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With the Edinburgh Art Festival taking place this month, we bring you our festival highlights

Jenny Saville (b. 1970), Rosetta II, 2005 - 2006 Oil on watercolour paper, mounted on board, 252 x 187.5cm, copyright of the artist.

In the month of August, Edinburgh is aglow with festivals of every nature. The well-trodden Edinburgh Festival Fringe sees the city overflowing with alternative theatre and comedy, whilst the Edinburgh International Festival showcases some of the best and boldest of the world’s theatre and music. Meanwhile, the ever-expanding Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF), now in its fourteenth year, sees the capital explode into life with visual art.

Bringing together Edinburgh’s leading galleries, museums and artist-run spaces, the festival is a month-long, city-wide celebration of art and artists. Each year, the festival presents leading international and UK artists alongside the best emerging talent, major survey exhibitions of historical figures, and a special programme of newly commissioned artworks that respond to public and historical sites in the city.

Here to help you navigate this year’s EAF, we bring you eight of our festival highlights.

Tacita Dean

Fresh off the back of an unprecedented collaboration between the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy — in which the artist presented three solo shows simultaneously — acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean brings her widely acclaimed exhibition to the Edinburgh Art Festival this summer. Woman with a Red Hat is a groundbreaking exhibition that examines the relationship of performance to fiction.

Centered around Dean’s bewilderingly intricate film Event for a Stage (2015), the exhibition will show a screening of the film every hour. Originally commissioned for the Sydney Biennale in 2014, Event for a Stage was cut together from four nights of live performance, and features actor (and longtime collaborator) Stephen Dillane in a number of performative contexts; he acts out a script written for him by Dean, recites lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, talks about his family, reads a story, and meta-announces the changing of the reels within the cameras that are capturing him on film. According to the EAF, “It is a performance about performing, given by an actor playing an actor”. In addition to this piece, Woman with a Red Hat will showcase a number of Dean’s other films, drawings and photogravures — notably including the longest of her signature blackboard drawings, When First I Raised the Tempest (2016), which is being shown for the first time in the UK.

Tacita Dean (b. 1965), When First I Raised the Tempest (2016), copyright of the artist.

Annie Crabtree

Featuring in the EAF as part of Platform 2018 — a dedicated showcase for Scottish artists at the beginning of their careers — Annie Crabtree’s bold new video work examines the loss of bodily autonomy through illness. By deconstructing the visual and physical act of swimming, Crabtree uses her unique imagery to present swimming as a means of recovery, resistance and regaining of autonomy. Body of Water (2018) is an exciting piece of work by a young artist, which highlights the cultural misrepresentation of female pain. One of the wonders of the EAF is the role it plays in nurturing and platforming young, local and unique artists, and Crabtree is a definite example of the emerging talent that is so deserving of the festival’s focus.

Annie Crabtree (b. 1989), Body of Water, 2018, still from video, copyright of the artist.

Kate McMillan

The Past is Singing in our Teeth is a new performance and installation piece by the artist Kate McMillan. Presenting at Arusha Gallery, McMillan documents and re-evaluates the associations between time and memory, and the capacity of art to uncover the deep, buried strata of memories that lie dormant within ourselves. McMillan has created a two-channel video work for the exhibition, which follows a young girl’s journey as she rediscovers a powerful and primordial, mystical heritage, leading her back towards a time and history that is a partially beyond her conscious reach. Accompanied by sculptures and sound performances, McMillan’s installation reconfigures art itself as an extremely important, and active agent in the process and mechanisms of memory.

Kate McMillan (b. 1974), The Past is Singing in our Teeth, 2018, still from video, copyright of the artist.

Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow is opening the tenth anniversary programme of Jupiter Artland — a public sculpture park that orbits the city of Edinburgh — with a powerful installation called quarry. Realised in close relationship with Jupiter Artland co-founder Nicky Wilson, the multi-part commission for Jupiter’s woodland consists of three towering sculptural objects, each showcasing Barlow's trademark textural surfaces. Two trunk-like monoliths — one 10 meters high and the other 12 meters high — emerge from the landscape, hanging imposingly over the canopies of the neighboring oak and beech trees, cradling what Barlow calls their own ‘skyframes’. The third work is a huge mass of molded concrete and steel, which has been contorted into the shape of a set of ancient ruined steps. The pieces in quarry are the largest works made to date by the acclaimed sculptor and Royal Academician, and although unveiled as part of the EAF, Barlow’s works will go on to form part of Jupiter Artland’s permanent collection.

Phyllida Barlow (b. 1944), quarry, 2018, copyright of the artist.

NOW

The third instalment of NOW — a showcase of contemporary artists — is centred upon a major retrospective of works by the renowned British artist Jenny Saville, spanning some 25 years of the artist’s career across five rooms. Having recently been featured in Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition All Too Human, Saville has effectively secured her place in the canon of Britain’s greatest modern painters. As a graduate of The Glasgow School of Art, this presentation (somewhat surprisingly) marks the first museum exhibition of the artist’s work ever to be staged in Scotland. The exhibition truly illustrates the scale and ambition of the Saville’s practice, highlighting her unique and challenging approach to composition, materials, gesture and subject matter. NOW features a plethora of monumental paintings and drawings made by Saville between 1992 and 2017 — alongside an impressive roster of work by further artists who are dedicated to investigating themes of the body, performance, and materiality. Among the other artists on show are Christine Borland, Robin Rhode, Sara Barker, Miroslaw Balka, and Alexis Hunter. The exhibition is a towering collection of paintings by some of the most exciting contemporary British artists, focusing on the body and fragmentation.

Jenny Saville (b. 1970), Rosetta II, 2005 - 2006 Oil on watercolour paper, mounted on board, 252 x 187.5cm, copyright of the artist.

Bill Viola

Internationally renowned video artist Bill Viola is presenting his 2008 video piece, Three Women, part of the artist’s critically acclaimed Transfigurations series, which he produced alongside his wife and close collaborator, Kira Perov. ‘Transfiguration’ is a religious term for spiritual change — befittingly then, Viola’s video has been installed at the Parish Church of St Cuthbert. Indeed, a sense of the spiritual is an important and recurrent theme in Viola’s videos — so much so that it was recently announced that the artist will show his works alongside those of Michelangelo himself, in a special exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts next year. In Three Women, a mother and her daughters enact a transfiguration as they enter the illuminated, metaphysical realm beyond the threshold of a thick torrent of water. The piece is a striking meditation on the interlocking and universal human experiences of spirituality, birth, and death. A captivating highlight of the EAF, not to be missed.

Bill Viola (b. 1951), Three Women (Transfigurations), 2008, still from video, copyright of the artist.

Rae Yen-Song

Another up and coming Scottish artist selected to exhibit with Platform 2018, Rae Yen-Song uses performance and documentation to visually interrogate her unique cultural identity as a female Chinese-Scot. The artist’s 2017 film, It’s a Small World — screening all month at the City Art Centre — underlines the social importance of the outsider figure, who uses the self as a means to reveal something of the wider society they live in. By abstracting the meaning of her dual heritage, Yen-Song creates a subversive and unique form of family portrait. It’s a Small World is the latest chapter in the artist’s ongoing series entitled Song Dynasty. This is a fantastic opportunity to experience the work of a rising star before she reaches international significance.

Rae Yen-Song, It’s a Small World, 2017, still from video, copyright of the artist.

Shilpa Gupta

In one of the EAF highlights, the multimedia artist Shilpa Gupta has created a forest of 100 microphones and 100 desecrated papers, designed to fill the Edinburgh College of Art’s Engine House. The installation, For, in your tongue I cannot hide (2018), uses the microphones — suspended above myriad fragments of poetry impaled on spears below — to recite the words of actual poets who were jailed, censored or silenced over the last few centuries. Gupta’s artistic practice is well regarded for its diverse use of media, and the artist has been known to return time and again to the thematic power of language and the written word. In this brand new work, Gupta quotes and re-appropriates the works of poets who found themselves in direct conflict with political powers and authoritarian forces, who sought to crush and obfuscate these artist’s written ideas. The work is not only a spellbinding retrospective of the history of censorship — it also speaks frankly to the fragility of our right to freedom of expression today. In Gupta’s own words: “Time and again, like where we are at today, voices of truth cause discomfort and stand, truncated, however, the resonances stay and they continue to be heard.” Her complex multi-channel sound installation gives voice to the fragmentary, yet evocative words of writers jailed through time, reimagining them once more as a collective body. One of the highest profile artists to present work at the EAF, Gupta’s beautiful installation is a true focal point of this year’s festival.

Shilpa Gupta, For, in your tongue I cannot hide (2018), Installation, copyright of the artist.