Edinburgh Art Festival 2022

As the city marks 75 years of festival culture, Edinburgh Art Festival welcomes its new Director, Kim McAleese, who joins as the festival opens. A celebration of the unique ecology of the visual arts in Scotland’s capital city, the 2022 programme brings together independent galleries, world class collections, and spaces for production. This year, the festival features more than 100 artists from around the world in 7 commissions, 35 partner exhibitions, and Platform: 2022, the festival’s annual showcase of emerging visual artists working in Scotland.

The festival’s 18th edition features major exhibitions of artists including: Ishiuchi Miyako, Céline Condorelli, Tracey Emin, Cooking Sections and Sakiya, Ashanti Harris, Studio Lenca, Luke Jerram, Daniel Silver, Alan Davie, Ruth Ewan, Lorna Robertson, Will Maclean, Duncan Shanks, Barbara Rae, John McLean, and Shelagh Wakely.

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Union Canal, this year’s Commissions and Associate Artist Programme explores and responds to the waterway and the people who live near it. The programme title is inspired by The Wave of Translation—the phenomenon of a soliton wave, a discovery made in Edinburgh by naval engineer John Scott Russell in Scotland’s capital city in 1834.

In the west of the city, residents of Wester Hailes and surrounding neighbourhoods have formed the Community Wellbeing Collective (C.W.C.), who present Watch this Space in Westside Plaza Shopping Centre. Over the course of 9 months, the group have worked to create a space for all to develop together and to experience what community wellbeing is, and could be. The collective present a programme of anchor events, including workshops, discussions and music, running throughout the festival.

Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, renowned for her long term socially engaged and political practice, initiated the C.W.C.. As a result of her research practice in Wester Hailes, she will deliver the festival’s Keynote Lecture for 2022, in partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland and British Council Scotland. Van Heeswijk’s work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including the Liverpool, Shanghai, and Venice biennials.

Further up the canal at Bridge 8 Hub, Glasgow-based artists Ruby Pester and Nadia Rossi (working together as Pester and Rossi) have created Finding Buoyancy, an installation of colourful sails flying above the canalside activity centre. The work is the result of a number of workshops at WHALE Arts in Wester Hailes, where local people made responses to the importance of the canal as a site of nature in their neighbourhood. The commission launches with Setting Sail, a celebratory live performance staged on a canal boat, featuring songs penned by local people in partnership with Rhubaba Choir.

Towards the city centre at Lochrin Basin, the festival’s 2022 co-commission with Edinburgh Printmakers premieres work by artist Nadia Myre through print, sound and installation work. As an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, Myre’s work brings to the fore the decolonial impulse inherent in the artist’s practice, imprinting and entangling materials with meaning.

Myre will discuss her practice and the commission—titled Tell Me of Your Boats and Your Waters—Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go? in a special event at Edinburgh Printmakers.

Channels—brought together by artist Emmie McLuskey for the festival’s Associate Artist Programme—focuses on ideas of labour and nature along the canal over two centuries. The festival premieres new work by Hannan Jones, Janice Parker, Maeve Redmond and Amanda Thomson at varying points along the canal, accompanied by Background Noise, an iteration of an ongoing project by McLuskey which takes the form of weekly radio broadcasts.

The festival’s Endnote Lecture for 2022 is delivered by Edinburgh-born sculptor and contemporary artist, Hew Locke. Locke’s Duveen Hall Commission for Tate Britain, The Procession, opened in March this year, and in September 2022 his work Gilt will be unveiled as the Façade Commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Endnote Lecture is presented in partnership with British Council Scotland.

Edinburgh Art Festival is supported by Creative Scotland, The City of Edinburgh Council, Scottish Government and EventScotland.

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