For the love of all things visual and sensory, we are proud to announce that we are sponsoring the Edinburgh Art Festival!
As the ‘platform for visual arts at the heart of August festivals', Edinburgh Art Festival runs from the 28th July-28th August. There are over 35 visual art exhibitions and commissions to explore during the festival, alongside their current programme.
We wanted to share Bon Accord's must-see exhibitions for this year's programme brought to you by artists from Scotland and beyond.
Counted: Scotland’s Census 2022
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 10:00-17:00 Daily
Following the collection of Scotland’s census this year, Counted explores our citizens through ‘what we have in common, and what makes us unique. In a landscape whose people have changed over the decades, the exhibition explores identity and how it is influenced by religion, occupation, health, and ethnicity. Featuring photographs by modern-day Scotland-based photographers, alongside 19th-century images, giving us a comparison between Scots past and present.
Yan Wang Preston: With Love. From an Invader.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 10:00-17:45 Daily
Preston responds to the contested term ‘non-native and invasive species’ in response to the xenophobic response to the East Asian community during the Covid-19 Pandemic by photographing a Rhododendron ponticum in a local wasteland that she walked past every other day. Walking in nature was also deeply important to so many of us throughout lockdown, and gave us all a chance to reconnect with our natural environment after such deep isolation. Preston’s work gives us an opportunity to query how we respond to the natural environment, and in turn, each other. This beautiful immersive audio-visual installation features a time-lapse of 182 photographs, films, and a soundscape created with composer Monty Adkins.
National Museum of Scotland, 10:00-17:00 Daily
In a turn from the sincere to the slightly silly, we come to a 90ft long inflatable sculpture of the E.coli bacteria. This makes the sculpture, 5 million times the bacteria’s real size! Bacteria were the earliest forms of life on our planet and are considered vital to medical research, which makes the artwork a potential look at our past and future. E.coli, in particular, is the ‘best or most-studied free-living organism’ with a record of 11 prestigious Nobel prizes investigating it.
A sneak peek Luke Jerram’s magnificent sculpture
With the potential to be both harmless and harmful, will this sculpture invoke fear, comedy, absurdity, or repulsion from the viewer? There’s only one way to find out!