After Image
Fruitmarket, until September 27

Keiko Mukaide: Spirit of Place
Talbot Rice, until September 13

Although the Fruitmarket is a contemporary art gallery, and although some of the work in After Image is absolutely up to date, it is surprising how historical this exhibition feels. Feminism, and all the intellectual dialogue that comes with it, is today more subtle – and some would say weaker – than it was in the strident seventies.

After Image brings together the work of four women photographers, from the seventies to the present day, dealing with notions of female beauty, identity, and belonging. A smattering of Cindy Sherman’s works from the last 30 years pre-empt the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s retrospective this December, and alongside these are the lesser-known photographs and film of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who died after falling out of a window in 1985. Upstairs are the stunningly beautiful photographs of American Francesca Woodman, all produced from the age of 13 until her suicide at 22 in 1981. Lastly, the more recent work of Malaysian photographer Simryn Gill brings the exhibition into the present day.

Cindy Sherman is celebrated for her fancy dress photographs which explore female personas created by men, beginning with her Untitled Film Stills series of the late 1970s, where she poses as various imaginary female ‘types’ from 1950s B-movies. Later she aimed her sights at old master paintings, and more recently she has swapped the metaphorical masks for real ones. The selection shown here suffers somewhat from a lack of visual coherence, the smaller images losing rather than gaining impact from being spaced out deferentially along the wall.

Ana Mendieta’s images are more a documentation of performance art than stand-alone photographic works of art. What sticks in the mind (or the chin) is her Facial Hair Transplants, 1972, a nod to Duchamp’s moustachoed Mona Lisa. In a progression of images we see Mendieta adhering her male friend’s beard to her own face, assuming the mythological power which Delilah stole from Samson.

It is upstairs where the real power in this exhibition resides, particularly in the intense work of Francesca Woodman. Like all the women in After Image, Woodman used her own body as subject matter, in work which combines sheer classical beauty with timeless symbolism and a poignant measure of adolescent fervour. She plays the role of the faceless neo-classical caryatid, the luminous pre-Raphaelite water-nymph, the spiralling demonic serpent and the innocent teenaged Madonna. Many of her photographs are a denial of her own material existence, as she fades into battered old walls, obscures her face, and uses long exposures to create ghostly transparent shadows of herself.

In the next room Simryn Gill takes this baton and runs with it, standing upright in various scenes of vegetation, inadequately disguised as part of the foliage. These images from 1999 are farcical and self-mocking, but contain a serious point about cultural identity, and the difficulty of belonging. This theme is explored at more of a tangent in her 2001 series, Dalam, which is a huge grid of 260 empty living-rooms in Malaysia, of all tastes and social classes. Apart from the obvious fascination for home-décor enthusiasts, the pictures are about territory, belonging, and the gaping chasm between being inside and being outside, looking in.

The commonality running through the exhibition is clear: all the artists use their own bodies and all seem to be saying at the same time, “this is not me; I am not here”. They play with conventions of beauty, pretending to be ugly, old, male, or deformed, and in doing so they are challenging the male gaze, a key pursuit of 20th century feminist art.

There is no such confrontation at the Talbot Rice, where Edinburgh-based Keiko Mukaide has created a glittering oasis of calm. Using dowsing, the Tokyo-born artist has identified underground streams and earth energies, marking them on the floor with dotted lines of coloured tape. With GPS information she has plotted exact longitudes and latitudes within the building as well as signifying north, south, east and west with triangular glass plates. These are complemented by four speakers issuing gentle sound mosaics of contemplative words spoken quietly by women from around the world.

The centrepiece is a giant suspended spiral of knitted wire, with colourful diachronic glass woven through it. It is a voyage of discovery to pick your way through this space, dotted with occasional glass sculptures, and an entirely different experience to view it from the balcony upstairs, where the tape markings look like a map, the sounds float upwards in the echoing space, and the central diaphanous spiral can be seen in all its glory.

Mukaide has exhibited in the Round Room once before in 1999, responding instinctively at the time to its ‘uplifting feeling’, but she has since explored the ancient principles of geomancy, seeking to harmonise with a ‘spirit of place’. This time she has adorned the walls with fragments of blue-pink glass, hanging a miniature spiral in the centre.

Whether you’re sceptical or not, Mukaide has undeniably worked her gentle charms on the Talbot Rice and created a much-needed breathing space in the midst of all this festival frenzy.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.08.03