Search: Edinburgh Art Festival, 0-4 - Edinburgh Festival Guide

Contemporary artist Ilana Halperin explores notions of time in 'The Library', a new exhibition that presents rocks, minerals and geological artefacts in a new and remarkable light.

Tracing a thin and permeable line between geology and biology, culture and nature, Halperin introduces visitors to the alphabet of geology: including agates that share the artist’s birthday, minerals that record the collision of Earth and outer space, and artworks slowly formed in caves and geothermal springs. At the heart of the exhibition is the artist's most ambitious project to date: a 1.3 ton stone library featuring ‘books’ of the mineral mica.

Originally from New York, Halperin trained as a stone carver before her growing fascination and interest in geology drew her to Scotland, recognised as the birthplace of geology. Now based in Glasgow, Halperin is the first recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship at National Museums Scotland, during which she has been researching the Museums' own collections and exploring geological phenomena in the wider world. Her research has taken her from the Blue Lagoon and active volcanoes in Iceland to the Fontaines Petrifiantes, family-owned petrifying caves in France.
Supported by Creative Scotland.

'From Death to Death and Other Small Tales' brings together works from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, one of the most important private collections of modern and contemporary art, with major works from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. This innovative exhibition comprises approximately 130 works and creates a new and dynamic context for both collections.

Through often surprising juxtapositions between works, the exhibition highlights the significance of the body as a theme in 20th and 21st century art practice and enables audiences to view many world-class artworks that have never before been seen in Scotland.

Many of the most significant names in post-war and contemporary art are represented – figures whose output and ideas have shaped the way in which subsequent generations of artists have developed and others continue to emerge. Artists represented within the exhibition include Marina Abramovi?, Matthew Barney, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, Ana Mendieta, René Magritte, Ernesto Neto, Pablo Picasso and Kiki Smith.

Please note this exhibition features nudity and imagery of an explicit nature. Rooms with such content are highlighted in the exhibition.

Bringing together highlights from National Museums Scotland's collection for the first time, 'Amazing Amber' explores the many facets of this beautiful and versatile material, revealing its origins and its diverse properties.

On display will be pieces from across the globe - from Borneo to the Baltic, Sicily to Scotland - reflecting both the wide variety in appearance of fossilised tree resin and the range of its material applications. Used for centuries as a decorative artefact, amber was also treasured for its perceived magical powers, crafted into charms and amulets to heal and ward off evil spirits.

Amber is also prized for its unique capacity to preserve fragile life that is millions of years old, opening a special window into the past. The exhibition explores how scientists are continuing to make exciting new discoveries based on life forms preserved in amber.

This exhibition will examine the motivations, processes and benefits of collecting contemporary art through displaying works owned by a wide variety of participating collectors: from first-time buyers to corporates, and from family collections to those held by national institutions.

The artists whose works are displayed by the collectors have also been invited to exhibit new works from their studios, offering visitors the opportunity to begin – or enhance – their own collections.

Supporting the exhibition will be a programme of events involving the participating collectors and artists, in which both parties will be invited to discuss the role of collections and collectors, the dynamics of their relationship, the processes involved, the way in which collections are constructed and how people interested in buying contemporary art can plan their first steps towards building their own collection.
Supported by Own Art and Creative Scotland.

This solo exhibition by Glasgow based artist Rachel Maclean premieres a new film and screenprints, commissioned and published by Edinburgh Printmakers over the last two years.

Producing work that slips inside and outside of history, Maclean explores Scotland’s romantic past through the lens of contemporary political debate. Employing a monstrously alluring aesthetic, the work explores a hybrid of styles that reference the rugged romance of Scottish Landscape painting, the all-smiling, futurist visions of SNP propaganda and the hyper-saturated pop colours of 'Oor Wullie'.

Maclean is the only actor or model in the work, using costume and face paint to invent characters that drink North-sea oil from Jacobite crystal, divide up pieces of a Union Jack cake and incite conflict over the mispronunciation of the poetry of Robert Burns. At once violently positive and grotesquely kitsch, this exhibition employs dark humour to create a complex and surreal vision of contemporary Scottish and British national identity.

The work of both Leeds United and Paul Rooney explores notions of narrative, myth, identity and authorship. In 2011 they began working on a project that began to scrutinise, fictionalise, and mythologise each other’s practice. This exhibition extends that relationship and deliberately blurs the edges between the work of the artists.

On display will be new video and text works, including a video documenting an attempt to claim the Loch Ness monster for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and a dark and ominous film concerning Yorkshire rhubarb sheds.

Originally trained at ECA, Paul Rooney won the prestigious Northern Art Prize in 2008, was shortlisted for Liverpool Art Prize in 2010, and has had recent solo shows at Matt’s Gallery in London and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Leeds United is a collective, also operating under a number of pseudonyms such as L Foundation and MOMA, whose work examines the operation of the art world through the appropriation of other artists’ practices. They have recently exhibited at Tate Liverpool, Camden Arts Centre and PSL in Leeds.

GARAGE presents new works and collaborations by artists created during a series of micro-residencies in this unique project space which comprises three garages and a garden.

The artists exhibiting include Ailie Rutherford, Ary D Cahyono, Belinda Gilbert Scott, Bob Moyler, Christine Hilditch, David MacDiarmid, Emma Bowen, Jo Arksey, Jo Marsh, Kati Niemelä, Kirsten Welsh, Malcy Duff, Owen Davison, Pester & Rossi with The Bearded Clams, Rebecca Key, Sarah Kenchington, Sharon Quigley, Steff Norwood, Stéphane Cattaneo and Thomas MacGregor.

The projects presented will include a series of live events and performances, creating links between artists and artist groups from many areas of the UK and providing the opportunity for public engagement and exchange during the festival. The curators and several of the artists will be available for interview and discussion on site.

Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) is the sole resource of its kind in Scotland. Launched in 1991, the library has amassed a remarkable collection that charts women’s and equalities campaigns, showcasing and conserving the diversity of women’s history and creativity.

To mark the library’s 21st birthday in 2012, GWL commissioned 21 female artists to create limited edition fine art prints inspired by items in its collections, from campaign badges and knitting patterns to Suffragette memorabilia, album covers and feminist newsletters.

The exhibition includes works by Claire Barclay, Sam Ainsley, Jacki Parry, Kate Davis, Ellie Harrison, Ciara Phillips and Corin Sworn, and will also include 21 new texts generated by a renowned group of women writers.
Supported by Museums Galleries Scotland, The National Lottery and Creative Scotland.

Pioneers in tapestry and rug making for over a 100 years, Dovecot Studios presents an exhibition of hand-tufted rugs created in collaboration with well known contemporary artists.

These graphic and vibrant works uniquely showcase the colour blending and design skills of Dovecot’s artist weavers and rug-tufters working in tandem with the ideas and concerns of artists as diverse as John Byrne, William Crozier, Alan Davie, Nick Evans, Ruth Ewan and Alasdair Gray.

Scottish artist Katri Walker is attracting increasing attention for her multi channel audio-visual installations which are equally at home in the worlds of contemporary art, portraiture and documentary film-making. 'North West', presented by Peacock Visual Arts at the 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival drew on the landscape of Assynt, Sutherland and its close geological connection to Monument Valley, to explore a rich history of cross-pollination between Scottish and American culture.

Her newest work, jointly commissioned by NVA and Edinburgh Art Festival, continues to use the Scottish landscape as a medium to explore wider concerns. 'An Equilibrium Not of this World' was commissioned in association with NVA’s extraordinary Speed of Light project, and draws on running and specifically hill-running to reflect on man’s complex and highly intimate connection to the land.

The work takes its title from acclaimed geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, a pioneer in the field of ‘humanist’ geography, who married conventional geography with philosophy, art, psychology and religion, to explore how human’s relate to and perceive the space around them.

Walker’s dual projection with surround sound conveys an intensely symbiotic relationship between man and the environment, in which the body reveals in its interior all the familiar features of a landscape, and external landscape is transformed into interior experience. The work establishes a strong visual conversation between the internal and external, counterposing extraordinary microscopic timelapse sequences of the interior workings of the body, with views of the Scottish landscape as experienced by a hill-runner. It is a formal conceit through which an interior view of arteries can equally be read as the branches of a bush quivering in the wind; a respiration graph becomes an abstract mountain landscape.