Overview
Edinburgh Art Festival 2012
Our ninth edition of the Festival ran from 2 August to 2 September 2012 and included 52 exhibitions across the city, alongside eight newly commissioned public works by some of Scotland’s best-known artists and emerging talents.
"Edinburgh Art Festival exhibitions are making Edinburgh one of Europe's major hubs for art lovers" Daily Telegraph
Commissions Programme
Promenade
‘... this profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality.’
Writing in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson was already highly attuned to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Scotland’s capital city: that a city which really should belong to the world of the visual imagination was in fact physically real, a fully functioning modern city that looked as if it has stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale.
Edinburgh Art Festival's 2012 Promenade commissions explored these contradictions, taking you on a promenade through the city, and inviting you to experience the city (both Edinburgh specifically, and ‘the city’ in general) in new ways, whether in works which reflected and revealed hidden traces in the city’s iconic landmarks, or those which transformed the city of ‘every-day reality’ into a magical playground.
Participating Artists:
Andrew Miller: The Waiting Place
Callum Innes: The Regent Bridge
Susan Philipsz: Timeline
Kevin Harman: 24/7
Anthony Schrag: Tourist in Residence
Emily Speed: Human Castle
Partner Exhibitions
Jock McFadyen: The Ability to Cling... at Bourne Fine Art
Leslie Hunter: A Life in Colour and Human Race at City Art Centre
Weaving the Century at Dovecot Studios
Rachel Mayeri: Primate Cinema: Apes as Family, Cast Contemporaries and More Than Bird at Edinburgh College of Art
Cheer Up! It’s Not the End of the World... at Edinburgh Printmakers
Dieter Roth: Diaries at The Fruitmarket Gallery
Ian Hamilton Finlay at Ingleby Gallery
Philip Guston: Late Paintings at Inverleith House
Tania Kovats: Rivers at Jupiter Artland
Van Gogh to Kandinsky and Giovanni Battista Lusieri at Scottish National Gallery
Picasso and Modern British Art and Edvard Munch at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Roderick Buchanan: Legacy at Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Melvin Moti, Catherine The Great: An Enlightened Empress and New Jewellery from Northern Lands at National Museum of Scotland
~ in the fields at New Media Scotland
John Bellany at 70 and Picasso and Modern British Printmaking at Open Eye Gallery
Treasures from The Queen’s Palaces at The Queen’s Gallery
Carolee Schneemann, David Michalek, Art & Language, Robert Kusmirovski, Phenotype Geno- type, Static State, Jean Pierre Muller, Venus with Severed Leg, Wolf Vostell, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robin Gillanders and Ally Wallace at Summerhall
Tim Rollins & K.O.S.: The Black Spot and Working Papers: Donald Judd at Talbot Rice Gallery
Associated Programme
6°WEST at St Triduana’s Chapel
Mick Peter and B.S. Johnson: Lying and Liars at Collective
Through the Looking Glass, Dimly at Contemporary Art Exchange
GARAGE
Harry Hill: My Hobby at White Stuff
We Are All U.F.O.-nauts at Rhubaba Gallery & Studios
Here/Now at The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture
Soviet Grand Designs at Scotland-Russia Institute
Duncan Shanks at The Scottish Gallery
Orchard at Scottish Poetry Library
James Casebere: Home and Other Fictions at Stills
John Brown at Superclub
Illana Halperin at The Travelling Gallery
Detours
Providing fresh perspectives on visual art, Festival Detours is a series of intimate live performances in Edinburgh's leading galleries by stars from the worlds of music, comedy, theatre, poetry and prose.
Joe Dunthorne at National Museum of Scotland
