EDINBURGH.- A spectacular installation of 10,000 fresh red roses which wilt over time are set to stimulate visitor’s senses as the centrepiece of an enthralling new exhibition this summer at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

NOW is a dynamic three-year programme of six exhibitions at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), which brings together some of the most innovative and exciting contemporary art from the UK and beyond.

For the fifth instalment, which opened on 1 June, Anya Gallacio’s iconic sculpture Red on Green - in which 10,000 fresh blooms are left to decay over a period of months - is being shown as part of a major survey of the artist’s work. Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003 and is one of the UK’s most prominent artists, emerging from the group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the 1990s. She is renowned for her use of organic materials, from which she creates temporary works that change over time as they are subjected to natural processes of transformation and decay.

For a short while Red on Green, which was first made in 1992, is a gorgeous and enticing display of velvety flowers, but during the course of the exhibition, this display gradually decays, transforming into something different altogether. The Paisley-born artist also presents a series of existing pieces and new works specially commissioned for NOW which further explore her fascination with the effects of time on her materials.

Exploring other threads on the theme of transformation, NOW also features the work of British artists Roger Hiorns (b.1975) and Charles Avery (b. 1973); French artist Aurélien Froment (b. 1976) and French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira (b.1963); and a newly commissioned installation from Peles Empire, a collaborative project created by the artists Katharina Stöver (b. 1982) and Barbara Wolff (b. 1980).

As in previous years, there is a family-friendly play area in the beautiful grounds of Modern One for visitors to the exhibition.

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at NGS, said: “From the smell and sight of 10,000 red roses slowly decaying to an exploration of our obsession with sugar, NOW 5 offers new ways of seeing and thinking for everyone curious about the world around them. We want to create a playful, anarchic, thought-provoking experience for visitors, so expect to see the use of rope, ceramics, x-ray machines, sugar, obsidian, photography and live performances.

“We’re a place for art-lovers, the curious, experience-seekers and families. We’ll have our temporary playpark for children once again over the summer period next to the spectacular Landform by the artist Charles Jencks, so we are a great free day out for everyone”.

Roger Hiorns works with a range of media and unlikely materials to create surprising transformations of existing or ‘found’ objects, including a decommissioned X-Ray machine, a jet engine and an ordinary park bench, which is being intermittently ‘activated’ through the presence of a naked man and a small fire. Alongside these sculptures Hiorns presents a series of works on panels and canvas. These works resemble paintings but are actually made from varying materials, including copper sulphate crystals and bovine brain matter, the latter exploring themes around BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’. These works are on one side extremely beautiful, sparkling shards of blue crystal and on the other, defiantly ugly, with abstract brown brush strokes of diluted brain matter smeared across the panel.

Aurélien Froment, who is now based in Edinburgh, works with books, performances, video, photography and objects, creating multi-layered works which often reference feature films, early film technology and literature. He is showing two new works here: The Apocalypse, a film collaboration with the Canadian poet Steven McCaffrey which documents the deterioration of France’s oldest surviving medieval tapestry, the Tapestry of Angers (which famously depicts scenes from the biblical Book of Revelation); and One, an installation comprised of a 200-metre length of rope which changes colour imperceptibly from one end of the spectrum to the other.

In 2004 Charles Avery embarked on a project called The Islanders, a painstakingly detailed and diverse description of the flora, fauna and culture of an imaginary island, which Avery vividly conjures into life through drawings, paintings, sculptures and texts. NOW presents a sculptural installation and accompanying 16mm film by Avery, which follows the flight of the one of the island’s curious creatures - the Dihedra – an ephemeral butterfly-like being that cannot be contained by the boundaries of the physical world. This fascinating installation was recently acquired by the Galleries and is being shown here for the first time.

Zineb Sedira uses photography, film and installations to explore language, memory and history. In NOW, Sedira exhibits a selection of photographs from her Sugar Routes and Sugar Surfaces series, which highlight the massive scale of the sugar industry by exploring the way sugar is produced, distributed and consumed. These images, which show new ‘landscapes’ - mountains of sugar in siloes and warehouses - are being exhibited alongside cast-sugar sculptures which touch on the dark history of human displacement, slave labour and colonisation that underlie this global business.

Katharina Stöver and Barbara Wolff’s ongoing collaborative project Peles Empire is having its latest showing in NOW. The duo transformed a room at the SNGMA into an installation that fuses photocopied imagery of the remarkable interiors of the nineteenth-century Peles Castle in Romania, with parts of the building here, creating an immersive environment in which the original and the copy are intertwined and blurred.