TThe large, dark courtyard of the University of Edinburgh is aglow with light from a huge, seemingly cloth-like sheet suspended between classical columns. Fields of cream, gold and rust, with occasional waves of blue and patches of scarlet, evoke topographies of coasts and cities. Then an August breeze ruffles the surface and you realise that everything you see is made of metal fragments: tiny mosaics somehow woven into this glittering sheet. It is one of the most dramatic openings in contemporary art.
The experienced Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b. 1944) created this masterpiece from the flattened caps of liquor bottles, their tags and labels, all sewn together with copper wire. It tells of long and infinitely small work in a land of historical slavery. There is a direct yet poetic connection between the exquisite sight and the recycled waste of colonial trade. And through a square door in the Talbot Rice Gallery upstairs, much more of Anatsui’s great art can be seen.
The exhibition begins with the earliest of these shimmering chainmail weaves, smaller and more loosely constructed from thousands of shiny aluminum fragments, entitled Women’s clothing (2001). The method is clear: the artist’s and his assistants’ hands press the metal, cutting, piercing and joining the elements together: discs, pennants and rectangles, mainly in red and black, or their undersides in silver and gold. It is lined up at a cheeky angle (Anatsui gives galleries the freedom to exhibit his work as they wish).
And opposite hangs his latest creation, Scottish Mission Book Depot Ketawhich evokes memories of the library that gave him books and crayons as a child in Ghana. Thirteen metres of glorious golden yellow discs, rising in geological folds like Edinburgh’s volcanic surroundings itself and specially made for this show, are a wall of pure joy, containing the occasional tiny scribble and dot – half a letter, a printed flourish or an apostrophe – reminiscent of a child’s first doodles.
Freedomfrom 2021, brings you closer to the geopolitical details of these works. The brand names – Lords, Castles, Chelsea – are telling, running like ribbons across the glittering fragments, literally woven into the work, metaphorically into the history of Ghana. Alcohol was one of the first goods imported from the West, first exchanged for gold and then for people. Three forms here seem to fly free like birds, leaving all this behind; and the work is mounted to turn a corner.
Upstairs are resonant prints, early woodwork and glittering oceans of mother of pearl. In the Georgian Gallery, Anatsui works his recycled metal into forms reminiscent of lace, macrame, wickerwork, the finest filigree and the heaviest tapestries. Anyone who saw his wonderful Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern earlier this year will know how vast and diaphanous his works can be, but also how devastating. This show will show you El Anatsui in all his fullness, from the most concentrated and lyrical to the grandest three-dimensional spectacles that sing of tragedy, humanity and hope in the purest visual delight. A coup for the Talbot Rice Gallery: this is the largest retrospective of his work ever shown in the UK.
It is also the centrepiece of a particularly strong edition of the Edinburgh Art Festival, that loose amalgamation of museum tours, contemporary art exhibitions and pop-up events in unusual locations. What is it, where and when: for once, the routine questions have an answer. Kim McAleese, who took over as director in 2022, has somehow managed to persuade the city council to allow her to infiltrate the City Art Centre, with its wood panels and parquet floors, which until now had been a strict monument to civic pride.
Now you can step straight out of Waverley Station into this new EAF hub directly opposite, with its bright banners giving the festival that crucial focus and direction. Two floors above are dedicated to the festival shows. Young artists get a proper stage – I particularly liked Tamara MacArthurs warm-hearted transformation of the room with pink windows that turn Edinburgh red and a hanging garden of matching curtains surrounding a sort of tabernacle where the artist will perform acts of kindness.
And on the floor below the Polish artist Karby Radziszewski shows an archive of Fichlo Magazine, one of the first underground queer magazines in Central and Eastern Europe, founded in 1986 as a reaction to communist oppression, alongside his own post-pop portraits of LGBTQ+ icons. Irish artist Renée Helena Browne shows a slowly building cinematic portrait of her mother, interrupted by reflections on faith and death, astonishingly embedded in a choreography to the movements of the rally cars.
Go back across the street and the Fruitmarket has Anatsui’s Ghanaian star Ibrahim Mahama (born 1987), with a multi-part show about the construction (and eventual closure) of the railway that the British commissioned to transport minerals and cocoa around the area known in colonial times as the Gold Coast.
Like Anatsui, Mahama processes the past—in his case, hundreds of documents from the paint department of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation dealing with gallons of white paint, board meetings, and low annual production. Pieced together, they form a basis for life-size charcoal drawings of Ghanaian workers loaded with railroad tracks and sketches of people hauling the abandoned wagons and locomotives back to Mahama’s arts and education complex.
Little by little, through old photographs, we see that these 21st century Africans – employed by the artist – are recreating the work of the shirtless workers who sweated for the British long ago. The old coach leather is used to create works inspired by the tattoos that served to identify these men in the event of an accident. Evocative films show the many hands that have been involved in the creation of this exhibition, which is essentially a political turnaround: instead of toiling to make the parts of the railways they never saw, these Ghanaians are now transforming the remains into art.
A few minutes away, at the Collective on Calton Hill, Scottish artists Moyna Flannigans delicate collages, prints and installations where paper women meet history, particularly the space age (that’s the old observatory). There are allusions to Picasso, Hockney, Sinéad O’Connor. The word “fragile” is written – unnecessarily – across several pale works.
Down the hill in the former Glasite Meeting House, the Ingleby Gallery displays Californian gardens by the LA painter Hayley Barker: so lush they almost bewilder the eye. Violet twilight over winding paths, nasturtiums and cyclamens shimmering in the dusk, a pale moon rising over the fronds: they represent the four seasons, and yet in LA there are no real seasons.
The paint seems so thin and dry that it only sparsely sinks into the canvas, and yet the images are wonderfully dense. Barker aspires to be an American Vuillard. And for another paradox, consider the mauve tennis courts of Florida in the overview of Sir John Laverys audience favorites at the Royal Scottish Academy. Born in Belfast in 1856, Lavery traveled to France, Morocco, Monte Carlo, Venice and Spain: virtually any place where the sun could be found and depicted in buttery layers on canvas.
Lavery is an uneventful windbag: he cannot make a snake look frightening or a woman look like more than a doll. He cannot paint faces and has a weak sense of psychology. But as an official war artist he attends with great care to soldiers’ wounds and counts the dead in shadowy burial grounds. He may be the only Impressionist who ever painted Princes Street in Edinburgh; if only he were Monet.
But the most urgent task this year is Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words at Stills. A field pharmacy, a stack of books drying after an explosion, the same apartment block bombed again and again until only the single word of graffiti remains: People.
An old man rearranges his shattered belongings in a house whose facade has been blown away. Displaced Ukrainians crowd into tiny spaces. The art ranges from semi-abstract images of charred landscapes and abandoned chairs on the Polish border to seriously beautiful portraits of citizens in bunkers. Each work is a revelation of life in the here and now, art created with extraordinary urgency, unlike anywhere else at the festival. Photography is knowledge.
