Old College
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh EH8 9YL
UK
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10am–5pm
T +44 131 650 2210
info.talbotrice@ed.ac.uk
On the occasion of Talbot Rice Gallery’s 50th anniversary, we are delighted to announce our 2025 programme of exhibitions.
Following on from our Festivals 2024 exhibition of El Anatsui, TRG will present a major solo exhibition in Scotland of Wael Shawky.
Wael Shawky
June 28–September 28, 2025
Wael Shawky’s solo exhibition in 2025 will expand across all of Talbot Rice Gallery’s contemporary and neoclassical galleries. Shawky’s penetrating historical analysis will be explored through dramatic retellings of the past, including Drama 1882, which was created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. This operatic film tells the story of the nationalist Urabi revolution, a dramatic café-fight in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, and the resulting conflict that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt until 1956. Shawky’s piercing film will premiere in the UK at a time of widening historical reckoning for former colonial empires.
Weaving together a number of Shawky’s large-scale film productions, sculptures (many of which have featured in his films) and drawings, the exhibition will celebrate an extraordinary artist, and through extended academic research, honour the Byzantine and Islamic Art Historian who gave the gallery its name 50 years ago—David Talbot Rice. The exhibition of Wael Shawky will welcome the dawn of the next 50 years of Talbot Rice Gallery’s future—part of a global discourse on art and cultural politics, reflective of the past and its neoclassical estate in Edinburgh, and committed to artistic and curatorial practices that engage with issues in the world (and world histories) that effect every one of us.
The Children are Now
October 25, 2025–February 15, 2026
The Children are Now is a group exhibition that aims to represent the relationship of children to the key challenges we face today. Through artworks that capture the potency of children’s playful imaginations, it makes reference to apartheid education, militaristic games and generational trauma, asking how history is made to repeat itself in the face of those who are capable of reimagining everything. In the context of Childism, a movement to expose and redress the prejudices in how children are understood, and in collaboration with Children’s Humans Rights Defender from the Children’s Parliament, it will empower the voices of children. Shifting the emphasis of the phrase “the Children are the Future” from being a description of the fact that children will become the next generation, it acknowledges that young people are here and now the most powerful world-builders among us.
Walker & Bromwich: Searching for a Change of Consciousness
March 15–May 31, 2025
Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich’s projects bring together utopian, socialist and animist ideals to create festival-like spaces for communities to come together around issues related to climate change and social justice. Searching for A Change of Consciousness draws together many groups including working-class communities in Wales, anarchists in Denmark, environmental scholars and Indigenous representatives from the Columbian Amazon. Sometimes funny, sometimes sombre, and always hopeful, their projects are often built around unique giant inflatable works that fall between sculpture and processional objects: totems that manifest positive and negative forces and—reading across Walker & Bromwich’s practice in this exhibition—build bridges and critical links between communities, labour movements and Indigenous struggles.
Trading Zone
March 15–May 31, 2025
Trading Zone—a term coined by historian of science Peter Galison to describe how different worldviews can meet within scientific collaborations—is Talbot Rice Gallery’s interdisciplinary student exhibition. Trading Zone 2025 will include students from: fine art, design, illustration, painting, sculpture, contemporary art practice and creative writing.
Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition programme is supported by Edinburgh College of Art and Creative Scotland, with additional support for Wael Shawky from Henry Moore Foundation. Trading Zone is supported by Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh.
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: Josh Young josh.young [at] ed.ac.uk
