Freee @ Collective Gallery

The tone of this exhibition is both meaty and rousing, drawing in visitors with a catchy simplicity reinforced by the use of primary red and blue emulsion paint as a backdrop for the performance props and text on two of the gallery walls. Like the billboards which were temporarily pasted at sites around Edinburgh, vivid widescreen posters fill the space drawing double taken glances from passers-by outside the gallery’s glass frontage. The crux of the mighty-mighty debates that Freee aim to trigger with their eye-catching billboards emblazoned with their cheeky mugs, street protesting, and acrobatic textly twaddle, instead seems to be a cursory engagement with the Polish community. It all gives the impression of well intended fun.

It is hard to shake some nagging questions that pop up through this exhibition. Are these three pals engaging in multi-cultural drag because they are desperate to shape shift out of their white bodies? Perhaps they are asking if by paying lip service to spectacular social problems public opinion could be galvanised, prompting the much-lamented chime, ‘things can only get better’? For me their protest of inflated imagery, jovial colours and jocular japes sits uncomfortably. It’s hard to be convinced when a sense of satisfaction hangs so palpably in the air, and leaks from the academic-artists as they show and tell us about the contradictions of the term, and experience of, immigration. There is something difficult to reconcile here, and this might be, wittingly or unwittingly, the best thing about this exhibition. [Daniella Watson]