list.co.uk/festival Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
NEW EDITION Edinburgh Printmakers celebrate 50th anniversary with new commissions ●●●●●
To mark the 50th anniversary of Edinburgh Printmakers – which will soon move to an impressive new building in Fountainbridge – this group exhibition has been put together by Glasgow-based writer and lecturer Sarah Lowndes. It’s a celebration of poster art which emphasises the
medium’s collaborative nature, its inter-generational appeal, and its roots in the same late-1960s milieu as the Printmakers itself. She cites the era’s ‘idealism and productive creativity . . . when screenprinting first became the medium of choice both for political activists and for artists of all stripes.’
Poster Club – a group of six artists – share a wall of rough designs for what looks like an imaginary magazine named New Erotics, including plays on modernist architecture, cat pictures, images of a copyrighted mouse and class-based sloganeering.
Elsewhere, Museums Press deal in dense
photographic collages and individual text pieces, while Emer Tumilty provides eye-catching splashes of abstract colour design. If there’s a certain slimness to the number of works on show, that’s more than likely down to the restrictions on gallery size rather than the wealth of talent involved. (David Pollock) ■ Edinburgh Printmakers, until 21 Oct, free.
SHANNON TE AO: WITH THE SUN AGLOW, I HAVE MY PENSIVE MOODS Mournful installation set inside former Magdalene asylum ●●●●● ROSS LITTLE: THE HEAVY OF YOUR BODY PARTS AND THE COOL AIR OF THE AIR CONDITION Disorientating, surreal video installation ●●●●●
The title of Shannon Te Ao’s new video installation may resemble that of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, but the landscape here is the artist’s native Aotearoa in New Zealand. The tone is similarly mournful, in a starkly poetic study of what seems to be an eternal estrangement between humankind and the fractured landscape it barely occupies. The first of the two films is a close-up of two Maori
women slow-dancing in a field, holding on for dear life itself before the inevitable goodbye as the sky above them broods its way from day to night. The second focuses on the landscape. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, hills and fields are punctured by pylons as cows graze. Both scenarios are soundtracked with a slow-burning string-led score, and end with a voiceover of the same elegiac verse.
Housed for Edinburgh Art Festival in a former Magdalene asylum for ‘fallen’ women just of the Canongate, the room is filled with foliage to create its own environment. It is the over-riding ache of absence and loss from the films themselves, however, that makes this such a hauntingly beautiful experience. (Neil Cooper) ■ Gladstone Court, until 27 Aug, free.
Ross Little’s video installation presents a surreal view of life aboard a cruise ship, alongside footage of a shipbreaking yard in India. His footage is often shot from the perspective of a
sober bystander at a drunken party. Shafts of light illuminate abstract bodies moving in and out of the shadows in what appears to be a submerged, watery scene, but gradually as the muffled sound gains clarity, the rhythm of a disco beat links the image with its context. This sort of disorientating transition is key to the film’s construction; a means of opening up aesthetic distance between the eye of the camera and his captive subjects.
Little’s narrative is centred around interviews with passengers who refer to themselves as ‘digital nomads’. Working online while drifting untethered across the ocean, their description of daily life aboard is mystifyingly carefree and humorously delusional. Though some of the footage of the shipbreaking yard is extraneous, the overall impression is of the cruise ship as a giant living organism whose lifecycle is of a scale that’s impossible for most of its tiny passengers to comprehend. (Jessica Ramm) ■ Collective, until 10 Sep, free.
SHADOWS OF WAR: ROGER FENTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE CRIMEA, 1855 Fascinating exhibition of some of Britain’s earliest war photography ●●●●●
The Crimean War of 1853–56 was the first British conflict which was significantly documented in photographs. Victorian Britain was abuzz with the possibilities of the new art form and in sending Roger Fenton and his cameras to the Crimea, publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons knew there would be an appetite for what he brought back.
The photographs were then taken on a 26-venue tour and, by the following March, had been seen by an estimated two million people. Queen Victoria, who was interested both in photography and in the Crimea, purchased this set for her son, the Prince of Wales, who had been following the war avidly.
It’s easy to forget that, in 1855, photography was still in its infancy. If the photographs of groups of soldiers and officers look stiff and posed, it’s because the long exposure time meant that subjects had to hold completely still for several minutes. It would be some years before ‘action’ photography was possible. However, a number of pictures feature regiments which took part in the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, a story which had caught the imagination of people at home.
The world Fenton photographed still seems distant to us in these
small, sepia images. There are Croats, Ottomans, French, a feisty- looking vivandiere (women who accompanied the French troops to serve food and drink), rows of white tents in stony desert terrain and ships in the harbour at Balaklava. Some of these pictures were used as source material for Thomas
Barker’s major group painting of the generals and officers in the Crimea, reproductions of which were then made for the mass market. In the 1850s, prints were still more vivid than photographs and could be produced on a larger scale. But Fenton’s work spoke of the change that was coming. (Susan Mansfield) ■ The Queen’s Gallery, until 26 Nov, £6.30 (£3.20–£5.70)
17–28 Aug 2017 THE LIST FESTIVAL 95
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