New Commissions at the 2023 Art Festival
Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) today announce plans for the 2023 festival, the first under the direction of Kim McAleese - a programme that connects the people and city of Edinburgh with a global dialogue through a range of exhibitions, commissions, performances and events.
The 2023 festival is set to be one of the largest yet, seeing 55 ambitious projects and exhibitions across more than 35 venues - with the most innovative and renowned partners, museums and galleries working in visual art in this city all set to take part, including many who will work with EAF for the first time.
The new dates for the UK's biggest visual art festival are 11–27 August 2023, allowing for three full weeks, including a trio of weekends of talks, performances, and one off events, aligning in date and in collaboration with other festivals in the city.
From queer histories in brutalist tower blocks; to tracing peace lines and borders through sound, moving image and music; and the festival’s continuing commitment to support structures, the 2023 festival-led programme features artists, thinkers, writer and performers who move through this world deeply connected to feminist and queer practice. This may take various forms: an opera; a poem; the sound of a ricochet along a peace wall; a newspaper excerpt; a bodily gesture; a warming meal.
The new format festival is a call to action to explore the Scottish capital, looking at the city anew through the lens of visual art and across a diverse range of the EAF partner galleries, museum presentations, and newly commissioned works.
2023 Commissions/Events
- History of the Present: will see Northern Irish writer Maria Fusco collaborate with Scottish artist film-maker Margaret Salmon and composer Annea Lockwood, on a hybrid opera on stage and screen which will have its world performance premiere on the opening day of the festival [11 August]
- Haven for Artists: a cultural feminist organisation based in Beirut, Lebanon, have been invited to spend time in-residence during the festival with a programme of activities, connecting with local organisations and initiatives, as well as launching the festival with an ‘Opening Provocation’ [12 August], in conversation with Turner Prize winners Array Collective.
- Alongside the National Galleries largest exhibition of Alberta Whittle's work to date, a new performance - The Last Born: making room for ancestral transmissions - will take place at Parliament Hall [13 August], the buildings housing the Supreme Courts of Scotland, and see scenes/moments from Lagareh–The Last Born re-enacted and reconfigured, encouraging the audience to continue to think about the poetics of abolition and how love and grief can become healing forms of release.
- Festivals love dialogue, and EAF have joined with the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival for a new Sunday Salon series. Each Sunday afternoon, the festivals will host a lineup of artists working across literature, film and art to talk about the finer details of their work and practice in an intimate setting - with the Art Festival hosting Salon 1 [13 August]
- Edinburgh-based poet Nat Raha presents the first iteration [18 August] of a performance work epistolary (on carceral islands) addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe through the colonial project of the British Empire.
- JUPITER RISING x EAF Party: joins forces with EAF to throw one of the biggest one-night only parties in Edinburgh [19 August] curated by artist Lindsey Mendick and collective Bonjour, a queer workers’ coop based in Glasgow.
- The Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC) are a growing group of 30+ people from, and connected to, Wester Hailes – practising mutual care, responsibility, vulnerability, and solidarity. Brought together in 2021 as part of a joint commission by EAF and WHALE Arts, they will be joined this year by Haven for Artists, EAF’s collective in-residence, for Together Towards A More Just World [20 August] an event with conversation, food and an open mic exploring urgencies, desire sand offerings
- Rachel Mars will create a durational performance installation, with live welding and atmospheric sound-world by Dinah Mullen, inspired by the theft of the "welcome" gate from Dachau concentration camp and exploring who memorials are for and who decides - Iwith an exclusive EAF event [21 August] seeing Rachel Mars joining a panel of guest speakers for a conversation about memorial, public space and architecture in Edinburgh and the UK.
- BEAST! a performance work [26 August] by the French artist and poet Tarek Lakhrissi, where the reading of recent romantic and critical poems, accompanied by the lyrical vocals of Makeda Monnet and the electronic music of Victor da Silva (Fatma Pneumonia), will be interspersed with utopian queer passions, dark corners to protect oneself, erotic dreams and free moments of improvisation.
- Sean Burns’ Dorothy Towers: a film and installation which explores ideas of queer kinship and inheritance alongside experiences of HIV in the 1980s and ’90s, catalysing a series of events [dates TBC] tracing the themes present in the work to concurrent histories and realities in Edinburgh.
- Initiated by The Common Guild, EAF will co-present an illuminated artwork by Rabiya Choudhry at Leith Library [throghout the festival], with the design based on a painting by Choudhry, part of the artist’s ongoing project Lost Lighting – a series of lighting artworks for public places intended to ‘act like a vigil in the dark’
- Platform: Early Career Artist Award celebrates early-career artists working in Scotland, with the opportunity to make and exhibit new work which this year addresses a diverse set of concerns spanning race, climate change, and food justice, to cultural identity in Scotland [throughout the festival]
These are the new commissions and wil lrun alongside the vast range of exhibitions presented by the Art Festival's partner galleries, the majority of which will be open to the public for free for the festival.