Edinburgh Art Festival announces its 2024 programme

Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) turns 20 this summer and today they’ve announced what to look forward to at this year’s event, which runs at various venues across Edinburgh from 9 to 25 August.

The festival says they’re using this milestone birthday celebration as an opportunity 'to connect with historic and contemporary ways of organising that have built infrastructures of care and pioneering activist movements over the past 20 years (and beyond).' EAF also invite audiences to use the festival as '​​a moment to collectively pause and reflect upon the conditions under which we live, work, gather and resist.'

Over 200 artists will take part in the festival this year, making this year’s EAF their biggest programme to date. EAF Director, Kim McAleese, explains that this year’s festival celebrates persistence:

“Our programme traces lines through personal histories, the natural world, post-colonial landscapes, and the global political stage,” says McAleese. “We have invited artists from across Scotland, the UK, Europe, Latin America, and the SWANA region, who refuse inequity, isolation, destruction, and despair (in large ways and in quiet ways). We want to connect to our context and the city – to the people and movements who inspire change, who enable solidarity, and bring people together to work towards collective futures.”

EAF Highlights

The first thing to jump out at us is Prem Sahib's new performance Alleus, which sees Sahib working with live vocals for the first time for an event taking place in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle at the Castle Terrace Car Park. The title is 'Suella' backwards and takes its name from the ignominious Suella Braverman. By re-ordering, re-directing and disrupting anti-immigration speeches given by Braverman, Sahib presents a blistering response to the former home secretary's hate-filled rhetoric (16 Aug, tickets here). In addition to Alleus, Sahib will also present Liquid Gold, an intriguing site-specific light installation that can be experienced after hours at Leith craft and design shop and gallery Bard, in Custom Wharf. Liquid Gold will bask its audiences, who can’t cross the space’s threshold, in an inaccessible yellow light – which is suggestive of everything from glory, power and spiritual transcendence to a certain bodily function.

The Shore in Leith will be a hive of EAF activity this year. As well as being home to Liquid Gold, it’s where you’ll find EAF’s opening celebration, which includes a birthday bash at Custom Lane hosted by queer-led hair salon turned iconic party series Ponyboy, with EHFM’s DJs providing the tunes (9 Aug, tickets here). Before that opening party, there’s opening event through warm temperatures, a new outdoor performance from artist and choreographer Mele Broomes; we’re told the piece will take the form of 'a progression of vocal callings accompanied by live melodies and choreographies', which pays homage to 'a series of conversations facilitated by Mele and the living archive' (9 Aug; tickets here).

Also be sure to check out the festival’s Opening Provocation, which sees EAF invite a mix of local and international practitioners to discuss how to make art at a time of global crises. Taking place at Edinburgh College of Art on 11 August, EAF will be joined by Dundee’s Cooper Gallery, volunteer-run collective Falastin Film Festival, the Beirut-based cultural feminist organisation Haven for Artists; Edinburgh’s radical, queer-owned bookshop Lighthouse Books; and Colombian climate emergency art and ecology organisation Más Arte Más Acción (tickets here).

EAF’s 2024 hub is City Art Centre

EAF’s 2024 hub is City Art Centre and a range of projects will be taking place at the Market Street gallery. Look out for Sanctus! a new film installation by Renèe Helèna Browne exploring devotion in relation to portraiture, faith, and belonging. There’s also a curated exhibition by Polish multidisciplinary artist Karol Radziszewski, which collects rare photographs and ephemera to trace the history of Filo magazine, one of the first underground queer magazines in Central-Eastern Europe.

City Art Centre is also home to the unmissable PLATFORM, EAF’s annual exhibition of early-career artists, which this year includes Alaya Ang, Edward Gwyn Jones, Tamara MacArthur and Kialy Tihngang, who will respond directly to the themes of the 2024 programme, centring intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution.

Partner Exhibitions

A wide range of partner exhibitions take place across the city. At Fruitmarket, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, famed for his monumental installations, will be playing on a grand scale with a brand new body of work inspired by Fruitmarket’s unique physical location – perched on columns above Waverley railway station. Fellow Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui is at Talbot Rice for the most substantial survey of his work in the UK. The show will feature work spanning Anatsui’s five-decade career, including his iconic sculptural wall hangings, wooden reliefs and works on paper.

Ingleby Gallery hosts Europe’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Los Angeles-based landscape and nature painter Hayley Barker. There’s more grand-scale work from Korean sculptor Do Ho Suh at the National Galleries of Scotland. The National Galleries of Scotland also host Women in Revolt!, a survey of feminist art from the 70s and 80s that challenged and changed the face of British culture by violently kicking against the system with much humour and righteous rage.

National Museums of Scotland, meanwhile, presents Cold War Scotland, a new exhibition drawing on Scotland’s rich history of Cold War-era protest and activism. And at Stills Centre for Photography, there’s the exhibition Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words, a touring showcase featuring contemporary Ukrainian photographers exploring the meaning of home.

The above is just a handful of events and exhibitions to look out for. Explore the full programme at edinburghartfestival.com