Edinburgh Festival Visual Art Preview: The Enlightenments

For decades, the visual arts have been the black sheep of the Edinburgh festival family. Exhibitions once played an integral part of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), fuelled by the enthusiasm of people like Ricky Demarco, but in recent times the official programme has made no mention of art. The Edinburgh Art Festival was introduced to plug the hole, but now, with an art strand reintroduced into the International Festival, our cup runneth over.

The EIF’s new foray into the visual arts began two years ago with curator Katrina Brown’s project, Jardins Publics. Three international artists made garden-related interventions in four unexpected sites around town; eschewing the usual gallery format, it pushed boundaries, but as a visual art programme it was easily missed.

Operating on a biennial basis, art is back this year with a gallery-based project put together by Australian curator, Juliana Engberg. While the rest of the festival celebrates Edinburgh’s historic contribution to The Enlightenment, Engberg has kept things 21st century, and popped an ‘s’ on the end to embrace enlightenments in their widest sense. So, while the 18th century Enlightenment famously challenged religion, Engberg’s Enlightenments include, for instance, contemplations on spirituality.

The choice of venues, however, invokes the spirit of The Enlightenment. The Collective, a grassroots gallery at the heart of Edinburgh’s ghost-filled Old Town, sits between the neoclassical elegance of both the Dean Gallery in the west, and Robert Adam’s Old College, housing the Talbot Rice Gallery, in the south. In those three galleries you will find embodiments of the establishment, the university, and a cultural avant garde, all of which were powerful players in the intellectual upheaval of the 18th century.

At the Dean Gallery, Tacita Dean’s Presentation Sisters is an hour-long film about five nuns in a convent whose long corridors and empty rooms recall a lost age when their order was thriving. In painterly shafts of light, they perform their collective daily rituals; domestic chores and religious devotion. This is a warm film celebrating faith, and a way of life which will soon pass – more Counter-Enlightenment, really, than Enlightenment.

Though Dean curated a show at the Fruitmarket Gallery some years ago, and will loom large in Ingleby’s upcoming billboard project, her films are not often seen in Scotland. Inviting an antipodean to curate the Festival’s visual art programme brings with it a distinct advantage – the usual artistic suspects are sidestepped for a less predictable selection. It’s a fairly new-world line-up, hailing largely from Australia and the USA, with the only real usual suspect being our own Nathan Coley.

Coley is perfect for the project, with his painstaking, relentless challenging of belief systems. For this new commission, he has put his famous cardboard churches to one side, plucking an architectural oddity from rural Perthshire and peppering it with hidden textual references. Beloved is made from three old tree trunks, once holding up a roof; now dried, painted and precision-drilled. I don’t know what Coley’s hidden message says, but it’s likely to set us all puzzling.

Four other artists are showing at the Dean Gallery, in an entertaining breadth of media taking in Creek’s detailed drawings, Mosley’s philosophical animation, De Vietri’s singers (relating the day’s news a capella) and Mingwei’s interactive installation inviting you to write the letter you always meant to.

The Talbot Rice Gallery will host Joseph Kosuth, a key figure in the use of text as art (he was American editor of the seminal journal, Art And Language, and the famous 1965 installation, One and Three Chairs, was his). Kosuth has made a new commission for the refurbished Georgian Gallery – the very room where Charles Darwin began work towards his theory of evolution. Kosuth will combine Darwin’s notes with allusions to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, all in a series of neon signs.

At the Collective, Australian artist Susan Norrie explores a world of nuclear holocaust, and in her new work, SHOT, she takes the exploration into outer space. There can be nothing closer to the heart of the Enlightenment than looking into the night sky to see what lies beyond.

There’s one further venue I haven’t yet mentioned: in various locations around town, Spaniard Juan Cruz has planted fragments of a story to be discovered via blue tooth on your phone. The Enlightenments is a fascinating programme of contemporary art which works hard to talk to us – whether by phone, by letter, by choir, or neon. All that remains is to listen, and with any luck, to be enlightened.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.08.09