By Cicely Farrer
Shilpa Gupta, Where do I end and you begin, 2012, neon, installation view at The Old Royal High School, photo: Stuart Armitt
During a panel discussion on themes of community and the commons as part of the opening day of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Canadian curator Kathleen Ritter cited the necessity for ‘incoherence’ when understanding narratives of the past and, in this case, those of the Commonwealth.
Although not the stated thematic, the notion of ‘incoherence’ provided an appropriate framing of the selection of works and artists in the festival’s central exhibition, ‘Where do I end and you begin’, which posed timely questions about the history and current status of the Commonwealth, and about the parallel notion of the ‘commons’. Edinburgh Art Festival is an annual event that was launched in 2004 and runs concurrently with the International Festival and the Fringe – a period when the city is taken over by a multitude of theatre and comedy professionals and aficionados, along with a plethora of tourists. Exhibitions, performances and talks take place throughout the month, and, as with neighbouring citywide festival Glasgow International, emerging Scotland-based artists are foregrounded alongside those with more established international profiles. In the summer that Glasgow hosted the 20th Commonwealth Games and with the referendum of Scottish independence pending, revisiting the position of nations states – particularly Commonwealth countries – within the global economic system certainly seemed apt.
Mary Sibande, The Allegory of Growth, 2014
‘Where do I end and you begin’ started at the City Art Centre. Contributions from 21 artists – including Mary Evans, Antonia Hirsch, Uriel Orlow, Mary Sibande, Shannon Te Ao and Yvonne Todd – hailing from the Commonwealth countries of Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK were installed across four floors. Allegory of Growth (2014), South African artist Mary Sibande’s latest work involving her fictional alter-ego, ‘Sophie’, enigmatically welcomed visitors to the exhibition, her sprawling purple silk underskirts reaching out like intertwining tentacles crawling towards the audience. Sophie has found multiple forms in Sibande’s practice, symbolizing the black woman as active subject and contending histories of female oppression and exploitation. Questions of ‘common experience’ and ‘shared identity’ were proposed throughout the exhibition, frequently articulated in relation to the body. In her highly staged photographic series, ‘Ethical Identities [Vegans]’ (2014), New Zealand artist Yvonne Todd questioned stereotypes and preconceptions about veganism. Directing soft pastel coloured lights on her subjects, who were sought out through adverts placed in newspapers and online, to produce eerie portraits, Todd makes light of the often unfounded expectations that exist around how people choose to live, look and dress.
Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest, 2011- 2014, installation view at The Old Royal High School, photo: Stuart Armitt
The exhibition expanded offsite where Amar Kanwar’s ongoing installation The Sovereign Forest (2011–) was mounted in the Old Royal High School, a 19th century building on Calton Hill overlooking the city. The Great Hall of the school was converted into a debating chamber in 1968 in preparation for the 1979 referendum for devolution in Scotland but as this did not come to pass, was never used as such. Kanwar’s sumptuous HD film, The Scene of Crime (2011), was projected on a large screen in a pitch black, never been used, debating chamber. Focusing on the grief of loss in a place of conflict, The Scene of Crime uses long panning shots of the terrains of the east India state Odisha (formerly Orissa) cut with scenes of civic clashes. Since 1999, Kanwar has been filming the conflicts in various villages and towns in Odisha which continue to take place between the people and state police in response to commercial acquisition of and industrial construction on the land. By way of these protracted images of natural beauty, The Scene of Crime instilled a sense of ‘slow time’ memorializing the landscape, its ecology and the relationships that existed within and with it. Also at the High School, looming, barely legible, above the building was the exhibition’s statement piece, Shilpa Gupta’s nine-metre neon light sculpture Where do I end and you begin. The text-based sculpture traces the words of its title, questioning the relationship between the self and the other. However given its eponymous status, and its frequent utterance in the catalogue and public programme, the work became an uncomfortable icon, its overuse affecting (for me) the subtleties of the piece itself.
The festival itself spread far beyond this central exhibition, with a broad spectrum of exhibitions taking place across the city, many of which form part of the other major art event taking place in Scotland this summer, GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland. Edinburgh Art Festival sits in partial contrast to this compendious national survey, providing a global scope to situate the practices of the GENERATION artists.
Tessa Lynch, Raising, 2014, view of action at Jupiter Artland
On the outskirts of Edinburgh in the sculpture park Jupiter Artland, Glasgow based artist Tessa Lynch invited participants to perform Raising (2014) – a collective action of constructing a barn. As I arrived in the heavy rain, approximately 15 volunteers were beginning to erect the wooden frame of a fragmented barn according to an instructional maquette. Lynch’s project invokes an ancient tradition, practiced in England until 17th Century, ruling that if you could build a home and light a fire in a place before sunset, you could claim the land as your own. The declarative action raises questions of what constitutes public space and how communities can occupy it. It felt especially pertinent in Scotland where, according to a report published earlier this year, 432 individuals own half of the land.
Katie Patterson,Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (91,800g), 2014
found meteorite, cast melted and re-cast back into a new version of itself, 40.6 × 33 × 22.9 cm
Back in the city, at Ingleby Gallery, Katie Paterson’s six reformed meteorites (‘Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky’, 2013–14) lined the floor in an exhibition of works relating to cosmology and aiming to prompt a form of ecological thinking. Originally bought from a meteorite-dealer in Arizona, they were melted down and cast into new forms, one of which was sent back into space in an unmanned rocket on Tuesday 29 July. Paterson’s meteorites, much like her other works, take shape through a process of extensive research into physics and cosmology, and carefully orchestrated collaborations with scientists. Concerned with the physical position of her works in time and space, Paterson is particularly attuned to the longevity of her art objects. For instance, in her 100 year long project, The Future Library (2014–) (represented in this exhibition with an editioned print depicting the growth rings of a tree), she has planted a forest in Norway. After 100 years, the forest will be harvested to provide the paper for an anthology of books to be written, one per year, each by a different writer, until 2114. (The first writer is Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood.)
Katie Paterson, Fossil Necklace, 2014, installation view at Ingleby Gallery
Magic was on the cards at Rhubaba Artists’ Studio in Leith. Artist (and trained sleight of hand magician) in residence, Augusto Corrieri (otherwise known as Vincent Gambini) narrated the disputed story of Gambini’s Famous 4 Ace Trick while performing a complex card trick, as his two-channel video installation Diorama (2013) played alongside. Lamenting card tricks and illusion as a form of low art largely overlooked by critical attention, Corrieri explains, in a text accompanying the exhibition: ‘Perhaps its because magic’s basic premise is a little absurd: from *the start you are attempting to do something that the audience will not understand. Talk about an unemancipated spectator!’[ref].
Augusto Corrieri, Diorama, 2013, video still
Of course, during festival season, illusion and spectacle in all it’s forms is almost unavoidable. As with other events grouping multiple exhibitions and performances without a strong overaching theme or framework, the divergence between the show and artists on show at Edinburgh Art Festival was large. This did not detract, however, from the overall experience – as the chaos and cacophony of the city’s liveliest period attest, sometimes diversity and incoherence can be a compelling experience.