’s just showing two things that are the same, together. It doesn’t necessarily mean romantic relationships, I think of it as queer family-building,” they said.

For American social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin, the Great Depression of the 1930s left a profound impact. He began photographing working-class communities, laborers, and miners in Buffalo, New York, before embarking on a “Family of Miners” photography series that saw him traveling to China, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, and eventually documenting the men, women, and children of the Scottish coalfields in 1982. Artist Nicky Bird revisited Rogovin’s documentation 40 years later and decided to meet individuals and families connected to the original photographs.

The exhibition “Before and After Coal” is a collaborative project between Bird, the National Galleries of Scotland, and mining communities from Fife, East Ayrshire, and the Lothians. The new series of work on display showcases participants from these communities posing for portraits in front of enlarged versions of the original photos, wearing orange miner’s boiler suits and helmets. The exhibition focuses on family, community spirit, history, and the important documentary work by Rogovin.

Chris Ofili, “The Caged Bird’s Song”

Dovecot Studios

Through Oct. 5

For nearly three years, the master weavers at Dovecot Studio meticulously translated Chris Ofili’s fluid watercolor painting into a beautifully intricate tapestry, entitled The Caged Bird’s Song (2014–17). Unveiled at the National Gallery in London as the centerpiece of the 2017 exhibition “Weaving Magic,” the tapestry, with its vibrant pinks, turquoise, and purple hues, returns to Scotland for EAF, accompanied by insights into its context and complexities.

The Caged Bird’s Song triptych tapestry depicts a Trinidadian seascape with a waterfall backdrop, featuring Adam and Eve sitting together, and two figures framing the scene, one holding a caged bird. Translating watercolor paintings into tapestry is a challenging task for weavers, which often requires a spontaneous approach to capturing the fluidity and detail of the paint, which adds to the complexity of this piece.

City Art Centre

Through Aug. 25

In Poland, the LQBTQ+ community has historically struggled with discrimination and oppression, with the president Andrzej Duda labeling LGBT “an ideology” in his reelection campaign in 2020. However, over the years, LGBTQ+ activists have grown in numbers in Poland, with the number of Pride marches growing from six in 2016, to 20 in 2019.

Polish-born artist Karol Radziszewski’s work broadly encompasses painting, photography, film, and installation. At City Art Centre, his exhibition brings together research into the archives of Filo Magazine, one of the first queer underground publications in Central-Eastern Europe. Founded by Ryszard Kisiel, the magazine was created in direct response to Operation Hyacinth, carried out by police in the communist state from 1985 to 1987 to suppress the queer community. The exhibition brings together photographs and copies of the publication (that were originally printed via photocopiers), alongside paintings by Radziszewski in an ongoing series entitled “The Gallery of Portraits.”

The boldly painted portraits are reminiscent of early Cubist portraits and depict individuals who have been subjected to prejudice and discrimination based on their sexual orientation and identity. The exhibition has been co-commissioned by London gallery Auto Italia and will be accompanied by a program of events with Radziszewski and artist Agné Jokšé.

The Scottish Gallery

Through Aug. 24

Bringing together works by the Scottish Colourists, the St. Ives School, modern British painters, and Abstract Expressionists, “Modern Masters Festival Edition 2024” at The Scottish Gallery is centered around the Scottish painter and educator William Gillies. Known for his masterful use of color, form, and light, Gillies was principal at Edinburgh College of Art as well as a proponent of the Scottish art scene, drawing influence from artists working across the United Kingdom and beyond.

Although Gillies never formally belonged to the Scottish Colourists, he was significantly influenced by their work, particularly that of S. J. Peploe and Denis Peploe, whose works are included in the show. The exhibition explores the impact of these artists’ work on Gillies, as well as the St. Ives School, a mid-20th-century artists’ colony in Cornwall, England, which fostered artists like Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (also included in the “Modern Masters” show).

Open Eye Gallery

Through Aug. 24

In this show at Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh-born artist Leon Morrocco captures the form and structure of rocky mountains, valleys, fields, forests, seascapes, and waves in a new body of work inspired by his travels to the Alpes-Maritimes and Nice. Using vivid colors offset by warm light gray stone colors in oil, gouache, and pastel, “Terre et Mer” explores the changing light and atmosphere of the Mediterranean, in the artist’s second show at the gallery. Morrocco freezes moments in time, depicting the morning light casting over mountains, the sharp shadows on the beach at night, and the intricate interplay of light and cast shadows in town alleyways.

Morrocco has described exploring landscapes as geological layers of time, wanting to capture the monumentality of the mountains in his travels to France. “It was so quiet up there…total silence,” he wrote in the show’s press materials “The mountains are very volcanic and were obviously the result of tremendous geological turmoil.…I was often sitting drawing on volcanic lava, the rocks around me pitted with blowholes and you realize ‘my God, that’s lava that flowed down this hill millions of years ago.’”

El Anatsui, “Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta”

Talbot Rice Gallery

Through Sep. 29