Summer programme: Annette Krauss, Camara Taylor, Ruth Ewan

This summer, Collective presents three new, distinct artist commissions across the City Observatory site and online.

Using the City Observatory site as a springboard, Collective’s programme considers the hidden histories and untold stories relating to our site and wider cultural history. Bringing together new work by Annette Krauss, Ruth Ewan, and Camara Taylor, our summer programme of solo exhibitions and related events reframes and questions complex figures, movements and systems whose legacies are woven into our collective cultural memory. All three projects have been developed with the artists, in some cases over a number of years, to explore how the legacies of the past can be reconsidered and re-presented to help us re-imagine the present and future.

A Matter of Precedents by Annette Krauss opens on June 1, as a research resource in the City Observatory Library. This collaborative long-term research project reflects on Collective’s move to the City Observatory and explores the site’s designation as a “common good asset.” The project launches with two walking conversations on June 1 and 2 led by Annette Krauss and other artists and cultural thinkers, and will visit common good sites in Edinburgh.

backwash, an exhibition of new work by Camara Taylor, opens in the Hillside on June 18. The exhibition consists of new video and mixed-media work relating to the artist’s ongoing conversation with Scottish waterways and a collection of public papers spanning multiple centuries. Camara Taylor is a participant in Satellites, Collective’s development programme for emergent practitioners based in Scotland.

On June 25 The Beast by Ruth Ewan will open in the City Dome. A new animation, presented alongside archival material, focuses on the Scottish/American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and his namesake Diplodocus carnegii. The exhibition explores intersecting ideas around power, exploitation, culture and the history of capitalism. The animation has been co-written with Marxist magician Dr Ian Saville.