EDINBURGH.- Edinburgh Art Festival’s Commissions Programme each year supports Scottish and international artists to develop ambitious new projects as part of the Festival. Aiming to bring artists into conversation with the city, the Commissions Programme takes work out of formal gallery settings and into public spaces, often offering rare public access to key buildings or sites, and always engaging local residents and international visitors alike in citywide debates around wider social issues.

The Edinburgh Art Festival 2018 programme features new commissions by Shilpa Gupta, Ross Birrell & David Harding, Ruth Ewan and Adam Lewis Jacob. Collectively through music, poetry, conversation and magic these artists invite visitors to reflect on urgent current political issues. Strategies of collaboration, orchestration and the act of close listening inform a number of the works, while freedom of expression and a questioning of our consumer culture feature prominently as themes within the programme.

The Festival also presents Platform: 2018, the fourth iteration of the Festival’s showcase of new work by early career artists based in Scotland, which this year highlights the work of Renèe Helèna Browne, Annie Crabtree, Isobel Lutz-Smith, and Rae-Yen Song.

· Internationally renowned Indian artist Shilpa Gupta presents For, in your tongue I cannot hide, a multi-channel sound installation, in the Engine House, ECA. Bringing together fragments from the work of 100 poets from around the world, the work offers a powerful reflection on freedom of expression.

· In collaboration with Marxist magician Ian Saville, Glasgow-based artist Ruth Ewan’s Sympathetic Magick infiltrates the streets of Edinburgh with ‘socially engaged magic tricks’.

· Reflecting through music on themes of flight and dispossession through music, Ross Birrell & David Harding’s Triptych presents a new three channel film work and installation in the 16th century church of Trinity Apse. As a highlight of the Festival’s closing weekend, the artists will collaborate with Syrian composer/violinist Ali Moraly on a live performance in Trinity Apse.

· Adam Lewis Jacob presents No Easy Answers at the Institut Français d'Écosse, an experimental moving image installation inspired by J G Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which draws on the language of advertising and retail space to reflect on Britain’s shift from an industrial producer to service provider.

· Platform: 2018: Selected from an open call by artists Jonathan Owen and Hanna Tuulikki, this year the Festival’s dedicated showcase for emerging talent will feature work by four early career artists at the City Art Centre.

EDINBURGH ART FESTIVAL 2018 COMMISSIONS

Shilpa Gupta
For, in your tongue I cannot hide
Venue: Engine House, The Fire Station, Edinburgh College of Art, 76-78 Lauriston Place, Lauriston Campus, EH3 9DE
This multi-channel sound installation by internationally renowned Indian artist, Shilpa Gupta, gives voice to poets who have been jailed through the centuries. Bringing together fragments from the work of 100 poets from around the world, Gupta offers a powerful reflection on freedom of expression.

The installation comprises 100 microphones suspended above 100 metal rods, each piercing a page inscribed with a fragment of poetry. In turn, a single microphone plays these verses, echoed by a chorus of the other 99. Lasting over an hour, the sound piece alternates between English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Azeri and Hindi, amongst other global languages. A chorus of voices shift across the space, forming an ongoing sequence of haunting recitals.

Working across a wide range of media, Gupta demonstrates a deep engagement with the power of language, the written word, and the role of the individual vis à vis those structures that seek to define and control mobility, whether of the body or the imagination, through the use of mechanisms such as censorship or borderlines. This newest work draws directly on the work of poets who over centuries have found themselves in conflict with political powers as a direct result of their written ideas, highlighting the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today.

Co-commissioned with YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku. Supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund and EventScotland, part of VisitScotland’s Events Directorate. With additional support from Scottish Poetry Library, PEN International and Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.

Ruth Ewan
Sympathetic Magick
Performances across the city
Sympathetic Magick is a new project devised by artist Ruth Ewan which will use the ancient art of street performance to bring magic onto the streets of Edinburgh.

Based in Glasgow, Ewan has created artworks as a direct response to particular public spaces, and her projects involve a process of focused research and close collaboration. This newest work responds to the extraordinary explosion of street theatre in Edinburgh at festival time, and is developed in collaboration with magician Ian Saville, who has worked with Marxist magic and ventriloquism for over 30 years.

Ewan and Saville have worked with professional and amateur magician collaborators to bring a series of socially engaged magic tricks to infiltrate the streets of Edinburgh. Visitors can expect to encounter magical experiences such as ‘The Class Struggle Rope Trick’ popping up as part of the street performances around West Parliament Square, or in programmed performances in spaces including Edinburgh’s gardens, museums and pubs.

Ross Birrell & David Harding
Triptych
Venue: Trinity Apse, Chalmers Close, High St, Edinburgh EH1 1SS
During their 12-year collaboration, artists Ross Birrell and David Harding have continually explored the thresholds between music and politics, poetry and place, composition and colour.

Their new project for Edinburgh Art Festival reflects on themes of flight and dispossession, through an installation in the historic setting of Trinity Apse. Framed by the high vaulted arches of the former kirk will be a film documenting the powerful recital of Henryk Gorecki’s 1976 Symphony No. 3: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, initiated by the artists for documenta 14 and performed in the Megaron Concert Hall, Athens by the Athens State Orchestra, with the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra, and featuring Syrian soprano Rasha Rizk.

Newly edited across three channels, the film sits at the heart of a wider architectural installation which directly transposes musical notation into a design of colour and light resembling a shattered mosaic. The installation includes two versions of the score of Fugue – a composition jointly evolved between Ross Birrell and Syrian composer/violinist Ali Moraly – which provided a starting point for the larger project reflecting on the shared etymology of the words ‘fugue’ and ‘refugee’.

Adam Lewis Jacob
No Easy Answers
Venue: Institut Français d'Écosse, West Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RF
Adam Lewis Jacob presents No Easy Answers, an experimental moving image installation combining manipulated animations, found material and interviews between the artist and his Nan, which are interrupted by short narrative excursions. Using the language of video advertising, No Easy Answers takes as its focus the contradictory nature of the shopping centre as both a ‘nurturing space’ and ‘decaying womb’, a contested political arena representative of Britain’s shift from industrial producer to service provider.

The work takes J G Ballard’s novel Kingdom Come, Brexit and the increasing abstraction of economics as starting points that force a questioning of the role these spaces play in the construction of identity and political opinion within late capitalism.

Platform: 2018
Venue: City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, EH1 1DE
The 2018 edition of Platform, the Festival’s dedicated initiative to supporting artists at the beginning of their careers, will show new work by Renèe Helèna Browne, Annie Crabtree, Isobel Lutz-Smith, and Rae-Yen Song, selected from an open call by artists Jonathan Owen and Hanna Tuulikki. All four artists are based in Glasgow, with Crabtree also based between Skye and Arbroath, highlighting the strength and vivacity of Glasgow’s young creative scene.

Working with performance and documentation, Rae-Yen Song draws on references from her cultural heritage (Scottish and Chinese), processing them visually to abstract and expand on their meaning to create a unique form of family portrait – the latest chapter in an ongoing series entitled Song Dynasty.

Annie Crabtree’s new video work explores the loss of bodily autonomy through illness, examining cultural (mis)representations and social (mis)understandings of female pain – pairing this with the act of swimming as a means of recovery, resistance and regaining of autonomy.

Inspired by research in the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive, Renèe Helèna Browne’s new sound-based work is concerned with creating and appropriating narratives relating to the female voice, in particular the accented voice and regional colloquialisms.

Isobel Lutz-Smith experiments with the ways in which a narrative can be grown from inverting the linear stages of filmmaking. Using multiple screens, her new installation is based on a short article on the cut-up method written by William Burroughs and published by the radical Scottish literary journal ‘Sidewalk’ in 1960.

This group exhibition, on show for the duration of the Festival, is on display at the City Art Centre, where In Focus: Scottish Photography, Edwin G. Lucas: An Individual Eye and Travelling Gallery at 40 are also on show as part of this year’s Festival programme.

Sorcha Carey, Director of Edinburgh Art Festival, said: “We are delighted to share details of our 2018 Commissions programme. Over the past ten years, the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund has supported our Festival to work with leading and emerging Scottish and international artists to open up new places and conversations in our city. This year’s programme is no exception, bringing together five artists, each with highly distinctive practices, but united by a common interest in some of the urgent social questions of our day. Our 2018 edition of Platform continues to support artists at the beginning of their careers, with four young artists from across Scotland selected to take part.”