Emerging Talent: Platform at Edinburgh Art Festival 2024
Edinburgh Art Festival's Platform exhibition returns for the festival's 20th birthday year with a fresh cohort of emerging artists. Each artist has been paired with a writer from the EAF x The Skinny Emerging Writers programme to explore their practices
Alaya Ang
by Gabrielle Tse
For their Platform presentation The Fingers Pulling The Thread, Singaporean artist Alaya Ang has created a floor-based multimedia piece displaying hand-dyed textiles produced in Indonesia and Scotland. A meditation on textile craft, lineage, and creative labour, the installation explores how personal and collective memories are woven into what we wear.
Not long before our conversation, Ang had travelled to Indonesia, learning how to dye fabric with natural materials such as mud, jackfruit trees, and mangrove barks. The artist has been researching mud-dyeing techniques since their last installation, Unravelled Gathering, which was exhibited at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. “I was drawn to the rope’s dyed maroon shade without knowing why,” says Ang. “Afterwards, I learned that in Shunde, Guangdong province – where my mum’s side of the family is from – people made mud-dyed silk, called gambiered silk, in that exact shade.”
This discovery prompted Ang to dig deeper into the connections between textile and lineage. Compared to historical records, textiles share a particularly tactile connection with communities, as styles, craftsmanship and materials all reflect multi-stranded histories of trade and industry. During our discussion, Ang raises the example of tea leaf-dyed fabric, which tells, to involved listeners, the fraught histories of commercial espionage in Sino-British trade. “The body is a territory,” explains Ang, “and our ways of dressing have traditionally reflected our histories and origins.”
As vessels for indigenous landscapes and practices, mud-dyed textiles became Ang’s research focus. “When you wear mud-dyed clothes,” Ang says, “you carry your soil with you, long after leaving your native land.” To Ang, textiles form part of a network of relationships, as significant to communal memory as language, food, and space. The installation also reflects its Scottish setting, having been dyed with soil from the River Esk and the West Lothian Shale Bings. Coloured with iron ore and mining waste, the fabrics testify to Scotland’s environmental degradation over the past decades.
To the artist, whose parents own a tailoring business in Singapore, textiles carry a personal significance. “I grew up listening to the cutting of fabric,” recalls Ang. “My mum made our clothing and curtains!” Recordings of the shop’s ambience will play in the installation. Invited to become tailors themselves, audience members will be encouraged to cut and mend fabric scraps, producing a final piece that reflects collective processes of creation. Ang says: “I want visitors to be involved in this collaborative process of continual change, especially since my family is also a part of this artwork.”
The installation is part of a long-term project titled The Sea, The Heat, The Rope, and The Fingers Pulling The Thread, which Ang envisions in the form of a “deconstructed musical”. “There’ll be sculptural elements,” Ang explains, “but also live performances, sound pieces, and more.” Currently, the artist is collecting a vast assortment of culturally significant miscellanea – such as woven baskets, paper money, and bamboo leaves – objects that “make sense to me,” Ang says with a light laugh. “This has been a period of homecoming,” reflects Ang, who has just returned to Scotland after a period of rest in Singapore. “My daily experiences are encoded in these materials.”
Image above: Alaya Ang, Unravelled Gathering, courtesy of the artist. Photo by Najma Abukar
Edward Gwyn Jones
by Rory McMillan
Glasgow-based artist Edward Gwyn Jones, exhibiting at Platform 2024, engages with moving image, text, and printmaking to explore persisting social, technological, and personal histories. His work reframes seductive and latent artefacts, examining their role in shaping collective and individual perceptions. Jones discusses how he's using this opportunity at Platform to investigate these ideas.
Can you tell us about the work you will be exhibiting at Platform?
My work for Platform is a video installation and a series of mirrored prints that centre a motif of a performer having various materials hurled at them from behind the camera. Eggs, mud, cream pies and gunge don’t hit the performer, and instead impact a clear screen revealed between their tense body and the camera. These materials reference contemporary and historic substances used to humiliate subjects in acts of both persecution and protest, implicating the screen, the mediated image, and its viewership as complicit in persecution, but also suggesting the screen’s potential for resistance. Resistant and irresistible.
Previously you’ve worked with subjects such as queer film dialogues and 70s-80s pop music. Can we expect similar choices in the subjects and artefacts that you work with in Platform?
The motif in this work is a recreation of a sequence from Alan Clarke’s 1974 gay coming-of-age folk-horror film Penda’s Fen. In a lot of my work I appropriate what I refer to as ‘artefacts’ from various histories as a way to interrogate how unreliable material informs our social, cultural and political ideas. With this motif I hope to engage with sexual practices of humiliation, where a potentially violent gesture is reclaimed and disrupted. I guess I also see the false screen as speaking to a pornographic subjectivity where a viewer is both in control and gives up control to an image.
Your work often emphasises the role of the viewer. In this piece, what specific experience or reflection do you aim to provoke in the viewer?
In this work, the viewer’s perspective from behind the camera is that of the assailant – the prosecutor or protestor. The viewer then switches roles to become the humiliated subject when they are reflected in the mirrored prints accompanying the video work.
How do you see your work relating to the context of Edinburgh and its institutions, like the City Art Centre? How does exhibiting at the Edinburgh Art Festival enhance the relevance or impact of your work?
I’m excited by the civic-modern interior of the City Art Centre because it relates to the publicness of the gestures I’m referencing and the political infrastructures that legislate and police them. To me the feudal contexts of Edinburgh also complement the work, with its lore of early-modern torture and Victorian waste mismanagement, the City Art Centre towering above the former polluted Nor Loch where Waverley now stands.
Image above: Untitled, 2024, by Edward Gwyn Jones. Courtesy of the artist
Kialy Tihngang
by Ella Williamson
I met with Kialy Tihngang at the site of her duo exhibition with Josie KO for Glasgow International 2024. Entitled fir gorma, Gaelic for 'blue people', the work explores the historical and mythical presence of Black people in Scotland. Tihngang's contribution, Neyinka and the Silver Gong, was born from her exploration of ‘Scottishness’ and, more so, her own diasporic presence among the remains of a colonial history. The film, part Braveheart, part Nollywood, is an extended trailer of sorts in the style of a fantasy blockbuster. Tihngang observes Braveheart's ahistorical elements, which highlight the imbalances in the treatment of African histories: marginalised, and rarely canonised, leaving Tihngang to speculate outwards to redress this disparity.
While filming Neyinka and the Silver Gong, Tihngang road-tripped around rural Scotland, yet could not escape her discomfort as a Black person in the predominantly white landscapes. “Scotland in particular purports itself to be this real open tolerant country, but then I've experienced the same racism I've experienced my whole life within it.” Take high fantasy (Tihngang admits to being a huge fan of Narnia and Harry Potter). Despite the magical ability to create the impossible, these lands remain blindingly white. While trailers cherry-pick the most enticing elements of a plot to sell tickets, mythologies like Braveheart pick out the best parts of a history to sell an identity, a “virtuous, brave, really incredible depiction of Scottishness” completely divorced from their complicity in colonialism.
Tihngang's research departs from the distant mythology of Scotland and pivots towards exploring colonial-era ethnographic photography – specifically its fetishisation of Black women and their breasts. With the “Black woman’s body in constant servitude, whether that's to nurture, titillate, or labour,” Tihngang anchors this to her own Cameroonian heritage and understanding of regional tradition. In the run up to Platform, she’s begun to survey the practice of breast ironing, where prepubescent girls' chests are massaged with hot stones to stunt their growth and development – “a protective mutilation so that they can get an education, not be married earlier, and to be protected from sexual violence.” Her understanding has been partly influenced by Instagram infographics and self-proclaimed TikTok experts, a phenomenon of aestheticising traumatic information pervading each new ‘social media activism’ movement. In order to be made digestible to digital audiences, this reduction can take many forms, as Tihngang notes the absurdity, total disconnect and commonality that, “nowadays someone makes an infographic in a few different colourways to match your feed.”
Tihngang shares with me that she had a breast reduction a few years ago – in a way replicating the process of breast ironing on herself – tying together her understanding and experience of her own body with a cultural practice. Embedding the modern diasporic within traditions that reach us orally, digitally or otherwise, “the internet is such a vessel of Black History: of contemporary Black history and of historical Blackness”. It is how this information is corrupted, transmuted and made palatable that is beginning to underpin Tihngang’s work.
Image above: Venus, 2023, by Kialy Tihngang, courtesy of the artist
Tamara MacArthur
by Celeste MacLeod-Brown
Tamara MacArthur’s work for Platform will forge a site dedicated to centring care and emotional vulnerability, in response to the artist’s environment. MacArthur’s practice often balances along the edge of a façade, relying on an audience not only to engage but to suspend disbelief in the artist and their construction of intimacy. It manifests as something like a sequinned paper theatre, a glittering figment of the artist’s desires for sharing connection and extending the ability to believe in one another, our capacity for closeness.
The work will exist across multiple facets of an installation, featuring drawings that serve as sensually attuned self-portraits, a thickening dispersal of curtains, and a private booth that will also host interactive performances by the artist on 17 and 23 August. The space, bathed in a warm glow, will bear the responsibility of greeting guests, caressing them as they make their way towards the private booth, introducing a soft physicality to the experience and enticing them into a new intimate situation. Inside, audience members will find themselves encased in a glittering room, a haven of comfort dedicated completely to making them feel special. During the performance dates, MacArthur will offer a moment of connection through a song-length private dance, extending gestures that inhabit and reach around the borders of intimacy, holding eye contact with viewers and initiating limited touch. Outside of performance times, the essence of this experience will be captured within a sound work played in the booth, retaining elements of the artist’s presence.
While verging on the fantastical, the work gains its depth through its criticality and engagement with ideas of devotion and our ability to exchange love and affection, striking a particularly poignant chord between social themes and those concerned directly with emotion. MacArthur brings into play their own experience as a stripper but expands more broadly on our perceptions of intimacy, exploring the links between acts of service and human connection. These efforts will seek to disrupt the current environment that perpetuates disconnect and the media’s attempts to restrict and control human nature and empathetic response. In the artist’s words, they will be “creating a space that honours our foundational, unifying needs for intimacy and understanding.” This work will operate on a different frequency of intensity, allowing for assured vulnerability and emotional permeation. It’s an invitation for connection and unique proximity that exhibit visitors should seek to accept.
Image above: VIP, 2024, by Tamara MacArthur. Photo by Bruno Lopes
Platform Early Career Artist Award, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 9-25 Aug, 10am-5pm