Art Events & Exhibitions in Scotland: August 2021

The events column is making an optimistic return. After a few months of galleries tentatively reopening, August brings a roster of new shows and events. Grab a fresh face covering and get in, we’re going gallery hopping.

Edinburgh Art Festival is the big one this month, and we’ve covered parts of it elsewhere in this month's issue (out this week!). It’s happening across the city, featuring a cluster of works in Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, including Andrew Gannon’s Eccentric Limbs, in which the artist substitutes his arm prosthesis with different alternatives, including coloured pool noodles. In the Sound Tower, artists Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha present a new commission that takes as its beginning radical ideas of gardening practices.

In Stills gallery, Sekai Machache presents a new body of work developed over the previous year. During times of restrictions on movement, the studio has had to stand in for landscape and landscape has been reconstituted. In the new photographs, Machache has used automatic drawing techniques to create illustrious surfaces which she wears, holds and which form an immersive backdrop.

In Collective, Alison Scott presents a cross-media installation coming from her expansive research project around weather, and includes new writing, sound, custom wallpaper, moving image and sculpture. One contrast Scott draws is between the diaristic stability of weather reporting and the historic climate crisis it belies.

Also throughout August, Generator Projects in Dundee celebrate their 25th birthday, an all the more poignant milestone given the Edinburgh studio and gallery building Rhubaba’s recent unhousing the month after its 10th anniversary. In Dundee, Generator are having a show through August looking at their archive and all the amazing work they’ve hosted in the past, along with events and new commissions. Keep an eye on their website for dates and more news as it comes.

Also in Dundee, a set of new solo shows open in DCA from 21 August. Japanese artist Chikako Yamashiro debuts a richly imagined film work that promises to weave together comic satire, mining landscapes, opera, traditional Japanese theatre and domestic lives, and emerges from the artist’s research into her geopolitically fraught homeland, Okinawa. Next door, Irish artist Mary McIntyre debuts a new body of work developing her interest in the psychological charge of space, whether shown in photographs, constructed as part of an installation or in the mixing and layering of synthesised music. All of these elements come together at scale in the upcoming exhibition.