Where Do I End and You Begin: The Common Wealth

With GENERATION exhibitions taking place up and down the country until November, Edinburgh Art Festival director Sorcha Carey saw the opportunity to build a conversation between the rich Commonwealth contemporary art practice and the Scottish art scene. So while Glasgow is being run amok by two-legged thistles (see: Clyde the Commonwealth mascot), in Edinburgh, Where Do I End and You Begin is due to provide a welcome problematisation of the idea of 'Commonwealth.' Emphasising reflection of the concept, WDIEAYB is set apart from the widespread rambunctiousness of the Games. That’s not to say the show will not be exciting, however, as it promises a genuine celebration and showcase of the diversity of artistic practices within the Commonwealth.

Charged with selecting from the rich Commonwealth contemporary art practice, five curators of the show have been drawn from New Zealand, South Africa, India, Canada, and England: countries that have a close historic connection with Scotland, whether through emigration or immigration. It only takes a skim-reading of the artists’ CVs to see they’re impressively littered with prestigious biennials from around the world. Despite the international status of the artists, however, for eleven of the twenty selected, WDIEAYB will be the first time they have shown in the UK.

While the festival brings together a large number of established artists from around the world, one of the curators of the show, Aaron Kreisler assures that it has not “gone through too many filters – it is not an overly laboured production.” This is especially welcome considering the instability of the concept of the 'Commonwealth.' With such a clumsy term at hand, an equally hazardous curatorial strategy is only appropriate. Discomfort feels deliberate as Kreisler describes curators and artists being “brought together from very different perspectives and situations (and who do not know each other).” Though he admits such an exhibition structure “was and is always going to be risky” he identifies it as “a very real way of trying to reflect on this deeply loaded cultural association.”

With the same disregard for the tried-and-tested, the show is far removed from the usual over-representation of conventional art centres. Instead, the majority of the artists in WDIEAYB are drawn from cities like New Delhi, Vancouver and Johannesburg – only a few London-based artists are featured. Speaking of the decentralising ethos that’s so important to the show, Vancouver-based curator Kathleen Ritter is confident that “in working from places outside of the so-called centre, difference and variability emerge in the work of artists. Centres, both in the geographical and ideological sense, are slower to change. The margins tend to be the sites of movement, responsiveness, political and cultural shifts.” Setting itself far from the usual territories and bringing together curators from very different international contexts, WDIEAYB promises genuine variety.

Speaking to Antonia Hirsch about her proposed WDIEAYB installation, it’s clear that there’s no chance of WDIEAYB being a pat treatment of its Commonwealth theme. Hirsch shares details of one her video works, colour shift, which shows “the shipping and handling floor of the world’s largest flower auction house during the tulip season. The goods – continually moving between auction floor and shipping facilities – create an ever-changing palette of colour.” Another video, unstill life, will be projected onto a black velvet screen, a time-lapse 'still life' of tulips whose colours have been altered. Taking its beginnings from the $40 billion-a-year cut-flower industry, the work makes “a distinction between fiscally quantifiable value and a value, or affective charge, that cannot be represented in the abstraction that money and markets represent.” Deconstructing the idea of 'Commonwealth' to the exchange of wealth and economies, Hirsch takes a run at the brief from an oblique angle.

Showing again that flowers don’t have to be flowery, London-based Mary Evans explains the work she will include in WDIEAYB, entitled Transplanted. A large wall frieze made from brown paper, gold paper frames and decorative paper plates, it extends her “interest in the movement of populations to the movement of flora.” Emerging from visits to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and research into tropical plants that are now grown in Europe, Transplanted “is based on the history of African people who were either slaves themselves or descendants of slaves who ended up living in Europe.” Speaking about the Commonwealth “as a family of the colonised and the colonisers,” it can be predicted that Transplanted will be a similarly complicated work on migratory circulation.

It’s no surprise that not even the four floors of the City Art Centre is enough space to do a topic as loaded as the 'Commonwealth' justice. Extending outwards, one of the nearest-the-bone choices of venue is Edinburgh’s Old Royal High School. This High School building houses the debating chamber built to accommodate the anticipated 1979 Scottish Assembly, where New Delhi-based artist Amar Kanwar will show a new development of his ambitious film installation work The Sovereign Forest. This project has continued to take shape across multiple iterations since 2011. In it Kanwar addresses with a visual richness one specific configuration of the “tragedy of the commons,” namely the commercial acquisition of land within the East Indian state of Odisha, and its abysmally detrimental effects on local resources and livelihoods.

Also working in film and off-site, Steve Carr will show Burn Out, a 16mm film from 2009. Carr describes the work as “pairing a landscape recalling the art historical Romantic Sublime with the mechanical cacophony of the suburban boy racer.” Inspired by the 'burnout' culture in New Zealand, which centres on the “condemned (illegal) activity that is associated with 'troubled' youth,” of spinning a car’s wheels while it is stationary. Carr reacts to the 'burnout' videos on YouTube and “instead of a lot of cutting, heavy music and the sound of screeching tyres, [his] film is shot with a stationary, wide-angle view with the car soundless in the distance, so that the activity’s renegade status becomes a moment of quiet, suburban beauty.”

As well as the 24-hour outdoor screening, the film will also be shown in the City Art Centre alongside MK1 Skyline, made specifically for the exhibition. Carr describes this piece as a sculpture, “a discarded tyre from a Nissan Skyline after a burnout has been carved from a solid piece of walnut and then burnt until it is charred and blackened.” Together with the “highly aestheticised clip [Burnout], the [sculpture] both elevates a base activity and questions what is considered appropriate within our society.” Using the multi venue format of WDIEAYB in this way, Carr allows for a further displacement of an already restaged work. This dislocation for him is an opportunity for further “tensions and subsequent discussion” concerning the burnout subculture which already splits opinion on legality.

WDIEAYB spreads across several venues, with its two EAF festival organisers, five curators from across the continents and twenty equally international artists. WDIEAYB is big, almost to the point of being idealist in its ambition. But it’s only what’s needed as the word 'Commonwealth' is repeated and repeated on a global scale. Whether political, poetic, opaque or personal, the work in WDIEAYB proposes some conversation about a difficult history and how to deal with difference and commonality, punctuating reflection among the Commonwealth distraction.