Edinburgh Art Festival: Platform 2024 preview

Alaya Ang, Edward Gwyn Jones, Tamara MacArthur and Kialy Tihngang have been announced as the four artists selected to participate in Edinburgh Art Festival's Platform programme for 2024. Selected by Amal Khalaf, Eliel Jones and Eleanor Edmondson, the four artists will be responding directly to the core concerns at the heart of EAF’s 2024 programme, which include intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution. The exhibition will take place from 9-25 August 2024 at City Art Centre. 

Alaya Ang is a multi-disciplinary artist who seeks to unravel the multiple material and symbolic fractures produced by colonialism and capitalism, referencing their connections to Singapore, Scotland and ‘something deep within the sea’. Ang’s work for Platform will take the form of a composition looking at the breath and the architecture of the weather defined by words and utterances – often referencing a saturated state, such as humidity and its effects on the body. Ang is one of five artists currently on the Residents programme at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh; you can experience their work at the Residents exhibition currently on display at the gallery. 

'TWISTED PAIR', 2023 by Edward Gwyn Jones. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Edward Gwyn Jones is a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, text and printmaking. Jones is motivated by a desire to understand and complicate persistent social, technological and personal histories through the reframing of seductive and hidden artefacts. 

For Those In Peril On The Sea, film still, 2023, by Kialy Tihngang. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kialy Tihngang works with sculpture, video, textiles, animation and photomontage; their installations typically involve elaborate sets, costumes, graphics and props alongside collaborations with performers and musicians. Her research-based practice focuses on colonial European misrepresentation, extraction and demonisation of West African cultural practices, but also on her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices. This often takes the form of designing artefacts through the reimagining of histories and speculating futures. Tihngang explores Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions surrounding these identities.

'Wished On The Moon For More Than I Ever Knew', 2022 by Tamara MacArthur. Photo: Bruno Lopes.

Tamara MacArthur uses installation and durational performance to explore longing, futility and the boundaries of intimacy. Their glittering installations are constructed for a moment of emotional intimacy between the viewer and themself. MacArthur’s installations are laboriously hand-made and embellished, but epic and grandiose nonetheless. Audience-participants are asked to suspend disbelief, because ‘it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me’, the artist says. During their performances, the repetition of sentimental pop songs become MacArthur’s lament while singing, crying and smiling. 

The Skinny will also be collaborating with EAF for a third year to commission Scotland-based emerging writers Celeste Macleod-Brown, Ella Williamson, Gabrielle Tse, and Rory McMillan to respond creatively to the Platform artists and the wider festival programme. Look out for their writing in print and online in the coming months. 

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Platform 2024 is at City Art Centre from 9-25 Aug, part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2024