Edinburgh Art Festival is back with a major programme to support Scotland's visual arts

If you aren't doing much this summer, it's worth adding Edinburgh Art Festival to your calendar. The annual event is a major platform for the visual arts as part of the Scottish capital’s world-famous August festival season.

Written By: Tora Baker

29 May 2019

This week, it has revealed details of five new projects specially commissioned for 2019 as part of the annual Commissions Programme as well as the four artists selected to participate in Platform: 2019, the Festival’s dedicated showcase for emerging talent.

These new projects join the previously unveiled exhibitions programme as part of the 16th edition, bringing together the capital’s leading galleries, museums and artist-run spaces and featuring internationally established names alongside emergent talent from Scotland, the rest of the UK and beyond.

Magician Wilf Keys performing as part of Ruth Ewan's Sympathetic Magick, Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

Art Early at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

The Commissions Programme each year supports Scottish and international artists to create ambitious new work specifically for the Festival. This year, it looks to storytelling as one of the fundamental ways in which we make sense of the world around us and imagine new futures.

Reflecting on the mood of uncertainty predominating UK politics as well as the dramatic upheavals in longstanding geopolitical axes across the globe, Stories for an Uncertain World invites perspectives from five leading contemporary artists working across a wide range of media, from light installation through to performance and film.

Internationally acclaimed artists Nathan Coley, Alfredo Jaar, Rosalind Nashashibi, Sriwhana Spong and Corin Sworn present new projects at sites across the city, including Parliament Hall, home to the Scottish Parliament prior to the 1707 Act of Union; Edinburgh’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’, the structure linking Festival partner galleries National Museum of Scotland and Talbot Rice Gallery; St Bernard’s Well, an eighteenth-century neo-classical temple designed by the painter Alexander Nasmyth; and Edinburgh College of Art’s newly re-opened sculpture court.

Art Late at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

Art Late at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

Platform: 2019 will support four artists based in Scotland and at the start of their careers to make and present new work. Housed in The Fire Station at Edinburgh College of Art, this year’s group exhibition, selected by award-winning artists Monster Chetwynd and Toby Paterson, brings together new work by Anna Danielewicz, Joanne Dawson, Harry Maberly and Suds McKenna.

For more information, visit www.edinburghartfestival.com.