Scottish Art Exhibitions and Events: February 2022

It’s February, time of chocolates, flowers and sealing all correspondence with a loving kiss (public health regulations permitting), and Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh are cementing themselves as funnest gallery in Scotland with Love 2 Love their month-long of Valentine’s Day-themed programming. So far, their plans include an exhibition, performance event, online film screening and discussion, workshop, postal exhibition and life drawing event. Details are being released as they come, so keep an eye out on their website. 

In Glasgow, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain opens a new exhibition, titled An Experiment with Time, combining film, tapestry, print and installation. Through CGI collage and assemblage, visions of a destabilised future are created, with glimpses of a decommissioned medical site submerged in water, or a chameleon as the only inhabitant of a museum of computing history. 1920s dream theory weaves its way through the exhibition that rings a surreal alarm about climate disaster.

Also beaming out from CCA, the art FM radio station Radiophrenia is back on the airwaves for two weeks from Monday 7 February to Sunday 20 February. For the fortnight, Radiophrenia sets out to explore trends in sound and transmission arts, and includes soundscapes, spoken word, documentary, drama and radio experiments. This year also includes new live-to-air commissions – see the full schedule at radiophrenia.scot

One of the Radiophrenia artists, Feronia Wennborg is also showing an ambitious outdoor sound commission in Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop until 13 March. For this, Wennborg has taken recordings from the intimate domestic spaces of three collaborating artists. They each navigate their familiar environments using an instructional score piece, written by Wennborg, and Céline Amendola did the design of the work. The recordings are edited, merged and digitally transformed into a soundscape that merges with the sounds around the concrete tower that the piece is installed in.

A whole host of continuing shows are also on through February, including Joey Simons’ poetic excavation of Glasgow working-class history in Collective Gallery – until 13 March. Also in Collective, and until 1 May Cauleen Smith explores New Orleans with musicians who play a famous five-note motif from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in different sites. At Edinburgh Printmakers, artist Mohammad Barrangi is showing prints inspired by Persian art and storytelling until 27 March. In Dundee, Cooper Gallery still has its breathtaking survey of radical schools and alternative education from across recent history. It will be touring UK galleries, but it’s here until 19 February.