FESTIVAL FEATURES | Platform
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NEW SENSATION
Rae-Yen Song, It’s a Small World, 2017
As part of Edinburgh Art Festival, Platform gives artists at the start of their career a chance to make and present new work. Now in its fourth year, Rachael Cloughton catches up with 2018’s crop of chosen creatives
I n 2015, the Edinburgh Art Festival introduced Platform, a group exhibition that gives festival audiences the opportunity to see work by early career artists based in Scotland. Artists apply through an open call and are considered by a changing judging panel – with Jonathan Owen and Hanna Tulikki making the selection this year.
The artists chosen – Renèe Helèna Browne, Isobel Lutz-Smith, Rae-Yen Song and Annie Crabtree – may have just made one of the most distinct editions of Platform yet. Staged at the City Art Centre, this is not simply a show about emerging talent, but a sensitively curated exploration of bodies, identity, politics and the ‘slipperiness’ of images. ‘It’s a very experiential show – you can’t be a passive listener,’ explains Browne, who has created a sound installation with i ve vocal compositions linked to i ve different types of chairs. ‘The works are centred on thinking about language, both how it exists as speech within the body and outside of it, and then how it’s governed or structured by society afterwards.’
Browne is interested in the notion of ‘perfect’ speech, an idea associated with Received Pronunciation. ‘[RP] is spoken by only 2% of the population but is regarded as the most valued,’ explains Brown, who is originally from Northern Ireland. ‘I started this project with a very broad “not of here” accent – a specii cally Irish accent. The work kind of took off from that subjective position.’ What Brown presents is a celebration of difference. The audience are invited to sit on a range of chairs and listen to diverse soundscapes, from ASMR lessons (autonomous sensory meridian response is a tingling sensation on the skin, commonly triggered by auditory or visual stimuli) to tongue twisters and gargles. Lutz-Smith takes a similarly visceral approach in her multi-channel i lm installation. ‘I have quite a lot of mouths in my work,’ she explains. ‘There is a point at which the tongue breaks the surface of the screen. It took 20 attempts. It was like a mouth exercise and I had to train my tongue to do exactly as I wanted.’ Lutz- Smith’s i lm is about the preparation of a meal but also the deconstruction of a i lm: ‘The videos are all synched together and the actions are happening around you. I don’t really use i lm work in a narrative sense. It’s more
like choreography,’ she explains, ‘I shoot something and reshoot it again and re-edit it. It’s almost like a collage.’ For Platform, Song presents a handmade costume and lenticular print, through which a single image takes on multiple perspectives. Both objects are taken from a family outing; the latest chapter in an ongoing series of family portraits by the artist entitled Song Dynasty II.
The print is the single image Song presents from the day, while the costume takes elements from the Chinese lion dance and the Lion Rampant of Scotland, but is very much its own animal. ‘It became unclassii ed,’ continues Song, ‘it’s something of it’s own culture, mirroring my identity – Scottish and Chinese and not i tting into either. But I’m interested in using those cultures as a starting point to create my own cultural language that I i nd personal meaning in.’ Annie Crabtree’s work takes a similarly personal starting point, taking her own experiences of pain and hospitalisation as a means to rel ect on the broader political narrative around women’s bodies. ‘I had surgery to operate on one of my ovaries – there were so many presumptions around this, like that I wouldn’t want to have my ovary removed. This was never even discussed. There was little communication about what I can do with my own body,’ explains Crabtree.
This experience has shaped a new i lm, which combines archived footage from her operation two years ago with more recent footage of her swimming; a pursuit she picked up to reclaim autonomy over her body. Over the i lm she reads extracts from Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf as well as various medical journals and Wikipedia entries on pain. ‘Throughout the process of making the work, so many women have shared their own stories,’ says Crabtree. ‘I hope the exhibition inspires other people to speak out and feel they have a voice.’ That’s what this year’s edition of Platform does more broadly; it has created a space for four young voices among the cacophony of noise during the festival, and together they creatively and generously share ideas well worth listening to.
Platform: 2018, City Art Centre, until 26 Aug, free.
18 THE LIST FESTIVAL 1–8 Aug 2018