EDINBURGH.- A series of new and recent sound installations, photographs and paintings by the Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz will be the centrepiece of a major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this autumn. Five rooms by Philipsz will feature in the second instalment of NOW, a dynamic programme of contemporary art exhibitions which has taken over the entire ground floor of the Gallery’s Modern One building for the next three years.

NOW reflects the Gallery’s ambition to share contemporary art with a wide audience, highlighting the extraordinary quality and range of work being made by artists associated with Scotland, as well as those from across the globe, placing art created in Scotland in an international context, and demonstrating the crucial exchange between artistic communities around the world.

In NOW Susan Philipsz’s work will be shown alongside paintings by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage, a newly commissioned installation featuring sound and sculpture by Glasgow-based artist Sarah Rose, photographs by French artist Yto Barrada, a video installation by Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K, and a display pairing nineteenth century dolls with drawings by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis.

Susan Philipsz was born in Glasgow in 1965 and is renowned for her installations which explore how sound can trigger memory and heighten perception. She won the Turner Prize in 2010, which was the first time a sound work was nominated. Her work often features rearrangements of popular folk songs and melodies, which are played in both gallery and public spaces and frequently explore the themes of loss, longing, hope, and mourning.

The development of radio has long since been a source of inspiration for Philipsz, as illustrated by a group of large-scale black and white photographic prints, each of which depicts sections of the salvaged remains of radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s floating laboratory, the Elettra. Built in 1904 at Edinburgh’s Leith Docks, the Elettra had an illustrious life before being sunk during the Second World War.

Also on show will be Philipsz’s evocative work Seven Tears (2016) which comprises seven synchronised record players, each playing a single note taken from the melancholic Baroque lament Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans (1604), by English composer John Dowland (1563-1626). By separating and isolating individual tones from the original song, Philipsz makes it less recognisable, and creates an installation infused with haunting beauty. Each note was produced on a series of glasses filled with water, played with a moistened finger. This will be the work’s first showing in the UK.

Taking their titles from the names of each part of Dowland’s Lachrimae, the artist will also present a series of newly made ‘salt paintings’ which complement Seven Tears. Produced by submerging painted canvases into a bath of salted water and waiting for the liquid to evaporate, the resulting works are richly encrusted with layers of salt crystals, and evoke the tears suggested by Dowland’s music.

You Are Not Alone (2009/2017), another work by Philipsz, will be presented in Scotland for the first time. It takes the form of an FM radio signal transmitted from within Modern One, and made audible within the stairwell of our adjacent sister building Modern Two, situated across Belford Road. The audio is composed of recorded radio interval signals – brief musical sequences played before, or during breaks in radio transmissions. While some interval signals have a special significance, being based on national anthems or traditional national tunes, most are composed of a simple series of abstract notes.

In addition to Philipsz’s installations, NOW will feature work by a range of Scottish and international artists, including a series of photographs by Paris-born Yto Barrada, which focuses on dolls collected during missionary expeditions to North Africa in the 1930s. Barrada photographed sixteen of the small, colourful toys against a stark blue background, elevating the status of these delicate objects by making them appear dramatically enlarged and providing insights into science of ethnography (the study of peoples and their cultures, habits and customs) as it developed in the colonial period.

Toys will also be the focus of four pencil drawings by Kate Davis: the Glasgow-based artist drew dolls made by children living in deprived areas of London in the 1890s, using discarded shoes, bone and fabrics. A large collection of the dolls are now housed in Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood and a selection will be shown alongside Davis’s works and a delicate drawing by nineteenth century French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whose style inspired Davis. This is the first time Davis’s drawings will be on public display after they were acquired by the Gallery earlier this year.

The Bell Project (2007-2015), a thought-provoking video projection by Iraqi artist Hiwa K, explores the idea of legacy by reversing the historical precedent of bells being melted to produce armaments, and linking a munitions yard in Northern Iraq with a 700-year-old bell-making foundry in Italy. The work features two videos playing simultaneously: the left-hand video shows a group of workers at a munition scrapyard in Iraq as they melt down the mines, bombs, bullets, and military plane parts which litter the country following the three Iran-Iraq wars (1980-1988) and both Gulf Wars (1991, 2003). Although the resulting metal bricks are usually sold as material for further production, Hiwa K had them shipped to a bell factory in Italy where they were used to construct a bell, later exhibited in the 2015 Venice Biennale. The right-hand video details this complex bell-making process.

Originally from New Zealand, Glasgow-based artist Sarah Rose has been commissioned to make a new body of work for NOW. Primarily known for her innovative sculptural and sound work, Rose’s new installation will, like previous exhibitions, respond to the specific qualities of the room where it is shown. Borne from extensive research into forms of communication and the capabilities and limits of materials, the installation will include a range of hand-blown glass forms, a specially conceived voice audio piece, and hanging foam and fibre-based sculptures.

Michael Armitage’s large-scale paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya, the country of his birth. Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda which, unlike the smooth surface of traditional canvas, presents occasional holes and coarse indents. Using a rich colour palette, his paintings depict scenes of the urban and rural landscape, lush vegetation and animal life, as well as a giving an account of the sometimes harsh reality of Kenyan politics and social inequalities, violence and extreme disparities in wealth. One of the works on display, Nasema Nawe (2016), is directly inspired by Paul Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon (1888), one of the most popular works in the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection.

Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: “NOW is the most ambitious programme of contemporary art to be staged at the National Galleries of Scotland, and we are confident this autumn exhibition will build on the great success of the first. NOW showcases the work of some of the most influential and compelling artists working now, in Scotland and abroad.”