2021 exhibition programme

After a year marked by challenges we are hopeful for what 2021 will bring. We are delighted to announce an exhibition programme that draws from and reflects on these challenges, and which has been shaped by the pandemic experience.

The Normal
January 29–April 10, 2021
Amy Balkin, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Boyle Family, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Sascha Pohflepp, Gabrielle Goliath, Femke Herregraven, Jarsdell Solutions Ltd, Kahlil Joseph, Tonya McMullan, Sarah Rose, James Webb.

The Normal is an exhibition developed in response to the “wake-up call” of Covid-19. Exploring the profound re-orientation in relation to planetary health, ideas about progress, communities and new ways of working precipitated by the pandemic, it affirms the urgent need to rethink our relationship to the biosphere we inhabit.

Bringing together artists from around the world who are attuned to this singular moment in history, The Normal showcases international perspectives, including new ways of working with artists to produce works that respond to the imperatives of sustainability. Crucially, it looks to highlight how our laws, histories and communities are entangled with viruses, ecosystems and each other, foregrounding the role that art plays in envisaging different relationships to worlds that have yet to emerge.

Angelica Mesiti
June 25–September 4, 2021

Angelica Mesiti is one of the leading Australian artists of her generation, with a body of work characterised by scientific reflection and historical research and formally involving aspects of music, dance and performance. Working with video as a space of encounter, Mesiti’s multi-sensory installations transform their environments, and at Talbot Rice Gallery will be activated against the inherent contradictions of the building’s neo-classical and contemporary galleries. The exhibition, part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh International Festival in 2021, will be the most in-depth exploration of her practice yet held in Europe and the UK; and includes works made for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as new work commissioned for the Busan Biennale during the pandemic.

Presented across all of Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition spaces and drawing on the research initiatives of Edinburgh College of Art, the exhibition broaches subjects from legal infrastructure to the language of plants, and reflects the paradox of human isolation in tandem with collective action emerging from the 2020 pandemic.


Emeka Ogboh
July 29–August 29, 2021

Commissioned by TRG in partnership with Edinburgh Art Festival, a new sound work by the Nigerian sound and installation artist Emeka Ogboh is a response to the ongoing theatre of departure as the UK prepares to leave the E.U. Weaving together Scottish musical history with European politics, Ogboh’s site-specific installation in the Burns Monument in Edinburgh will run as part of the festival’s Commissions Programme throughout August.


Qiu Zhijie, Lara Favaretto and Nira Pereg
October 1–December 18, 2021

The works of Qiu Zhijie, Lara Favaretto and Nira Pereg are drawn together around the idea of the monument. Fictional, momentary and paradoxical, their distinct approaches to the concept of “something that reminds” act against the heavy material monuments that proliferate around the world, to describe a more momentary, imaginary or contested space. Sometimes contradictory, sometimes policed, and always characterised by disappearance, they form the core of an exhibition that reflects upon the fragility of our communion with the past.


Talbot Rice Residents
This two year residency of emerging artists working in Scotland welcomes Renèe Helèna Browne, Ross Fleming, Emmie McLuskey, Sekai Machache and Matt Zurowski in 2021. They join Jenny Hogarth, Rae-Yen Song, Eothen Stearn, Sarah Rose and Mona Yoo in the studios of Edinburgh College of Art, and a wide-ranging programme of workshops, masterclasses, exhibitions and symposia.

Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition programme is supported by Edinburgh College of Art and Creative Scotland, with additional support from The Confucius Institute for Scotland, and the Talbot Rice Residents are supported by the Freelands Foundation

Stay in touch with us as we explore what the 16th century University of Edinburgh, together with Edinburgh College of Art can contribute to contemporary art research and production today and in the future.

Press contact. Sam Talbot: sam [​at​] sam-talbot.com