EDINBURGH.- Edinburgh Art Festival announced the 2026 programme for the city wide festival taking place from Friday 14 — Sunday 30 August.

“As a curatorial team, we try not to be defined by theme, but instead by current climate each year in which the festival takes place; which is ever evolving, for the better or worse, with each year. Our 2026 edition invites you to gather around alternative queer images, global and community-held stories, never before seen sets of photographs, living sound collections, sound performances from Golan Heights, reimagined relics on Calton Hill, and late-night parties in some of our most iconic spaces in the city, from warehouses to sculpture parks.” -- Kim McAleese, Director + Eleanor Taylor, Curator + Elle Haswell, Civic Curator

EAF26 opens on Friday 14 August with Caught Hold of Nothing offers a glimpse into a performance work in progress by Magnus Westwell. Performing with Océane Robin, Westwell plays live violin to exhaustion, building layered environments in which the body moves through emotional states toward catharsis. Music and movement break down and rebuild in tandem, leading to a vulnerable and deeply embodied experience that invites audiences into the liminal space of experimental performance. (Friday 14 August). This will be complemented with a bold late-night celebration with Cardion Arts, headlined by American rapper, performance artist, writer, poet, and activist Mykki Blanco. Taking over the Biscuit Factory late into the night, the opening party will also see DJ sets from local icons AMR and Sweet Philly. A buzzing start to the festival, the opening night brings together performance, club culture, and collective experience.

To the West of the City, a Festival within a Festival during EAF - Jupiter Rising (Saturday 22 August) - is set to unfold. Jupiter Artland will present In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance, a solo exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based Irish artist and performer Sg�ire Wood. With origins in drag, fashion photography and multi-artform nightlife scenes, Wood’s practice is concerned with the layers of meaning behind everyday images, visual performances of identity, pop-cultural symbolism, authenticity and artifice. Jupiter Rising favourite Wood is set to curate the mini festival with a line-up of performance, poetry, late night stage, and more.

Sound performance Zifzafa, named for an Arabic word describing a wind that shakes everything in its path, centres on the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, where 30 planned wind turbines will flood the region with a relentless mechanical roar. Framed as a ‘green’ energy project, the turbines weaponise sound itself, unsettling and exhausting local life. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, artist and founder of Earshot, the first non-profit dedicated to audio for justice, whose investigations have informed landmark legal cases, brings this research to the stage. (Saturday 29 August)





Davi Pontes + Sebastião Abreu’s Serial Component (Sunday 23 August) is a choreographic research project and performance developed by Brazilian artist Davi Pontes, unfolding between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Around a Tree installation and Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Each presents a specific bodily vocabulary through collaborations with invited performers, navigating intimate and fragmentary exchanges. Continuing research initiated with philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva around the concept of Black Ecologies, the work proposes heat transfer as an alternative to the Western model of dance: an internal energy that moves through difference, without one body becoming another or losing its attributes. The performance is developed through a collaborative project between EAF and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, as part of the Brazil UK Season of Culture and is supported by Biennials Connect. Also at Around a Tree, Katucha Bento presents Effervescent! Human-Body-Nature Beyond Anti-Racism, a participatory performance exploring embodiment, memory, and our human-nature relation, grounded in Black feminist dreaming.

Level Up: Block Party is one of a series of events hosted by EAF celebrating the life and legacy of Sandra George. Hosted at Craigmillar Now, where her vast archive is held, the social gathering co-curated by Christian Noelle Charles and Ria Andrews celebrates George’s ethos of “starting from the level” with music, movement, food, and collective joy. A panel discussion with National Union of Journalists, Representing Communities takes inspiration from George’s journalistic work, discusses the social, cultural and ethical issues of working within communities. At the Community Wellbeing Collective, Common Thread: Sandra George, Wester Hailes + Community Action brings Sandra George’s works to Wester Hailes with a social gathering and shared meal.

Collaborating with EAF across their closing weekend (27—30 August) Falastin Film Festival (FFF) is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit collective of Palestinians, Lebanese and allies dedicated to bringing Palestinian and indigenous art and storytelling to audiences in Scotland. Through cinema, music, photography, poetry, and other creative storytelling mediums, the festival centres Palestinian, Lebanese, and other decolonial voices.

EAF will partner with the Palestine Museum for a new exhibition presented by Mo’min Swaitat of Majazz Project and Palestinian Sound Archive, featuring the installation of a mobile loudspeaker system often used at Bedouin weddings, looping a sonic mix of rare recordings. The field-recorded tapes share artists’ contributions Palestinian history and cultural heritage, with a focus on wedding music and dance. The exhibition will be host to a listening session sharing the sound archive, as well as a talk with Swaitat and curator and historian Ellie Armon Azoulay. Alongside EAF co-commissions, Falastin Film Festival hosts a full weekend of film and in-conversations at the Filmhouse.

Tell Me About It: Hard Labour creates a space for direct one-to-one conversations with people who have lived experience of sex work. This event is created in partnership with Scotland for Decrim: a grassroots campaign fighting for the full decriminalisation of sex work in Scotland. They have carefully shaped Tell Me About It, which sits as one part of a larger multi- art form project, Hard Labour, in partnership with Arika. The Hard Labour commission extends into Glasgow with a weekend of workshops, talks and visual art in the form of a huge timeline of legislation around sex work from 21—23 August.

Partnership events also include talks and moments of sharing with Edinburgh International Book Festival and as the city comes alive for festival season.

The new home for EAF in and around Edinburgh’s Shore will show a set of new exhibitions curated by EAF. At EAF’s new permanent space at 92 Constitution Street (EAF @ 92), Love Bites Back is an exhibition of work by Del LaGrace Volcano drawn from the Queer Archive of Resistance, focusing on photographs made in the UK, including Edinburgh, between 1982 and 1995. The title nods to Volcano’s first monograph, Love Bites, published by Gay Men’s Press in 1991 to considerable controversy. Emerging from lived involvement in queer identity, leather dyke culture, and embodied politics, these images challenge normative ideas of gender, desire, and power. A sister show at Auto Italia in London, Sensual & Mutual, returns to the early 1980s and to the queer subcultural spaces that both sheltered and shaped Volcano’s Practice. At Custom Lane, Carnal Desires is a rare exhibition of work by Sadao Hasegawa, revealing the under-recognised and largely unseen work of one of post-war Japan’s most influential gay fetish

artists. Celebrated for his depiction of hypermasculine forms, Hasegawa’s paintings blend eroticism with pan-Asian folklore, science fiction, and popular culture, imagining a universe where chiseled men encounter mythic creatures, hybrid animals, and divine bodies unbound by earthly limits. While his illustrations were originally published in gay magazines across the US, UK, and Australia, much of his work has remained virtually inaccessible outside Japan. An in-conversation by queer art researchers Dr Cole Collins and Dr Patrick Carland-Echavarria on 25 August will dive deeper into Hasegawa’s work and impact.

Also at Custom Lane, Leith, Ellis Jackson Kroese of Trans Masc Studies presents History is a Home, a research collection that shares a hoard of alternative trans artefacts, a curated selection of publications and a dedicated workspace for visitors’ own use, situating queer history as a place of belonging and connection. The exhibition will be activated throughout the festival with queer archive deep dives, including a screening of Del LaGrace Volcano’s film archive, writing workshop from Remi Graves, and a bootblacking workshop by Glasgow Leatherdykes.

The EAF Welcome Space at Brown’s of Leith will also offer a place to arrive, pause, and begin exploring the 2026 programme. In town, on Calton Hill, EAF presents a newly installed commission by sculptor Emii Alrai, whose colossal, fragmented relics explore the cultural power and contested political histories of archeological ruins.

A focus on archives and photography runs through this year’s festival with the largest ever presentation of photography by Sandra George at City Art Centre. Start from the Level includes over 200 photographs, showcasing George’s powerful and empowering archive and the largest presentation of work by Sandra George to date. She devoted her life to working with communities, documenting and developing vital social-action projects in Edinburgh for over thirty years, from the 1980s onwards. An extensive programme of events at the City Art Centre celebrating her photography including sharing events with family, friends and colleagues, and new responses to her archive of work will also take place, including a panel discussion with the National Union of Journalists, of which she was a member. In partnership with Craigmillar Now, there will also be archive deep dive events in Wester Hailes with the Community Wellbeing Collective, where she lived and worked, as well as a block party celebrating her legacy and community at Craigmillar Now. Craigmillar Now also presents A Magic Lantern, a powerful and sensitive photography exhibition from Niddrie photographer and former community worker Lee McCormack. Lee’s personal, joyful images capture pioneering art and community projects across Scotland between the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Among People at Stills is a major survey of internationally renowned documentary and portrait photographer Jillian Edelstein. Born in South Africa and now based in London, Edelstein has spent more than forty years documenting people, communities across the world, and defining moments of contemporary history. Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait charts 20 years of McMurdo’s photographic reflections on childhood, the digital world,
learning and make-believe. The National Galleries of Scotland is also hosting the first major museum exhibition of Catherine Opie’s work to be shown in Scotland. Taking place at the Royal Scottish Academy, Catherine Opie: To Be Seen showcases nearly 80 photographic portraits by Opie alongside a selection of portraits from Scotland’s national art collection, prompting questions around the who, why and how of portraits. Come face to face with Opie's mentors and collaborators, queer communities, children, surfers, high school footballers and political crowds that she makes visible through her work, as well as self-portraits of Opie herself. Join Opie and EAF26 artist Del La Grace Volcano for an exclusive conversation on Saturday 15 August at Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Sculptures made by leading artists such as Anne Hardy and Eva Rothschild will be on display at the Talbot Rice Gallery and Fruitmarket. British sculptor Anne Hardy transforms Talbot Rice Gallery’s Georgian Gallery into an immersive space, with sculptures made from cast elements, found materials and earth drawings. In this large-scale installation, Hardy explores landscapes that are both human and post human by animating the gallery with light, sound, data, and scenography. The Void Presses The Wall is a major exhibition by London-based, Irish artist Eva Rothschild that will inhabit all Fruitmarket’s spaces, enabling the artist – and Fruitmarket’s audiences – to take stock of both recent bodies of work and major new sculptures. Hers are sculptures born of the city and redolent of the urban landscape. Meanwhile, an ambitious new commission by Katie Paterson, co-commissioned with Folkestone Triennial, arrives at Collective. It comprises nearly 200 amulets, each created with materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, exploring themes of deep time, geology, and the environment. Memorials to Sausage Politics is a new exhibition by Jamie Fitzpatrick that explores the divisive debate around post-colonial public statuary. Developed through recent residencies at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and Edinburgh Printmakers, the exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, features newly commissioned prints and printed sculptures. Esther Castle's Abundant Parts at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is a newly commissioned installation and other-worldly garden, where Castle draws a symbolic connection between the non-normative body and weeds: often considered an undesirable presence and removed by gardeners. Also at ESW, Ukrainian duo Kristina Yarosh and Anna Khodkova, working as Etchingroom1, present a mural, What a Wonderful Day in a Wonderful World, that gives a message of hope against the background of terrible events. River sounds, rave beats and folk singing resonate within Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s Beacon Tower, in a new sound installation by artist Kate Power, as well as Fair Play, a collaborative exhibition by local children and the wider community. Over at Edinburgh Printmakers, Etchingroom1 presents Unexpected Trip, an exhibition of prints, drawings, embroidery and ceramics that reflect the difficult and exhilarating moments of life, underscored by the reminder that “this too shall pass.”

Further presentations across the city include Songs of Innocence & Experience, part II, an exhibition at Ingleby dedicated to celebrating the Caribbean artist Frank Walter through the work of 20 artists who have either responded directly to his paintings, or whose own work has something to say in conversation with his (including Alvaro Barrington, Andrew Cranston, Tal R and Rose Wylie, to name a few), as well as a new showing in the Instalments series from Sebasti�n Espejo. Gwen John: Strange Beauties is the first major retrospective in over forty years dedicated to one of Wales’ most accomplished artists at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two. At the City Art Centre, Jean F. Watson: An Artistic Legacy explores the legacy of an Edinburgh resident who had a significant impact on the city’s cultural heritage, showing historic and contemporary Scottish artworks acquired over the last 65 years through the Jean F. Watson Bequest Fund. Stephen Bird’s Looping States of Mind: Circular Thoughts at The Scottish Gallery explores the entanglements between environment, place, and human experience through layered narratives, dualities, and paradoxes. Developed through recent travels in Scotland and Europe, the work engages with cultural exchange, political histories, and artistic traditions, from Dundee’s connections with Palestine, to encounters with historic collections in Rome. Kate Downie: Grasslands in the same gallery is a major exhibition combining drawing, experimental printmaking, painting, and film, inspired by close observation of Scotland’s diverse grassland environments.