Scottish Art Highlights: November 2025

AI, the politics of surveillance and data extraction are the focus of a new solo exhibition by Felicity Hammond at Stills Centre for Photography. From 6 Nov, Variations presents an evolving installation that zooms in on the relationship between image-making and machine learning, geological mining and data mining.

Opening on 7 Nov, Fruitmarket presents Wilding, a major posthumous exhibition dedicated to the work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the late Native American artist, activist, educator and curator. Quick-to-See Smith was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. The exhibition, which engages with the politics of land stewardship, was conceived in conversation with the artist before her sudden passing earlier this year. Highlights include a sculptural canoe created by the artist specially for the show and works from her I See Red series from the 1990s, which serve 'to remind viewers that Native Americans are still alive' amidst quincentennial celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the US.

Alongside, Deep Time (an annual festival of new music) presents I See Red at Fruitmarket from 27-29 Nov. Named in homage to Quick-to-See Smith, I See Red creates space for several international artists to explore anger at current ecological, civil and political crises through sound, while also seeking connection through collective listening.

Trans Masc Studies and Edinburgh Art Festival continue their collaborations, imagining what a trans masc archive might look like. In a conversation held at Fruitmarket on 17 Nov, Ellis Jackson Kroese and poet Remi Graves discuss and read from their respective publications, Memory is a Museum and coal, both of which reclaim the archive as a site of trans exploration.

In the artist’s most ambitious presentation to date, Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 promises to transform Tramway into a 'sub-aquatic world' shaped by ancestral knowledge, memory and imagination. At the exhibition’s heart, Song transforms the ancestral figure of tua mak (大眼, translating 'big eyes' in the Teochew dialect), who drowned at sea in Singapore at 13 years old. The figure, who is only known through Song’s familial memories and myths, is transformed into a lifeform who is ever evolving and in perpetual migration. The exhibition opens on 15 Nov and runs until 24 Aug 2026.

At David Dale Gallery, Esther Gamsu’s solo show MEDIUM explores acts of obsession and repetition through sculpture as a counter to capitalist logic. Gamsu plays with irony, humour, scale and DIY processes in this larger-than-life installation. MEDIUM continues until 29 Nov.